Would Your Parents Have Twittered Growing Up?
November 11, 2009 :: Joe LoongI’ve been continuing to think about differences in generational attitudes towards the use of technology in general and social media tools in particular, and I’m not getting very far. I keep going around in circles.
(I am hampered by the fact that I am not a sociologist — not even an armchair one. But let’s ignore that for now.)
I’m getting hung up trying to figure out how much of these generational differences are due to inherent attitudinal differences (brought about by reactions to prior generations, defining historical events, other external factors), and how much is simply due to the technology not being available.
Basically, it’s the question, “Would your parents have Twittered? How about your grandparents?”
The technologically-deterministic view says that human nature pretty much stays constant, so changes in technology are what matters. Because the desire for communication and recognition are pretty constant, you can map the behaviors we see with social media tools now to analogous behaviors in the older offline world. The role taken by Twitter now was fulfilled by… I dunno, malt shop gossip and other real-world social interactions, as well as things like snail mail and physical bulletin boards. The function that Twitter serves now, and those venues served then, was basically the same — social status updating and self-promotion.
Which basically suggests that my teenage self, my parents, and say, the characters from Little Women, would have used social media in similar fashions, had the technology been available at the time. Though subject to the mores, modesties and values of those particular times, which is a pretty huge caveat. Hence the problem of figuring out where the technological factors end and the generational ones begin.
Also, I don’t think it’s true. Some behaviors are just simply new, born of technological change. For example, the idea of nostalgia didn’t really come about until the industrial age (if nothing ever changes, there isn’t anything to be nostalgic about). I’m not sure at what point the metaphor breaks down. Private paper diaries are radically different from publicly published blogs; putting a bumper sticker on your car is nothing like a social status update.
However, expectations of fame, expressions of reputation, and the existence of microcelebrity have probably always existed in one form or another — first among physical relationships, then in early media-enabled connections, then expanded across online networks. Even something like celebrity culture is nothing new — if anything is new, it’s the expectations of access and the (largely illusory) idea that you can have a deeper, authentic relationship than you could before.
I guess the question really isn’t “Would your parents have Twittered?” but “Would your parents have Twittered the way you Twitter?” Pretty clearly, the answer is no; technological determinism can only go so far, and that’s where genuine generational differences kick in.
For my next entry, I think I’ll take a look at some of the attitudinal differences that influence my own use of social media, and how it differs from those darn kids today.
Does any of this make sense? Please leave a comment either way.
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