“Today’s 35-year-olds were born closer to the 1940s than to today.”
OK, granted, the author means the tail end of the ’40s and by just one day, but even so it’s amazing and pretty funny to see yesterday’s Kids Today become today’s Young Geezers.
And now two closer-to-actual thoughts:
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The vulgar form of this time-mapping genre were those infernal, endlessly forwarded “mindset” emails that smugly listed factoids about how different Today’s Generation is. With each passing year those lists enraged me more: under an “I was only joking”–style veneer of purporting to teach teachers where kids are coming from, the message was that college-age kids had become a bunch of culturally illiterate, historically unmoored freaks — the kind of NPCs who didn’t really need a future and could blithely be saddled with the debt of indentures.
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The spatial equivalent of this kind of exercise is that sub-sub-genre of counterintuitive geographical questions and propositions, like “Los Angeles is East of Reno.” Nowadays they’ve mostly degenerated into listicles — the unwashed masses’ answer to “best practices,” i.e., getting paid to cut-and-paste other people’s bullsh*t — but the first burst of that genre came in the late ’30s, when it was a sign of the disorientation brought about by aviation. tl;dr: when you see examples of this kind of thing – a repetition-oriented genre that aims to surprise based on where or when “you” are in relation to others — maybe start thinking about reaching for your revolver. Not because you’re about to encounter difference, but because there’s a good chance you’re about to encounter someone with a creepy agenda talking about difference. Happily, this instance — via Jonathan Sterne — isn’t doing that.