Abstract
That popular consumer culture has a considerable influence on young people is evidenced in part by a 2007 report of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. There “Generation Next” (or those born between 1981 and 1988) is described as having the following characteristics:
About 50 percent have “either gotten a tattoo, dyed their hair an untraditional color, or had a body piercing in a place other than their ear lobe. The most popular are tattoos, which decorate the bodies of more than a third of these adults.”
49 percent play video games, 36 percent within the past week.
As “big movie-goers,” 47 percent go to the movies at least once a month but for most (77 percent) their favorite way to watch a movie is on a DVD or video at home.
As avid and skilled users of the Internet, 86 percent use it; the majority have a social networking site on Facebook, MySpace, or MyYearbook; and more than 4 in 10 have created a personal profile.
Gen Nexters spend less time than other generations following the news. And few read newspapers or watch network news such as CNN, MSNBC, or Fox, but find the “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” particularly appealing, with “13 percent of Gen Nexters” reporting “watching the show regularly, compared with 6 % of the general public.”1
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Notes
The Pew Research Center: For the People and the Press (2007), “How Young People View Their Lives, Futures and Politics: A Portrait of ‘Generation Next,’” January 9, http://www.people-press.org/2007/01/09/a-portrait-of-generation-next.
For a discussion of “plastic hippies,” see Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain (1994), Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press).
Nesta H. Webster (2004), Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before the Revolution (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing), 248–49.
E. L. Doctorow (1975), Ragtime (New York: New American Library), 42–43.
Seth Koven (2004), Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
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David Brooks (2001), Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster).
Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (2004), Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: HarperBusiness).
Mark Ehrman (1995), “Heroin Chic,” Playboy 42 (5), May, 68.
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William Anselmi and Kosta Gouliamos (1997), Elusive Margins: Consuming Media, Ethnicity, and Culture, vol. 29 (Ottawa, Canada: Guernica Editions Incorporated).
Elijah Anderson (2000), Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton), 74.
Mary C. Waters (1990), Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press).
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David Muggleton (2000), Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style (Oxford: Berg), 43.
David Muggleton, Inside Subculture, quoting Susan B. Kaiser in R. H. Nagasawa and S. S. Hutton (1991), “Fashion, Postmodernity, and Personal Appearance: A Symbolic Interactionist Formulation,” Symbolic Interaction, 14 (2): 165–85.
Ibid., 46. See also Jean Baudrillard, “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,” in Mark Poster (ed.; 1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 207–19 (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Kimi Eisele (2003), “Poverty-Chic: Diesel’s New Line,” August 21, http://www.alternet.org/story/16636.
David K. Brown (2004), Social Blueprints: Conceptual Foundations of Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press), 20.
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© 2013 Karen Bettez Halnon
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Halnon, K.B. (2013). Critiquing Postmodernist Zeitgeist. In: The Consumption of Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352491_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352491_3
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