But, wait! There’s more! Mr. Bauerlein somehow decided it prudent to beef-up his already lengthy sub-line with the following–very revealing–parenthetical statement: (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).
Wow! Mr. Bauerlein’s got some balls, aint he?!
If it wasn’t already clear from my dismissive tone, I fall (just barely) within this maligned age demographic. Subsequently, I am having a hard time taking Mr. Bauerlein, and his polemic text, seriously. That old adage passed down to me from my parents is only half right, it seems. For my generation at least, we’d better not judge a book by its cover, for the cover’s just gonna judge us right back!
In any case, I actually agree with some of what Mr. Bauerlein appears to be suggesting about the so-called ‘digital age.’ In an interview with YouthWorker Journal, he says of internet alienation:
“The Internet allows people to create their own little universe. They only make contact with things that interest them. They enclose themselves in the music they like, the politics they like—and what we see is an isolation of young people who really get into this world. This is spiritually withering.”
From personal experience I can attest to the validity of this claim. Maybe I’m wrong here, but the cosmopolitan promise of digital technology hasn’t necessarily been realized in the way that it is sometimes envisioned. Isolated cliques are forming online (in CCD we describe it in slightly less damning terms as ‘communities of interest’), and in much the same way they form in the real world–by language, nationality, race, gender, political persuasion, etc. ‘Social networking,’ in this sense, is anything but; it’s more like ‘ghetto networking’ with fancy electronics. Needless to say, this doesn’t bode well for engaging public policy, much less real socio-political transformation.
That being said, I have to ask… what is it with baby-boomers and their relentless deconstruction of today’s youth culture?! I’m getting a little tired of all these elite, me-generation pundits deflecting their own mistakes onto other people. I mean, really, y’all, who’s running the show here?! Who’s leading academia, the government, the corporate giants that fund and mold the online (and offline) media environments in their own self-interest? Is it the Xers? The Millennials? Forty years ago we weren’t supposed to trust anyone over thirty, and now we’ve flipped the script?! Make up your damn mind already, will ya?!!
It is the height of arrogance and hypocrisy for Mr. Bauerlein to belittle young folk with such ridiculous, postmodern rhetoric. Perhaps I should redirect my ire at the pissy little editors at the publishing house who thought they were being clever with this title. After all, seems like the boomer thing to do–pass the buck.
UPDATE:
There’s a fairly interesting interview, by the way, over at NPR. It eventually develops into an ironic, Broadway-inspired send-up of Bauerlein’s curmudgeonly position.
Take that, boomers!