Michigan Today - September 2007

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MySpace Generation

by Richard W. Bailey

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Every era has a way of branding the young. In the 1920s, fetching teenagers were sheiks and flappers, and their appearance and antics were chronicled in the illustrations of John Held, Jr. The girls had bobbed hair and the boys were marcelled.  Corsets gave way to the newfangled brassiere, and the young swilled bathtub gin and caroused in speakeasies.  Crooners had little megaphones since microphones of the sort used by their twenty-first century counterparts had not yet been invented. F. Scott Fitzgerald summed up the era in his book The Jazz Age.

Bobby Soxers came along as a word in 1944, and I regret to report that my dictionary says the term is "now historical." Bobby soxers got their name from ankle-length socks produced during World War II to save the fabric required for stockings, and the girls wearing them were ready to be swept off their feet by returning veterans of the war. If the socks didn't do the trick, the new bikini did. In 1947, a movie appeared titled The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer with Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Shirley Temple (as the Soxer). It won an Academy Award. The children of Bobby Soxers became first thirty-somethings and then, in their maturity, baby boomers—a term coined before it was needed (in 1976) and which gained increased currency as they began to leave the workforce in the 1990s.

Flower children appeared as an expression in 1967 as a logical successor to such earlier terms as beat (1957), beatnik (1958), and hippie (1965). Like their predecessors, they were eager to flout tradition and flaunt strange, immodest garments and exotic music. The apogee for flower children was the Summer of Love (1967). They scandalized their parents by their enthusiasm for sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

Gen X refers to children born in 1961 and the decade following. Billy Idol led a punk rock band with the name Generation X, and soon enough these youngsters found themselves on the cover of TIME magazine with the headline twentysomething. According to that magazine: "They possess only a hazy sense of their own identity but a monumental preoccupation with all the problems the preceding generation will leave for them to fix . . . ." The Oxford English Dictionary, now in the editorial hands of boomers, takes a similarly dim view: "perceived to be disaffected, directionless, or irresponsible, and reluctant to participate in society." Of course that was exactly what the parents of flappers, soxers, and flower children thought too.

With a certain lack of imagination, we now have the young boxed as Gen Y, those born between 1984 and 1994. One's suspicions of this term are intensified by the fact that its first appearance was in the magazine Advertising Age in 1993. According to various social scientists this generation is addicted to the internet and text-messaging; it is also, so these studies say, indifferent to authority. Wikipedia reports: "Members of Generation Y were found to be 'demanding, impatient and bad at communicating' by a 2007 survey of business owners in Australia." Sound familiar?

Marketing specialists have begun to use Generation Z for the successors to Generation Y. Pretty pitiful. Surely we can think up a better label. How about MySpace Generation?

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Richard W. Bailey is Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn/