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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Will the largest teen generation in history prove to be a mass of zombie consumers -- or an awakened giant filled with a terrible resolve?
Sep 25, 2001 | As America struggles both literally and metaphorically to climb out from under the bloody wreckage of Sept. 11, many a pundit has taken to quoting the famous line often attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor: "We have woken a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve."
Never mind that, as World War II scholars have pointed out, Yamamoto never uttered those words. (To quote the moderators of the Pearl Harbor Attacked message board, "Nobody can provide a source for this quote prior to the release of the movie 'Tora! Tora! Tora!'") There is a potential sleeping giant here, but it isn't the military-industrial complex that Hollywood's Yamamoto or the current crop of talking heads mean to evoke. It is Generation Y, and it has just gotten a big bucket of ice water in the face.
Encompassing more than 70 million people born between 1980 and 1996, Generation Y is, at its core, the largest group of teenagers in American history, dwarfing even its parents, the baby boomers who came of age in the '60s. In the next decade, it will come to represent 41 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau. Until recently, its entire existence has been spent in a period of unprecedented prosperity and a cocoon of creature comforts the likes of which we've never seen before -- or at least not since Camelot, which, after all, was quickly interrupted by the unfortunate ugliness of assassinations, the war in Vietnam and riots in the streets.
For the business press and many sociologists, the defining characteristics of this generation to date have been its buying power ($275 billion spent annually, according to some estimates) and -- despite an astounding degree of media savviness, thanks to being raised with cable and the Net (and literacy be damned) -- its cheerfully compliant consumerism and gleeful malleability at the hands of the shrewd and ubiquitous über-brands and lifestyle firms. (From a piece published in the Washington Business Journal last spring: "Smarter marketers such as Tommy Hilfiger and Old Navy have understood that coolness is an important ingredient in cultivating Y's. Abercrombie & Fitch has done it best. What was once a conservative, white-male sporting goods store is now the coolest spot in the mall. ... [C]odifying what today's teenager cool is all about.")
If there could possibly be a bright side to the obscene events of two weeks past, it's that Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, "Total Request Live" and Limp Bizkit, "Survivor," Sony PlayStation, 'N Sync and their ilk will never be enough again. Everything changed on Sept. 11 -- it's a cliché, but it's true -- and that includes the sudden realization for many that their current opiates were nothing but placebos.
For Generation Y, nothing much has ever been at stake, even during our most galvanizing and engrossing national news events. (Did O.J./Clinton/Condit really "just do it," in the words of Nike? Who cares!) Hence even the "edgiest" of its music (Rage Against the Machine? Brought to you by Sony! Eminem? Vanilla Ice as hate-filled slasher-movie obsessive!) has just been another piece of empty but well-hyped product meant to be purchased on credit, displayed along with one's $150 sneakers as irrefutable evidence of hepness, and then consumed and shit out (just like the news), to be replaced the minute a new and improved model is sent hurtling down the corporate pipeline.
