Next Generation

No, this isn't a Star Trek post, sorry. I suppose it's inevitable that when you have a kid you think about what they'll grow up into, and what kind of generation they'll be a part of. At least, I think about it a lot, but it especially came into clarity when I read Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland. Now, it certainly isn't his best, but it is a nice, somewhat sad look at culture in general. It summed up the generations quite nicely, and it got me thinking about what my generation is like, and what Judah's will be like in the future.

My generation is post-industrial, post-modern, post-nuclear, and some even say post-human. What, then, is left to name a generation when all of the monikers have been used? Today we are a transient generation: The ill-formed offspring of ex-hippie parents, still pining for freedom but tethered to the tide of digitalization. Born in a place, no more than a name, and always moving on. Not the upwardly mobile days of old, but a non-linear, meaningless sporadic movement of the virtually disconnected. We are, as Coupland says, de-narrated.

What is left for a homogenized time, when neuroses are normal and we look with suspicion upon anyone who claims to be anything remotely normal. If someone has lived in the same town all their life, never been divorced, abused, or unhappy, we wonder and mutter at them as we pass by; what are you hiding? where are your skeletons? You don't belong.

What then is left for the next generation? A generation that is more digital than human? Will we have a cadre of children who cannot relate in person, because they are used to vitual space? Children who can code computer programs but not read a book? It certainly seems like a terminal prognosis, though I'm sure our parents thought the same thing and look how well our generation turned out. In a manner of speaking, of course.