In the wake of the First World War, and against its background of mass slaughter, industrialised warfare and the suffering of millions of citizens of Europe and beyond, sociologists such as Karl Mannheim (1928/1952) and philosophers like JosĂŠ Ortega y Gasset (1923/1931, 1930/1932) sought explanations for social change in the continuous exchanges of generations. Their aim was to unveil âthe rhythm of agesâ, as Ortega y Gasset (1923/1931: 18) poetically put it, and to use the concept of generation to understand the âdynamic compromise between mass and individualâ (p. 15). Of these two scholars, Mannheim was the theoretically most rigorous, and his ideas on how generations come into being have since inspired a range of sociological analyses. Many of these studies have concerned themselves with youth. Some have focused on how youths have become integrated into society (e.g. Eisenstadt 1956 and 1988, Kerzer 1983), while others have studied how and in what ways they have resisted such integration (e.g. Murdock and McCron 1976, Frith 1978). Some have looked at youth cultures from a perspective of movements (e.g. Jamison & Eyerman 1994, Eyerman & Turner 1998, Wyatt 1993), while others have sought to theoretically advance the generational theory more generally (e.g. Corsten 1999, Burnett 2010, Pilcher 1998, Vincent 2005). Irrespective of the approach taken, the sociological focus has emphasised the role of experience in the formation of generations, especially experiences of dynamic and revolutionary historical events such as war, famine or natural disaster, but also political upheaval, or state or military suppression. All of these dramatic types of events are supposed to have an impact on peopleâs lives to the extent that the events are formative for the groups of people that experience them: they become central components in the everyday experience of living in modernity.
In these sociological accounts of generations, some components in peopleâs lives seem to have attracted more attention than others. However, and despite the central place of media technologies and content in peopleâs lives, generational theory has only recently been a prominent feature in media research, barring a few examples (e.g. Gumpert and Cathcart 1985, Bolin 1997, Hartmann 2003). Lately, however, we have seen a growing interest in generational components as part of media and audience research, where a few edited collections have dealt with the role of media in the formation of generations (Volkmer 2006a, Colombo & Fortunati 2011, Loos et al. 2012, Aroldi & Ponte 2012, Bolin & Skogerbø 2013, Vittadini et al., 2013b). The increased presence of the media in peoplesâ lives and in society more generally over the past century has also left few traces in the sociological literature on generations. This part of social and cultural development, which is sometimes referred to as the process of mediatisation (Krotz 2001, Lundby 2008, Hjarvard 2013, Bolin 2014b), is an important background to the formation and experience of generations because the increasingly rapid transformation of our media environments should leave its mark on the experience of each specific generation.
The rest of this chapter will introduce the background to the âproblem of generationsâ. This will include a review of the previous media research on generations, in which the main analytical concepts relating to generational theory will be presented. A justification for the cross-generational and cross-cultural analysis that is to be made in subsequent chapters will also be given.
The next section will give an introduction to Mannheimâs theory and it will describe how it has been developed by others over the years, leading up to the ways in which it has been adopted in media studies and communication theory. This is then followed by a sketch of the empirical research that forms the background to the analysis to follow in subsequent chapters.
Generation theory
Mannheim developed his generational theory as an alternative to Marxâs class theory, whereby social class is the historical subject and the driver of social change. To Mannheim, it was rather the generation who was the social subject, but it is also evident that his theory borrowed more than a little from Marxâs theory of class. A generation, in Mannheimâs sense, is a group of people who have a similar relation to societal events (just as Marx constructed classes depending on group relation to the means of production).
Marx was, however, not the only influence on Mannheimâs generation theory. He also picked up the idea from Wilhelm Dilthey about generations as the intermediary between âthe âexternalâ time of the calendar and the âinternalâ time of our mental livesâ (Ricoeur 1985/1990: 111). Thus, Mannheim argued that it was not only age that was significant but also the common generational experiences of people who were born at about the same time and shared similar experiences of the historical process during their formative years of youth. In the focus of this formative moment in youth, Mannheim follows Dilthey, who believed that the formative impressions gained in adolescence provided a âfund of relatively homogeneous philosophical, social, and cultural guidelinesâ (Jaeger 1985: 276). By focusing on this formative moment as being decisive for the formation of generations, Mannheim also departs from the more mechanistic ideas of Ortega y Gasset, who points to the repetitive nature of generational exchanges in continuous cycles of equal duration. This âpulse-rate hypothesisâ of generations has had difficulty in gaining ground, although some of the followers of Ortega y Gasset, such as JuliĂĄn MarĂas (1961/1970), have carried on the legacy of the Spanish philosopher. Despite some qualifications of Ortega y Gassetâs periodisation, for example adjusting the pulse-rate to fifteen years instead of thirty years, MarĂas had difficulties in providing empirical evidence to back this thesis up (Jaeger 1985).
In theorising the basic structure of generations, Mannheim made a major distinction between generation as âlocationâ and as âactualityâ. Making analogies with the class position of certain groups in society, Mannheim defined generation as âthe certain âlocationâ (Lagerung) certain individuals hold in the economic and power structure of a given societyâ (Mannheim 1928/1952: 289). The basis for the generational location is naturally year of birth: all people born in the same year, for example, have a âcommon location in the historical dimension of the social processâ (p. 290).
However, location in time is not enough; it would reduce a generation to an age cohort (cf. Burnett 2010: 48), and thus Mannheim instead introduced the concept of generation as actuality. Actuality should be seen as something more than generation as potentiality, and Mannheim develops his concept of generation as actuality against the background of Aristotleâs (1997) concept of entelechy, a term that in Aristotle refers to the realisation of something that previously existed as potentiality, the âinner aimâ of something. Mannheim picked up the concept of entelechy from German art historian Wilhelm Pinder (1926), who had used it to understand different artistic epochs (Mannheim 1928/1952: 283ff ).
Generation as actuality first appears when individuals who occupy the same historical location share the same experiences and are also realised as a generation for themselves (as opposed to in themselves). These experiences can naturally vary. Some are triggered by dramatic historical-political transformations such as the demise of the Soviet Union and the sudden independent status of countries formerly under Soviet rule (Opermann 2014, Kalmus et al. 2013, Siibak and Tamme 2013). Others might be triggered by media use and cultural experiences, such as cinemagoing (Jernudd 2013) or shared, historically situated music preferences (SuËna 2013). But they all create a certain âwe-senseâ (Wir-Schicht) among the members of the group (Bude 1997, cf. Corsten 1999).
Furthermore, not everyone who shares the same experience of large and evolving societal events (revolutions, war, famine etc.) will react to these events in exactly the same way. When faced with a specific phenomenon, individuals can âwork up the material of their common experiences in different specific waysâ, which will result in separate âgeneration unitsâ (Mannheim 1928/1952: 304). These generation units can be seen as ways of relating to the same phenomena, and as such make up âan identity of responsesâ to the problems at hand (p. 306). Such a compromise includes responses from the social subjects confronted with them. And even if the responses to the events could vary, thus producing generational units that related the historical unfolding in collective â but separate â ways, the role of the event itself was paramount. However, it can be argued that there are also less spectacular, more personal and more mundane, even banal, moments which are formative. Many people can probably recall the moment at which they discovered a cherished artist, film star, or novel that would make a lasting imprint on their lives. For some, it might be Elvis (or Tommy Steele), the Spice Girls or Lady Gaga, for others it might be Marlon Brando, James Dean, Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, and for still others this moment might have occurred when they read The Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Rings or The Twilight Saga. These are smaller, much more personal events that might not be as revolutionary in character, but which nonetheless have an individual impact that can be revived and returned to later in life. Of course, there is a collective dimension even to these moments: the rise and popularity of artists and the fan cultures surrounding them indeed occur at a specific point in historical time. But they are felt more personally, according to the principle that idols, fan objects and media texts more generally create a specific personal bond between the admirer and the cherished object.
One component in the generational media experience is thus the intimate relationship that develops with media personalities and content from oneâs formative youth period. This especially concerns music genres and stars. However, people also develop specific, sometimes passionate, relationships with reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tape, comics, and other now dead or near-dead media forms.
Of utmost importance for the formation of such passionate generational experiences is the phenomenon Mannheim calls âfresh contactâ, that is, that moment at which an individual is confronted with a novelty of some sort (Mannheim 1928/1952: 293ff ). Generational experience is formed through fresh contact, and these experiences are held to impact on all later experience. To Mannheim, the most indelible formative moments were related to historical events, disasters, wars, crises of different sorts, and so on: national traumatic moments such as the murder of the Prime Minister (Olof Palme) or the President (John F. Kennedy), or disasters such as the tsunami on Boxing Day 2006, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 or its counterpart in Fukushima in 2011, the German invasion of Poland in 1939, as well as more positive historical events such as the end of the Second World War in 1945, the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and so on.
In line with Mannheimâs insistence on the importance of fresh contact, it follows that the media technologies and content that one encounters during the formative years of youth can be expected to be the media that will also form all subsequent media experiences (which is why most people, as adults, develop a certain scepticism towards novelties). This is how media generations are thought to develop, with common experiences being connected to specific media technologies or media content (Gumpert & Cathcart 1985). The generation who grew up with the cinema at the birth of the film medium will bring with them this special experience of film as it was phenomenologically perceived at that moment, in that very technological, cultural and social setting. This will bring together persons with similar experiences (and will separate them from those who have not shared these experiences, thus producing generation gaps). This process of bringing together people with the same experiences and shaping their self-perception and âwe-senseâ could, in line with Andra Siibak and Nicoletta Vittadini, be called âgenerationingâ: that is, âthe result of the interaction between contextual and fixed traits (such as historical, cultural and social events and experiences) and a cultural process of identity formation developed over time (including narratives, performances and rituals)â (Siibak & Vittadini 2012: 3, see also Siibak et al. 2014).
To Gumpert and Cathcart, such processes of generationing became increasingly relevant for the formation of generations in the twentieth century.
Prior to the late nineteenth century media explosion, generations came and went, all exposed to and acquiring the same print grammar. Thus media seemed to have little bearing on human time relationships. Though we still think of people as related, or separated in chronological generation time, the rapid advent of new media and the acquisition of new media grammars implies new alignments, shorter and more diverse than those based on generations.
(Gumpert & Cathcart 1985: 31)
Gumpert and Cathcart (1985) thus speculated that âmedia generationsâ would be more important than what they called âchronological generationsâ (p. 33). They acknowledged that this was not based in any empirical evidence but was an assumption based on the background of historical research that had pointed to the consequences of the invention of handwriting and the development of chirographic cultures (Ong 1967), print (McLuhan 1964) and photography (Sontag 1977). Marshall McLuhan (1964), for example, famously argued via his most famous dictum âthe medium is the messageâ that the full consequence of the media was that technology (and here he drew more than just a little on the historian of technology, Lewis Mumford [1934/1963, 1967]) was âaltering the desired form of experienceâ, as James Carey (1981: 166) has pointed out.
To Mannheim, âfresh contactâ was a relative concept, and did not only concern âarrivingâ phenomena. As individuals come of age, they will encounter many different phenomena that have preceded them. These artefacts might not be ânewâ to older people, but to the young person they are; and a young person will approach them from their own vantage point, which in many cases will differ from, for example, the vantage point from which their parentsâ generation approached them. This is, in fact, one of the main dynamics of change in Mannheimâs theory (and thus separates it from perspectives that emphasise functionalist explanation, such as Eisenstadt 1956). Since there is a âcontinuous emergence of new participants in the cultural processâ, there will be a constant flow of ânew age groupsâ, who âcome into contact anew with the accumulated heritageâ produced by their predecessors (Mannheim 1928/1952: 293). This is not dissimilar to the historical materialism of Marx when he holds that âMen make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the pastâ (Marx 1852/1995). Mannheim and Marx thus share an interest in explaining historical change, although their main foci for why this happens differ.
Fresh contact is thus always related to previous experience, and for those lacking in experience each fresh contact appears as a novelty. This is also why expressions like ânew mediaâ are relative (if not outright nonsensical), because what is new for one generation is not new for another, older generation. For the very young child all media are new, and it is only as adults that we can distinguish between the new and the old: that is, because we have lived long enough to have seen new media appear in addition to the old media that we were used to. For the toddler, the newspaper and the book are media technologies that are just as new as smartphones and tablet computers. Fresh contact, then, always occurs in a historically specific context in which the encounter between an individual subject and a medium (or its content) takes place.
Indeed, all media have been new at one point in history (Marvin 1988). Today we think of the video as an outdated medium, but there was a time when this was a radically new medium that introduced new ways for viewers to relate to television, for example through timeshifting (Cubitt 1991), but also to film. This was naturally coupled with national variations. In Sweden, with its long-standing tradition of cinema censorship, a wide repertoire of action and horror films with extremely violent representations became accessible. And of course the very young were those who were the early adopters, which was revealed in the fact that families with small children were among the groups in which access was highest (Forsman & Bolin 1997). However, some young people were more active than others; Bolin (1997) analysed a group of young male video enthusiasts from a perspective of generational identity â a group of young men who also converted their consumption into textual production of fanzines and amateur video film-making.
As young people are lacking in experience compared to older people, fresh contacts will have a deeper impact on the young than on the old, and â[a]ll later experiences then tend to receive their meaning from this original set, whether they appear as that setâs verification and fulfilment or as its negation and antithesisâ (Mannheim 1928/1952: 298). Experience, then, appears in the form of a âdialectical articulation, which is potentially present whenever we act, think or feelâ (p. 298). Furthermore, the individual is most receptive in relation to phenomena that he or she is confronted with around the age of 17 years, give or take a few years, according to Mannheim â who, just like Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart (1985), refers to research on the formation of language in an individual, of which it is said that the spoken dialect seldom changes after the age of 25 (Mannheim 1928/1952: 300).
Gumpert and Cathcart argue that how we relate to new and old media is parallel to how we relate to our native language, as opposed to those languages that we might learn later in life. Thus, they stress the tools we have for interpreting the world around us, and the tools we have to aid us when we seek to represent this world for others. In this sense, Gumpert and Cathcart also argue that the media have their own grammar, which needs to be learnt and incorporated. Following Gumpert and Cathcart, each new medium that an individual is confronted with is read through the grammar of what could be termed our ânative mediaâ:
Even when a person learns several spoken/written languages in a lifetime, the person will generally tend to interact with the world through the bias of the native language. It is our position that the early acquisition of a particular media consciousness continues to shape peoplesâ world view even though later they acquire literacy in new media. ⌠For example, those born into the age of radio perceive the world differently from those born into the age of television.
(Gumpert & Cathcart 1985: 29)
This means that one might expect a certain homology in, for example, the way that 16- to 22-year-olds relate to a certain media technology and its dominant uses, and that they should bring these relations with them as they grow older.
As Mannheim points to social and cultural factors as important in the formation of the generational experience, his generation theory resembles other theories that have tried to grasp the relation between the individual and society. There are also striking similarities between Mannheimâs concept of entelechy â that is, the âstratified consciousnessâ and the âsimilarity of locationâ he finds as the common denominator for the gene...
