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Generational Persistence and Divergence

Started by AFK, June 04, 2007, 08:36:29 PM

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AFK

Have you ever noticed how young kids from generation to generation are raised with the same stories and songs?  Grimm's Fairy Tales, Mother Goose, Rock a-bye Baby, Old MacDonald, The Three Little Pigs, etc., etc. 

Yet, songs and stories change for older children and young adults.  This generation kids are reading Harry Potter, in an earlier generation they read Nancy Drew, before that the Oz books.  A few decades ago young girls were deliriously screaming at Lennon/Mcartney, then it was David Cassidy, now it's Justin Timerlake and um, somebody else. 

I think it's interesting how from generation to generation kids are started with similar messages and inputs but they differ as they enter teenhood and so on. 

I don't know if this really means anything, but, it seemed like it might be a good discussion topic. 
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hooplala

Yeah, the kids growing up on Britney and La Lohan are certainly getting something different from the girls who grew up on Pat Benetar.
"Soon all of us will have special names" — Professor Brian O'Blivion

"Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns." — Bob Dylan?

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Very well then I contradict myself,
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Darth Cupcake

I am far from an authority on these things.

However, your point is interesting. It is later on, in the stages where our "role models," if you will, are very different that we start seeing the change in behavior. People talk about "kids these days," and it's really the people who are in the worshipping Justin Timberlake/Lindsay Lohan stage that are being referred to.

On the other hand, they are still getting these same messages from as soon as they can take input from the outside world, regardless of whether or not they are singing Mary Had A Little Lamb or Mary Takes It In The Butt. So would anything change if we were to change the early childhood input in the same way in which the adolescent input has changed? I think that would be interesting to see. I don't know how one could test that without causing a huge public outcry, but I'm still curious.

-DC
Read every single Nancy Drew book ever yet still turned out terribly
Be the trouble you want to see in the world.

Jenne

I think it's just the case that the insitution pushing each of these has separate agendas.  *shrug*  It's the job of education to maintain status quo...the media, on the other hand, has a quite different agenda.  Or just a different status quo to maintain, rather.

Payne

I think that it's easier to treat the very young as an homogenous group. We know, roughly, what a generation of kids raised on Goldilocks and Humpty Dumpty are going to turn out like, so we continue feeding that to them.

When they reach an age where it's easier to influence them with media and to take advantage of more distinct personalities, they can be hit with more subtle content, in an effort to secure their cash in whatever till is most appropriate.

I believe the reason why media becomes different at this time is because when kids reach this age, they have already been exposed to their parents cultural influences, and need something new and different. Therefore, this kind of media needs to constantly "evolve", even if it's revisiting even older concepts, and rehashing them into something new and shiny.

Triple Zero

Pane brings up a very good point here, in fact. I suddenly remembering reading somewhere about MTV (and other such youth-brainwashing media conglomerates) having some sort of age categories for target audiences, and they split finer with age.

as far as i remember, it was something like really young kids were pretty much homogenous, when they get older you can target their gender (the classic Barbie versus GI Joe) and when they get even older (reach puberty) you can separate them into alternative-edgy / mainstream-sexy (the second category was called "Belly", as far as i remember, by the MTV target audience mindcontrol consultants), so they know whether to feed them Linkin Park or Beyonce. (this splits the audience into four parts, if you take the gender into account).
when they get even older than that, they are moving out of the MTV sphere of influence into some other, where there's probably more than four target groups.
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Cain

People don't like new things.

Its one of the secrets of the CoN.  Give them something new only insofar that its only novelty is its newness, but its results are exactly the same.  Are many contemporary bands really that new, when compared with the Beatles, for example?  Boybands are notoriously interchangeable etc...

Same with subcultures.   The purpose of the subculture is to divide the rebellious young people, keep them warring against imaginary enemies, instead of realizing the true nature of their shared situation.  Create a market, create antagonisms about "poseurs", and soon enough you'll have the next generation's version of goths or emo kids.  Who at the end of the day, are only a watered down (majorly) version of the mods and rockers.

Standard colonial procedure.  Divide and rule.  Only, most western industrial nations are ethnically and religiously homogenous.  So you have to create the tribes out of nothing, and keep creating them, keep on the cultural edge of modern society.  Only way to keep control.  Just remember 1968.  That only failed because of treachery within the ranks, divisions among the groups involved.  If the rebellious youth of a nation could overcome their differences....it would cost many people.