(Note: This message dates from a period when, for various reasons, I practiced writing fully justified texts. I’ve set this email in a monospaced font to make that clear. For extra OG-typography fun, I “hung” the punctuation on the right margin. )
To: nettime-l
Subject: Re:
[Ger J. Z. Zielinski wrote:
Autumnal Greetings, Nettimers!
A few weekends ago at the Toronto Goethe Institut I participated on an exciting panel bravely titled “Tranformative Aspects of New Media” as part of a special exhibition of video art, websites, and CD-ROM works by artists from Germany and Canada, organized by the Institut’s Doina Popescu. Co-panelists were German installation/video artist Bjoern Melhus and Canadian video artist Lisa Steele, with electronic media art curator Nina Czegledy as the moderator. I being the sole academic type on the panel was asked politely to set things in motion, so I began by reading from the following list below. It attempts to characterize the most recent wave of undergraduate students, and in so doing makes reference to a fascinating array of facts, some dryly technological, others political… How tellingly situated! Bonne lecture!
They do not remember Trudeau, the bombings and kidnappings in Quebec in the 1970s, the Montreal Olympics, or the Calgary Winter Olympics.
They do not remember the Reagan era, and they do not know he was ever shot.
They have known only one Pope.
They were 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart, and they do not remember the Cold War (references to the Iron Curtain and CCCP are unfamiliar to them).
They have never feared nuclear war and they only have known one Germany.
They are too young to remember the Challenger space shuttle disaster or Tienammen Square.
They have never had a polio shot, but their lifetime has always included AIDS.
They have never played PacMan and have never heard of Pong.
They have never seen a live telecast of a human walking on the moon.
They are unimpressed by the special effects in the original Star Wars movies.
The compact disc was introduced when they were two years old.
Their world has always included answering machines, cable television, VCRs, ATMs, and microwave ovens.
They never took a swim and thought about Jaws, or took a shower and thought about Psycho.
They were born the year after the Walkman was introduced by Sony.
They have never seen a black-and-white TV, cannot imagine having only
13 channels, nor can they imagine life with a remote control.
(UTS Newsletter, University of Manitoba, September, 1999. “This profile was compiled from a variety of sources, and was distributed via listserv last year by the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD)).)
Besides being somewhat shocked and sobered by all these facts read at once, one fact seemed to be missing, namely that
- They are also the first wave of the Internet/WWWeb generation.
Cheers!
Ger J. Z. Zielinski ]
lists like this circulate every so often, and it’s hard to
know how to read to them. they certainly pack a punch on a
certain level--but by describing young people as deficient
for not having experienced certain things. in doing so, it
seems as though their main appeal is the way in which they
reaffirm a really pernicious kind of bias, as if experienc-
ing X or Y event (like the invention of the CD--please) is
a salient factor in whether someone is qualified. taken to
its extreme--which developed societies do by various means,
for example, capital acquisition and fanatical use of cred-
entialization--the result of this worldview is gerontocacy.
the fact that these lists are fairly random in their organ-
ization means that they can slip fluidly from year to year,
as well as across cultures and nations. one could push the
time frame back a few years and mention 1968, sputnik, the
marshall plan, the anschluss, verdun; or the cultural revo-
lution, or the founding of israel or india’s independence--
you get the idea. in every case, the impact would be about
the same: the ‘current generation’ is missing this or that
experience, which is somehow constitive or decisive, so we
can only wonder about their ability to...
for a society that’s allegedly so obsessed with its future
(whether in the form of financial speculation, the amazing
advances of ‘technology,’ or conservation--no matter), all
these lists would seem to suggest priorities of a very dif-
ferent kind--priorities that are played out in really vile
ways on a daily basis, and in ways that will leave the gen-
erations now ‘running the world’ with a very spotty legacy.
my paternal grandmother was born in 1899. i’m glad she was
dignified enough--the fruit, of course, of being raised in
a world drowning in ignorance by our standards--not to lec-
ture her juniors on all the things they had missed, for ex-
ample, WWI, radio, TV. nor, for that matter, did she spend
much time marveling at all the wonders that technology had
brought (and not because she didn’t know or care).
and then, of course, there’s the minor matter of some pret-
ty mind-blowing things which the current generational hege-
mons have missed. i’d trade in trudeau in a second to know
what it was like to live in a world where land that wasn’t
owned by anyone was quite common. it wasn’t very long ago.
cheers, t