How to make friends and influence boomers
Posted on | November 30, 2005 |
The title might be deceptive, but this isn’t another post about the pre-fix professional development day, which Az and Ange have documented. A while ago now I wrote a book review of Lindsay Tanner’s Crowded Lives which apparently some people actually read, and as a result I’ve been asked to contribute to a new book on Australian politics. I don’t want to say much about it until things are more definite, but to give you a taste, the editors’ brief reads: “not only has Australian politics become hopelessly stale and conservative, but so too has our political commentary, with same old tired faces trotting out the same old opinions on the same narrow range of issues.” In light of themes raised in the Tanner review I’ve been asked to write about baby boomer nostalgia, which is kinda hard because it’s not baby boomers per se I object to, just the ones who use power to impose their one view of the world to the detriment of all others (for instance these ones). After the CSAA conference on the weekend I’m wondering whether I should include certain academics in that list; the conference itself often felt like “the same old tired faces trotting out the same old opinions on the same narrow range of issues.”
In one of the few papers which drew attention to the prospects for generational change, Angi Buettner and Peta Mitchell talked about similar problems raised by the book proposal, particularly how younger voices and different styles of public intellectual practice might be heard in the current media environment. Partly expressing some hesitations about the chapter I’ve been asked to write, I wondered out loud how it might be possible to have more young voices without having whatever they happen to say inevitably constrained by their identification as youth. As Kate Crawford argued earlier in the conference, the exnominated position of the mainstream media is that of the adult as much as any other identity - so to indict its values and presumptions is to do so from the position of an outsider, which can then be variously described as selfish or immature for failing to endorse dominant values.
In the abstract below I’m trying to write a way out of that bind, offering both positive and negative dimensions to some of these generational issues. If the book goes ahead I’ll probably be talking about blogging among other things, so I hope some of you will want to share ideas now, or when it comes time to write.
How to win friends and influence boomers
While baby boomers may be holding on to their jobs longer to fund their retirement there is little question who is paying to maintain their lifestyles. Non-boomers are suffering the consequences of their predecessors’ workaholism and consumerism which not only enshrined the dual income family as norm but left the choice of not working akin to treason. In this context young people’s apparent failure to demonstrate ‘traditional’ forms of community or political engagement is hardly due to a lack of desire, rather it’s because weekends and public holidays are so often spent catching up on work (that is, in jobs where weekends and public holidays are still possible). Away from the limited gaze of politicians and big media, however, non-boomers have been building their own models for community, connection and survival. New forms of creative patronage have had to develop between young people and their elders to ensure a viable quality of life in contemporary Australia. And while HECS debts, short-term contracts and casual employment mean that many of our dreams remain forever postponed, the friendships forged through new technologies and increased mobility are giving us the sense of community nostalgic observers believe we lack. At a time when politicians lament the quality of our relationships while legislating against those that do not fit a conservative worldview, this chapter provides an insight into the alternative networks of support and participation available in the many lifestyles variously ignored, exploited or dismissed by a bland and predictable mainstream media commentariat.
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18 Responses to “How to make friends and influence boomers”
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November 30th, 2005 @ 3:20 pm
Very strong with very clear ideas, I think.
November 30th, 2005 @ 5:31 pm
When you mention baby boomers I found myself asking for specifics, so in that sense the intro has an air of ’suspense’
I am wondering how constrained you are going to have to be. Otherwise your claim that ‘its not babyboomers per se that you object to but just the ones that impose their views to the detriment of others’ a bit too nebulous.
I am worried that people doing community relevant and politically effective actions get swept up by such concepts as ‘babyboomers’ with those who attempt to limit such potential.
I am worried about the risk of providing an unneccessary us vs them scenario.
when reading the passage I immediately get a sense that baby boomers do not participate, and recognise the potential, in these new modes of connection and community, which i think could be problematic.
‘HECS debts, short-term contracts and casual employment’ . Is your argument focussed around a middle-class or university educated community? because this sort of sounds like it (thereby implying an exclusion of the working class from public and political commentary/critique again [i think it is the 'HECS' bit]).
These are just initial impressions, and i reckon you would deal with them in the chapter. So apologies in advance for my misreading or overeading, which i am want to do
ps. re the csaa conference: i found most participants really encouraging and supportive of each other. And i think some of them are still arguing similar lines because they still feel their points are valid. and in many cases they are. I think we can encourage engaging directly with their ideas and show how new ones alongside them can be even more politically productive. a matter of working together, rather than allowing a discourse of ‘changing of the guard’ creep in, which i worry could stifle cooperation *shrug*
December 1st, 2005 @ 8:48 am
am thinking this morning that the us vs them is prob. what your publisher wants. woops.
December 1st, 2005 @ 10:28 am
Thanks Matt! Clif, yes your last point is precisely the dilemma I’m talking about. The book is aiming for a popular readership more so than an academic one, which makes it difficult to be as specific - it’s not really what sells. Hence the angst thinking about how to pitch it so I avoid being typecast as a boomer hater. But I shall try not to lose all my academic cred! I shall also try to be more optimistic as you seem to be! I’m glad you had a good conference.
December 1st, 2005 @ 11:20 am
yeah, sorry we didn’t get to hang out at conf. between work [in civil and academic life :)], sickness and paper aaargh. was a bit tough to meet up like we SHOULD have. sorry again.
December 1st, 2005 @ 12:14 pm
mel, one trick may be to separate the logic of baby boomerism from the expressions of this logic. It allows you to acknowledge that actual baby boomers are complex beasts (multiplicities?), but that they sometimes have to perform a particular set of dispositions and speak through the discursive megaphone of particular rhetorical devices. It gives you a way out when your senior academic friends are pissed off with you, but it allows you to engage in an oppositional way when your publisher demands it. Plus it may even be a more accurate description of what is happening…
The interesting thing for me (and this is purely self-indulgent), being a young ‘un, is not negotiating with the actual boomers (in the sense of engaging with them), but negotiating _with_ them (in the sense of together) in the face of the performative constrictions, what I have called the ‘logics’ above. Being ‘young’ is another way of saying I exist and have to engage with another section of a continuum that contains the subject position (expression of these logics) that the boomers have to perform. This is what I have been getting at on my blog re: the early career researcher stuff.
A career used to be what you ended up with at the end of it (the career), now it is what you must plan before you begin. This slippage in the meaning of ‘career’ is fundamental to transformations in the neoliberal workplace for highly skilled workers (what we are). The ‘career planning’ function inserts us in the prevailing logics of the ‘career’, that is, the exact same logics that the boomers are engaging with: hyper-production, ’success’, no social ties (family, etc), collegiality determined by networks and probabilities of career advancement (what Mel C has noted), and so on.
December 1st, 2005 @ 12:24 pm
Oh, I should add, we are inserted into these logics without the power to change them, ie: “If you want a career, then you must accept these conditions of possibility and then this probability will eventuate…”
My halfbaked Autouni paper was thinking around this, in terms of students vs academics organised around the cluster of singularities represented as ’scholarship’, but at different positions in relation to their labour. I think I might have to start promoting a ‘ratbag uni student’ persona…
December 1st, 2005 @ 6:13 pm
I’ve been reading your blog for a while but haven’t commented before. Hi!
I think your chapter abstract sounds really interesting. I’m currently researching my PhD on young women’s attitudes to work, relationships, motherhood and feminism. I’ve been looking into the generational debates that have occurred within feminism (2nd wave vs 3rd wave, Anne Summers’ “Letter to the Next Generation”, etc).
It’s hard to talk about boomers and non-boomers without setting up an Us vs. Them dichotomy, though. I’m finding it difficult to write about generationalism without succumbing to those rigid definitions that cast people into categories according to age.
I’m really keen to see how your chapter progresses.
Cheers,
Penelope.
December 3rd, 2005 @ 12:04 pm
Thanks Penelope! Your work sounds really interesting to me, too. Have you heard of Megan Jones’s work on academic feminism? She was a colleague of mine at Gender Studies at Sydney Uni. Her thesis might be useful for thinking through some of the issues you’re talking about. And yes, let’s stay in touch.
December 5th, 2005 @ 12:51 am
Glen, splendid stuff. Has you seen anything about of a high quality on the perceptual notion of social cleansing? Les Twentymen (of all people) used it in a speech recently and it resonates very clearly with this idea of the adult-authorial.
It sounds like a great book, really on the money.
December 5th, 2005 @ 1:12 am
Also, Mel! - I would take it as a good sign that this place becomes a touchstone for ideas concerning the problems of cultural studies - means you are on the right track.
That line about 70% of cultural studies people being wankers a few posts ago really has made me think about what occurs in the academy that cultural studies becomes the running joke on campus. At Melbourne its become… well, I’m looking elsewhere for work, put it that way.
December 5th, 2005 @ 2:01 am
Sounds good, Mel, and good to see publishers interested in new voices and picking good new voices too!
On Clif and Glen’s points, this struck me:
Well, maybe. Anyone doing mining engineering or law (with sufficiently good records) can probably hope to earn close to 100k in their late 20s or early 30s and will have their HECS debts wiped out in no time.
The great danger of the whole “generationalism” discourse (and here I think Glen’s point about logics is a productive one) is that it’s immensely variant depending on where you stand class, status and gender wise (women have much higher rates of casual and contract low paid employment and much less likelihood of paying off HECS debt than men, as numerous studies show).
Similarly, the same cleavages existed for the boomers. Men over 50 who didn’t complete high school or a trade are hardly in privileged labour market, wealth or social positions. And nor are many boomer women who had kids in their late teens or early 20s and failed to climb onto the secure job ladder.
I taught a course a few years ago which had a pretty close look at sociology of generations, and unfortunately there are few areas where a fundamentally middle class perspective (whether good or bad) is not more privileged.
It’s also worth remembering that the majority of the 60s kids supported the Vietnam War, and both my parents remember most boys wearing ties to Queensland Uni in the 60s. The Liberals were winning student elections until 1969 at UQ.
Unfortunately, much that is written on generations is heavily influenced by advertising discourse. It would be very interesting to look at that, and to the way generations are figured in popular culture.
Hope I don’t sound negative - it’s the sad lot of the empirical sociologist
Not to mention characteristic of my nihilist layabout no future Generation X early adulthood 
My take on some of these issues is here
December 5th, 2005 @ 2:02 am
Link: http://larvatusprodeo.redrag.net/2005/09/16/i-must-be-generation-x-or-something/
December 5th, 2005 @ 2:19 am
Ps - arguably the labour market position of late Generation Xers is worse than that confronting Generation Y (or Now or Z or whatev). The huge decrease in manufacturing jobs and the displacement of clerical and secretarial jobs by technology which occurred in the early 90s recession has two continuing impacts - the largest cohort of long term unemployed people with only occasional attachments to the labour market remains unskilled people who left high school in the early 90s and many middle class BA graduates (like me and my friends) in their mid to early late 30s (!) are only now getting the trappings of adulthood like mortgages and secure jobs.
It’s also the age you start worrying about the zippo super you have from all the casual jobs and uni-ing and dole queues that occupied your 20s.
There’s a fair bit of research on social attitudes of Generation X - the advantage being that we’re old farts now and thus have been around long enough to be tracked by longitudinal studies.
Interestingly, there’s a continuing propensity not to marry and a higher divorce rate for those that do compared to Generation Y.
Some of the connections still need putting together.
December 6th, 2005 @ 9:02 am
Looks like an interesting and potentially even valuable topic.
FWIW, I’m not convinced that the generational thing is the problem, or even an issue. The editor’s brief may be right in saying ‘Australian politics is hopelessly stale and conservative, along with our political commentary,’ but it is not just because their are the ’same old tired faces’. You could have a whole bunch of new faces, but they could just as readily ‘trot out the same old opinions on the same narrow range of issues.’
It’s the way parliamentary politics and mainstream media political commentary (which are inextricably intertwined) operate, which is the problem, rather than the lack of change in people. The staleness is not a consequence of age, or the same people being there. It is bereft of ideas because it is designed to be bereft of ideas - Ideas don’t sell newspapers (at least not on their own) and they don’t grab the interest of the disconnected voter. Fear, drama, sloganeering, jingoism, propaganda, intrigue - that’s the currency of political ‘debate’.
For example, it’s not Malcolm Turnbull’s ideas about tax changes which interest political commentators - there’s nothing he’s saying that hasn’t been said by many others inside and outside the Parliament. It’s the fact that Turnbull is deemed to be an up and comer, future leader, factor in internal Party tensions, etc which makes it of interest to the commentators - the tax ideas are just a plot device to hang the main story on.
Indeed, I’d say one of the few press gallery people who aren’t just commenting on politics through the paradigm of an entertainment reporter is Michelle Grattan (and maybe Alan Ramsey) - both of whom have been around for decades. They do actually make some effort to get into the substance of issues rather than just go with whatever is decided to be this month’s/year’s hot new drama.
Maybe it’s just because I never think about who’s a boomer and who isn’t - there’s a fair age range in the Parliament and in the press gallery, but I can’t see many differences amongst them all - certainly not ones that are linked to age.
December 8th, 2005 @ 8:57 am
Yes the wider trends Mark draws out are clearly important, even though I don’t have the scope to follow them through for something this limited. It’s great to get your thoughts on the book pitch Andrew - it helps to get a different perspective on the assumptions academics and publishers make about how politics and political commentary function. I think academics and publishers often perpetuate a similar pact to the politician/press gallery world you speak of. I should say it was your comments here some time ago that got me thinking along the lines of how blogging is helping to make new connections and ‘friends’ despite generation or occupation. This is the ‘hopeful’ direction I want to take the chapter as a way of escaping the enforced terminology and offering new ideas - two important functions that academic work can offer, I think.
December 9th, 2005 @ 3:15 pm
From a completely different angle: I write on a little group blog about my local municipality and that led to paying a lot more sustained attention to the recent local government election held there than usual. A remarkable number of candidates were very young people - teenagers and up to say 22 - and of those a (to me) disappointingly high number were already thoroughly committed to membership of major political parties. Several of them seemed to know and loathe one another from student union politics.
Andrew’s first two paragraphs could have been written about this election. It was all about the same old part line sloganeering and intrigue. So depressing.
March 12th, 2006 @ 8:31 pm
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