Who's the Me Generation now?

Who's the Me Generation now?

A lesson for me from the millennials on living alone in a crowd

In the United States, the baby boomers, born in the early 1950s, are considered the Me Generation. You can see the influence of this thinking in (especially conservative) sitcoms and other fiction: The parent as a selfish, irresponsible, and sometimes directionless character in pursuit of self-realization, and the teenage son or daughter as hard-working and tolerant. Indian fiction's human representations, for the most part simply a result of accepted age-appropriateness in Indian traditions, are almost exactly reverse: The youngsters have invariably been portrayed as the freedom-loving, often fighting generation.

But there is no denying the psyche of the millennial generation. They are born in the late 1980s and are growing up to the joy and burden of being public individuals--the joy of speaking their minds and the burden of being responsible communicators. Of course, what we see more conspicuously around us is a generation exploited and hijacked on social media by political and business interests. But devoid of the temporary influences of those vested-interest strings and ideologies, there is a self-inflicted and self-conferred sense of responsibility among the millennials. Within new structures, there is newfound agency, new ways to express. The phenomenon of what Chetan Bhagat calls "virtue signallers" (although he seems to view them with some skepticism) is impossible to miss: Whether it is conveying the right messages about equal human rights or about sharing secular views, they are teaching themselves civic responsibility.

And yes, I talk about the generation as a group--not individuals. As generation expert Graeme Codrington pointed out to a group of us once, this one is not rebellious. It's one that reconciles, but one that's opinionated. Sure, it's short on attention span, and that's not their fault. In his insightful book The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster describes the institutional mandates that make it so. The most important is also the most unsurprising--the role of social networks and the virtual welter of opinion- and preference-seeking communication. No previous generation has enjoyed being at the centre of so much direct marketing attention and what I believe is a semblance of liberty to choose, and the evolution of taking responsibility is inevitable.

I mean 'semblance' to imply an outward appearance. Evolution has interesting ways, and an example is how the emergence of personalized marketing has balanced with better personal networks. This new emphasis in the new generation doesn't create just linkages. As marketers know, this also creates social influence.

However, the hallmark of this generation is that it lives in 'communication silos'. As the bots claim to know who we are, we only receive communication surrounding that claim of personal interests and prejudices. Eli Pariser calls this the 'you loop' (but perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it the 'me loop'!). When you click on a link, the bots triangulate who we are and bombard us with messages around that subject. Diverse interests seem to confuse bots because of what I suspect is their propensity to triangulate rather than expand.

The baby boomer generation's rebellious ways seem to be passe because the new generation does not worry about access or rights. It claims to have both, and the slightest attempts by the powers that be to curtail those rights will be met with deadly anger. The 'me loop' is therefore a trap, an external, but not genuine, certifier of who we are. Personalization of information has led to new forms of solipsism: Solipsism that stems from the bombardment of echoes, and new forms because the millennials alone have mastered the art, science and commerce of living alone in a crowd. But this self-centredness is beautifully coupled with responsibility. Perhaps at long last, the youth has found a voice of its own, and can spare the mindspace to comment on larger social issues.