I used to love staying up past my bedtime as a kid and watching ‘adult’ TV. Of course, when you’re eight, ‘adult’ TV is sneaking into your nan’s room and watching stand-up sets from the Melbourne Comedy Festival which you don’t quite understand. But it’s also watching game shows which you don’t quite understand. I’d watch Spicks and Specks and Thank God You’re Here, but my favourite was Talkin’ ‘Bout your Generation.
Hosted by the steady hand and trustworthy wit of Shaun Micallef, a rotating panel of generationally divided teams would compete in time-hopping pop culture trivia to try and prove which generation had it best. Over the course of its allocated prime-time slot, guests would compete to see who truly had the most knowledge — was it the Baby Boomers, who watched all of this culture form around them? Perhaps it was Gen X, who were raised amidst the rise of this capsule of culture? Or maybe Gen Y, who absorbed whatever culture trickled off their parents backs into their young brains?
I don’t think the show intended to have deeper meaning, and whilst there was always a winning team, you left with a sense that we were all connected by some deeper sense of humanity which transcended the screen. The Gen Y team would answer the questions meant for the other teams and make jokes about the shows and movies which their parents would make them watch, and vice versa.
Generations are, of course, a nimble term, but historically they’ve come with some clear sense of delineation. Usually this is from the period of time in which people are born, but they typically also come with cultural baggage. You can define a generation by the historical events that impacted them the most, as is the case of the baby boomers, as well as some coherent shared sensibilities, whether it be how they fundamentally understand media, economy, or the way of the world.
This walled sense of being is breaking, though. For once, the internet has found ways to tie specific modes of being to generational terms. A ‘baby boomer’ no longer suggests someone born between 1946 and 1964, but rather an uber-conservative individual who fracks oil fields and votes against equality in their free time. By weaponising phrases like “Okay, boomer”, we’ve distilled the ability for this generation to be defined within their time. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does shake something which has become fundamental to our understandings of age, respect, and maturity.
Look at the new portmanteau permeating our social media feeds: ‘zillenials’. Not quite old enough to remember the 90s, but not quite young enough to have had a phone a single-digit age, zillenials float between the Obama-era optimism of the millennial ‘anything is possible’ mentality, and the more crushing sense of existentialism which defines Gen Z. It’s a flexible term though — a zillenial is more of a mindset than a demographic.
(I think I have exposed myself here as more zillenial than Gen Z, because a pure Gen Z would have called it a ‘vibe’ instead of a mindset.)
This doesn’t even begin to cover the infamous iPad babies. I am not in any qualified position to give parenting advice, but it terrifies me that children are being given their own devices with which to fiddle with unrestricted internet from such a young age. I worry what it will do to their ability to socialise, to comprehend information, and to see the world without the CoComelon, brightly-coloured filter that is real life.
It feels as if my generation is the last to experience any semblance of a whimsical and outside-focused childhood. Sure, I have fond memories of coming home after school and plopping in front of the TV to skim ABC3, and of seeing the Wii for the first time when I was about six or seven, and of harvesting plants on my mum’s Farmville account while she was at work so her corn wouldn’t die. But I remember playing with my nan in the backyard, and she’d roll a hula hoop down the sloped grass, and I’d try and jump through the hoop, and for hours at a time I’d just roll around in the grass and feel so at home.
Do kids roll around in grass anymore?
Clearly, these generational terms no longer denote a purely age-centric demographic. They suggest deeper cultural meanings, they become fluid spokes of identity which transcend years of birth, and they are collapsing and rebounding off each other like an accordion being viciously played at a clown funeral.
So where do we go from here?
I predict that generations are going to become fast and loose terms, that the cycle of what ‘defines’ a group of people is going to shrink smaller and smaller until the tonal shifts between babies born months apart amass to eons. Maybe we find other prongs of identity to define ourselves against, ones that aren’t bogged down in mass traumas and existential awakenings (God forbid we become known as the ‘lockdown’ generation in the history books).
All we can hope is that Gen Alpha is a factory reset. We’re already seeing the parents of Gen Alpha swinging on the screen time pendulum. Millennials, arguably the first generation to grow up around this age of technology, are parenting their kids with an awareness of what the Internet does to a child’s brain. Perhaps the turn from unfettered Internet access to a more controlled sense of how the Internet works is setting up a better foundation for the relationship between kids, phones, and fun.
We need to let life run wild for a few years, and hope that this new wave of human people are predisposed to sensitivity, passion, and a willingness to excavate the path to find new and exciting futures. Let’s not let the next generation loom with a sense of finality, whether that be to the grip of technology, or the ocean which will literally envelop us with mass tides.
Also, get your grubby, Nutella-covered mitts off my phone, I do not have any games on here!
