Potato Chipping

Millennial Fever

I like the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Their surveys are reliable and well-constructed, and they’ve collected tons of publicly available data over the past 10 years.

Their public relations, though, doesn’t approach the quality of their methods. Exhibit A: thorough takedowns of last month’s “just-this-side-of-moral-crusading…soft ball pitch to those who will turn it into media hoo-ha” report on sexting by Dan at Sociology of Information and Jay at Montclair SocioBlog. In my experience this isn’t an isolated incident–Pew seems to want to position themselves as a reliable source for academics but also to frame their reports in such a way that misleading sound bites can be grabbed by moral-panicking journalists.

Now their latest report is about the Millennial Generation, complete with a cute little quiz to find out how Millennial you are.

Observations:

• Generations are tricky academic constructs. If you really want to distinguish between cohorts (people occupying same or similar age positions at a particular point in time) and young people in general, you have to have longitudinal data. For example, Pew notes that Millennials are the most liberal age group today. Are Millennials more liberal than young people were in the 1960s or 1980s? They don’t say.
• Social actors shape society and are shaped by society in turn. Generational constructs tend to emphasize one of those relationships over the other. “Find out how today’s teens and twentysomethings are reshaping the nation,” the Pew tagline reads. How are they being shaped, besides by technology? Again, no real answer.
• Generational constructs also tend to define generations relative to one another. By far the most salient quality of Millennials, adultcentric observers argue, is their technological literacy. (My mom, who until recently was a technology coordinator at a high school, had nearly double the score of Boomers’ average on Pew’s Millennial quiz, despite tech proficiency being her only real commonality with us young’uns.) I consider myself to have above average tech proficiency even among other Millennials, but today’s 12 year olds are likely to be far more wired in 15 years than I am today. How will we define Millennials then?
• The “wired generation” angle is especially prone to an unbalanced perspective, since technological determinism is so prevalent. For Millennials, technological determinism combines with the common narrative of youths dominated by “raging hormones” to produce a doubly deterministic perspective. Kids today can’t control themselves, the story goes, and technology is the great enabler for all those dirty behaviors. If those kids would just put down their iPods, maybe this country wouldn’t be heading down the crapper.
• Society fears youths (especially lower-class or minority youths), but we also fear for them (especially when they’re white and middle- to upper-class). Because middle- to upper-class youths are the ones using the technology, their indiscretions involving technology have to be explained away without disparaging their race or class identities. So the blame is affixed to their age (i.e., raging hormones), to the technology itself (in its enabling capacity), and/or to the corrupting influence on the other side of the technologically mediated interaction (the predator, the exploiter of private information, the voyeur). The manifestations of these three things then become the most important artifacts of the contemporary youth experience, as seen through the eyes of the adults who fear for them.

Do the Pew study and others ultimately say anything useful about Millennials, then? Or do they say more about the generation(s) authoring them?

[Edit: Ezster Hargattai has a new article addressing the assumption that Millennials are universally tech savvy, showing significant differences by race, gender, education, and SES.]

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