Sunday, June 28, 2009
The Internet and Generation Formation
Ever since I shared my undergraduate thesis to Mark (Ruiz), I started to work on re-writing it and re-reading my source literature. I promised Mark that I'll blog about the sociology of generations, albeit a simpler version, but this post is not about that one (I'll find time to write it someday).
I would just want to share something I found in the internet. It's a part of a speech by June Edmunds in 2007 on his contemporary re-appropriation of Karl Mannheim's sociology of generations. Below is a short excerpt where he discusses the relationship of new media and the formation of an active generation.
Bryan [Turner] and I suggested that 9/11 could bring about the formation of a second global generation similar to the 1960s – a generation which both shares its information and ideas across borders and acts with global impact. Two factors seem especially important in the construction of global generations. First, the growth of electronic forms of global communication technology. Whereas print media and the radio shaped international and transnational generations, electronic technology has led to the globalization of trauma because new media mean that events can be experienced simultaneously across the globe, transcending time and space in unprecedented way. Second, the increase in mobility, tourism, education, global labour markets and so on.
However, I’ve started to rethink this issue and to question whether these new electronic communications technologies have the ability to generate a global generational consciousness. What they do is that they provide a very instantaneous vision of things; but these media images are transitory- we move on from them very quickly on to the next ‘trauma’ . And it is this very immediacy and transitory nature of mediated experience of trauma which is what inhibits the creation of a genuinely active global generation. So I’m starting to change my mind about the earlier argument we made. There is a very instant nature of global communication which means that these events do not have a long-lasting event and do not create a global political generation anything equivalent to the 1960s generation.
[via Media Research]
I remember in one of the TindigNation meetings, Noli Benavent (creator of the STOP CON-ASS NOW! cause in Facebook) was having an intense discussion with other members of TindigNation about the merits of cyberactivism. Some of the leaders (members of a more senior, actualized generation) are pointing to the fact that cyberactivism can only go so far and that it needs to lead towards street activism.
Well, we can look at it in several angles - division of labor, developmental stages of activism, diversification of means of dissent, and the argument that the internet can never replace actual street protest. Nonetheless, Edmund's point on the relationship of this new media and the formation of a "generation for itself" merits much consideration.
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