In a conversation today about Coffee and Cigarettes, Victoria and I were discussing the scene with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits. Tom says that he and Iggy are part of the “coffee and cigarettes” generation, while people in the ’40s, like Abbott and Costello, were part of the “pie and coffee” generation.
Well, then the begged question becomes, “What is my generation?”
After a little bit of thinking, the answer hit plain as day: the energy drink generation. Everything in our lives is about dodging sleep and trying to be as efficient as possible (whatever that means). We even commonly get our coffee in to-go cups because life is moving way too fast for us to actually enjoy anything. No one my age that I know has readWar and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov, and I think this has something to do with our utter inability to get an attention span together.
In fact, congratulations if you’ve read this far. In the textbook for my reporting class, one of the commentators states that he can’t handle a blog with paragraphs longer than three sentences. And this guy works for a freaking newspaper!
I think my biggest connection to this is a disappointment with my generation. We’re not going to be known for anything great. People in the future will remember that we couldn’t pay attention and whined about not getting our way.
This lovely little piece was originally found on the blog of a good friend of mine; I would advise all to check it out: http://typewriterfetish.tumblr.com/ Also, everyone should at least suffer through Tom Waits' music. I advise first-timers to listen to "Jersey Girl" and "Chocolate Jesus."
All The World Is Green and God's Away On Business are my favorites.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Jared in that we are a part of an ADHD type generation. The constant flow of information that we receive (primarily due to the internet) has conditioned us to only want to absorb information in small bite-sized chunks. Most of us feel like we don't have time to take in information in any other way. If it can't be condensed down to a few, easy-to-digest lines, it's probably not worth reading/watching/listening to.
ReplyDeleteWe are a part of the information age. On one hand, we have access to an unlimited amount of information, which seems great. On the other, there's so much information, we generally don't take the time to fully understand it; in fact, there's no possible way we COULD understand it all if we tried.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that our generation is blinded by the sheer amount of information that it encounters. Like greedy pigs, we attempt to gobble up as much as information as we can, but we never slow down and actually try to enjoy the taste of what we're shoving down our own throats.
(My original response was too long to fit into one comment. Here's the second half.)
ReplyDeleteI do disagree with one thing Jared says though: that we won't be known for anything great. Right now, people are being flooded with information. I'm going to be optimistic and say that our generation will be the group that helps to make sense out of all the chaos. I think our generation will find ways to provide information in more meaningful ways. We will never be able to reduce the amount of information people deal with everyday, but I think we can organize in a way that's easier to digest. Kind of like how page numbers, chapters, sections, indexes, and tables of content help to organize a book.
Sure, most people will never read books by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, but I think that's okay. If people don't read a great piece of literature, it doesn't make that work any less extraordinary. It just means that there are so many other great things out there, that we can't get to them all.