The Kids Are All Right (It’s the Adults We Worry About)

The Class of 2016 can barely remember a time before SpongeBob SquarePants.

Apparently, Beloit College puts out something every year called the “Mindset List,” which is basically a 75-item run-down of the cultural touchstones of the newest crop of college freshmen. According to the college’s website, it was “originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references” (yes to the Huffington Post, no to point-and-shoot cameras) but “quickly became an internationally monitored catalog of the changing worldview of each new college generation.” I’m skeptical that this specific bunch of bullet points is truly “internationally monitored” — it crossed my radar on the Washington Monthly’s education blog, and it looks more like Yahoo News fodder than anything else — but giving Beloit the benefit of the doubt, the Mindset List is a pretty sad standard by which to judge today’s 18-year-olds.

Perhaps it’s fitting that a list developed to help graying professors better relate to their students reads like a dispatch from a senior citizens center at which crotchety residents cluster on the sun patio to complain about “young whippersnappers” and advise darkly against trusting anyone under 30. The pablum in this year’s Mindset List really could apply to anyone under 30; it does less to describe a particular generation or capture a moment in time than to offer sweeping generalizations that have been true for the last ten years and will probably still be true in another ten. I’m a good decade removed from the teenagers Beloit attempts to characterize, yet many of the 75 items are as true for me as they will be for college freshmen this year, next year and the year after that. Beloit’s provides a helpful archive of Mindset Lists dating back to 2002, but it’s hard to see why — other than the free publicity — it bothers with an annual production. Some of the bullet points are already so vague and outdated that the 18-year-olds of Y2K would have found them to be old-school. If the list is an attempt to open a window into the granular details of life as a college student in 2012, it fails miserably; the faculty it purports to educate are not going to learn much of anything new. If entry #55 — “Mr. Burns has replaced J.R.Ewing as the most shot-at man on American television” — isn’t already obvious to the average professor (“Dallas” seemed as distant and old-school as “I Love Lucy” even when I was a kid), I have little hope that a mere list will enlighten him.

Some other notable fails:

#3 The Biblical sources of terms such as “Forbidden Fruit,” “The writing on the wall,” “Good Samaritan,” and “The Promised Land” are unknown to most of them.

Ignorance of the Bible did not begin with the latest generation, and it certainly won’t end with it. Sixty percent of Americans can’t come up with even five of the Ten Commandments. Twelve percent of respondents to a Barna Research Group poll supposedly think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. (Or are they just being clever?) Adults have been bemoaning young people’s lack of knowledge of the classics since, well, classical times. Here’s Hesiod, in the 8th century B.C.: “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.” Why single out the Class of 2016 as the font of cultural illiteracy?

#16 Since they’ve been born, the United States has measured progress by a 2 percent jump in unemployment and a 16 cent rise in the price of a first class postage stamp.

Ironic, considering #17 could be, Their mothers still buy postage stamps, but they’ve never licked one themselves.

#22 The Real World has always stopped being polite and started getting real on MTV.

The Real World has been on TV since 1992 and stopped being cool around the time I began middle school. Today’s teenagers barely remember Paris Hilton’s sex tape, much less a time when reality TV was novel.

#28 Star Wars has always been just a film, not a defense strategy.

Reagan left office in 1989. If professors haven’t noticed this for the last twenty-three years, I hardly think they’re going to update their references for this one.

#35 Probably the most tribal generation in history, they despise being separated from contact with their similar-aged friends.

Now there’s a case of generational amnesia. Westside Story. Grease. American Graffiti. Teenagers are to groups what bacteria are to colonies. Always have been and always will be.

#50 L.L. Bean hunting shoes have always been known as just plain Bean Boots.

No one under 35 knows L.L. Bean hunting shoes as anything, because they’ve never worn or cared about L.L. Bean. Unless you’re teaching bow hunting or animal tracking, your students have not flipped through an L.L. Bean catalog since 1980.

The best item on the list is also the most unoriginal; it is lifted from an Internet meme done better by multiple people. Number 27: “Outdated icons with images of floppy discs for “save,” a telephone for “phone,” and a snail mail envelope for “mail” have oddly decorated their tablets and smart phone screens.”

This seems to be a rip-off of a much funnier list posted back in May on the “Computer Zen” blog of web developer Scott Hanselman: “The Floppy Disk Means Save, and 14 Other Old People Icons That Don’t Make Sense Anymore.”

Alongside this icon, Hanselman writes: “Save? Save where? You know, down there. Adding the Arrow to the 3.5″ floppy makes me smile. Is it pointing to under my desk?”

 

 

 

“Bookmarks: We used to use smaller flat dead trees to keep our place in between the dead trees we would read from so that we didn’t lose our page. No, books didn’t ‘keep our place when we turned them off.'”

 

 

 

On the Siri speech recognition icon: “If you don’t know who Johnny Carson is, how could you know that this is a old-style microphone?”

 

 

 

“I assume that the Voicemail icon is supposed to be evocative of reel to reel tapes but it always look like a container of 110 Film. I suspect my voicemail is no longer stored on spooled magnetic tape. No, you’ve never seen either of these before, young person. #getoffmylawn”

If the Mindset List suffers from being authored by a bunch of, uh, geezers, it’s fitting that some of the keenest insights into the classes of 2016 (and 2014, 2015 and so on) come from Buzzfeed, a kittens-and-celebrities website aimed squarely at youthful time-wasters. For a taste of the cultural milieu today’s 18-year-olds were raised in, the “37 Ways to Know You’re a 2000s Kid” slideshow has no equal. My generation’s counterpart — “25 Ways To Tell You’re a Kid of the ’90s” — makes for unparalleled nostalgia. Trapper Keepers? Check. AOL profile? Check. The clincher for me:

I had that white doggie notebook cover. And I loved it.

Beloit’s list may make middle-aged Ph.Ds feel ancient, but Buzzfeed does it for me. For capturing the cultural zeitgeist, it has no parallel. Ten minutes clicking through some of the site’s slideshows would do more for a clueless professor than any administration-approved Mindset List. The TV shows, music and catchphrases that define a “2000s kid” are a generational window. And “40 Things That Will Make You Feel Old” is enough to consign even me to a rocking chair. What shocked me the most (has it really been that long?!):

#34: Kids these days will have no idea what “rewinding” is.

 

 

 

 

#8: Macaulay Culkin is 30.

 

 

 

#20: The Rugrats’ ages today. [This one is particularly scary for a 27-year old.]

 

 

 

 

#38: The first commercial with the Taco Bell chihuahua aired 14 years ago. The chihuahua has been dead for 2 years.

 

 

 

Are your joints aching yet? Here’s a comforting thought, or perhaps a scary one: In fifty years, the Class of 2066 Mindset List will still be lamenting the ignorance of kids today. #21: They think SpongeBob SquarePants was George Washington’s favorite cartoon.

Godzilla Found in Times Square *

Looks scary, doesn’t he?

* Actually, it was a cockroach, but who’s going to read a story about roaches in New York? Even bedbugs are hardly newsworthy these days. But the headline got your attention, right?

That seems to be the goal of a recent Reuters piece headlined “Romney Gains Toehold in Silicon Valley.” The premise of the article seems to be that, while Obama was “the darling of the technology world” in 2008, he is facing headwinds in 2012. Mitt Romney “is making inroads to a key source of cash for Obama, who some tech leaders view as anti-business because of uncertainty that they blame on the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform and the healthcare overhaul.” Unfortunately, the reporter spends the rest of the article undermining the lede, demonstrating that a nice hook — the Fundraiser-in-Chief is being trounced in the money game! — doesn’t guarantee a substantial follow-up.

Pressed by the relentless 24-hour news cycle to churn out more content than ever, even venerable media outlets like Reuters are apt to turn mountains into molehills. Framing every political development as a make-or-break moment drives clicks and adds urgency to a routine horserace story. Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe — from “corporations are people” to “I’m not concerned about the very poor” — morphs from a slip of the tongue into an outright disaster, a revelation about the candidate’s plutocratic tendency that threatens to derail his campaign. Despite evidence that such breathless coverage barely moves the needle in polls and in fact reaches less than half of voters (SOURCE), news organizations continue to overplay their hands. They assume, perhaps correctly, that no one wants to read about Obama’s so-so monthly haul from the Zuckerberg crowd. But imply that Obama’s techie donors are deserting his socialist policies in droves, and suddenly you have a story that might float to the top of Google news.

In the hands of certain “journalists” — most of the folks at Fox News, anyone associated with one of Breitbart’s sites — the manufactured drama would not have been limited to the headline. Instead, the entire article would have been filled with derisive comments from Peter Thiel and distorted statistics purporting to demonstrate that the president is in the danger zone. Reuters, whatever its faults, still has integrity. Its lede may be overblown and undercut by facile reporting, but its journalists are at least honest enough to add caveats to their more stretched assertions. Indeed, they back off so many of the statements made so boldly in previous paragraphs that the reader starts to suffer from whiplash. Punching holes in the so-called logic behind the article’s Death in Silicon Valley premise is so easy that the piece reads like something from The Onion.

Let’s take Reuters’ dubious assertions one by one:

He lags behind his 2008 campaign in donations from workers at Internet, computer and telecom equipment powerhouses such as Google, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Cisco . . . . The Obama campaign has raised $1.44 million through May from employees of 15 top tech companies, as compared to $1.6 million donated by the same companies’ staff four years ago.

Four years ago, Obama was engaged in one of the most competitive (and expensive) Democratic primaries in history. Hillary Clinton didn’t officially concede the nomination until June; in May, the candidates were still furiously raising money to duke it out in individual states. Obviously, this year Obama is the uncontested Democratic nominee. Of course he’s not raking in as much money. In its increasingly frequent, plaintive fundraising e-mails to supporters, the Obama campaign has made much of the fact that all donations — not just those from tech employees — are down dramatically from comparative months in 2008. There’s nothing unique about the drop-off in money from Silicon Valley. The New York Times observes that “nearly every major industry,” has given less in 2012. “From Wall Street to Hollywood, from doctors and lawyers,” donors are reluctant to open their wallets without a high-profile primary battle. The upshot: “Mr. Obama’s campaign raised about $196 million through March, compared with $235 million at the same point in 2008.”

Romney, a former private equity executive, is making inroads to a key source of cash for Obama . . . . Romney has raised almost $340,000 during this election campaign from the 15 tech companies’ employees, far behind his opponent but already ahead of the roughly $240,000 that Republican presidential candidate John McCain picked up through May 2008.

Romney raises less than 25% of Obama’s haul from the tech world, and that qualifies as making inroads? That’s like saying Romney is making inroads with Jewish voters because he’s polling at 29% instead of 23%. Sure, it’s technically true, but it’s also such a marginal difference that only some serious hyping by the Fox News talking heads can turn it into a newsworthy “crisis” for Obama. Put another way, at my last job, I made about $20,000. If my salary had jumped to $28,000, I would have been thrilled. But to claim that my raise meant I was gaining on my supervisor — who pulled down a cool $130,000 a year — would have provoked laughter. However, those numbers are roughly proportional to Romney’s tech fundraising vis-a-vis McCain and Obama.

While the numbers are small, Romney did slip past his rival among one group that is vital to the tech world. He has raised $392,300 through April from venture capitalists, some $20,000 more than Obama, according to federal disclosures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

This nugget is not so surprising when you consider Romney has been billing himself as a venture capitalist for years, despite some serious questions, raised even by conservatives, as to whether Bain can really be characterized as a venture capital firm. (In in its earliest days, Bain indeed invested money in eventually successful start-ups like Staples, but the bulk of the company’s business and wealth were derived from private equity deals, in which Bain bought struggling companies with borrowed money and attempted to extract maximum profits before reselling those companies.) Is it such a shocker that venture capitalists are amenable to donating to someone they regard as a fellow venture capitalist? If Romney were raising boatloads of cash from a less likely group — say, former University of Chicago constitutional law professors — well, that might be significant.

“People creating jobs in Silicon Valley are very entrepreneurial, very much geared to be capitalists, and the current administration, frankly, is more of the socialist bent,” said Daniel Dumezich, a Chicago-based tax attorney and major Romney fundraiser.

Without even addressing the “socialist” accusation, which is lobbed with dismal regularity by the conservative community (really, ask all those left-wing proponents of single-payer health care how Obama is doing on the socialist front), the inclusion of this quotation is slightly bizarre. What does a tax attorney have to do with the tech world? Does Dumezich work for Facebook or Google? Who knows; the Reuters story doesn’t say. The job description — “a Chicago-based tax attorney” is priceless for another reason: Since when is Silicon Valley located in Illinois? Reuters has not only found a conspiracy theorist; it’s found a conspiracy theorist who lives 1800 miles from the tech capital of the U.S.

Federal financial disclosures show that together with his Super PAC (political action committee) allies, Romney has received thousands from Texas Pacific Group partner Dick Boyce, Cisco CEO John Chambers and Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman – who made a fortune as CEO of eBay during its big years of growth and who lost the 2010 California governor’s race.

Yes, Meg Whitman — the Republican candidate in the 2010 California governor’s race. When Jerry Brown starts throwing money at conservative super PACs, get back to me. That would be news.

Finally, more than halfway into the piece, we get the actual bottom line. This isn’t a case of burying the lede; it’s more akin to drilling an oil well at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and tossing the lede down the bore hole:

“There is no doubt that, in terms of money and votes, Silicon Valley will be Obama territory,” said Steve Westly, a venture capitalist and major Obama fundraiser in California.

To be clear, I’m not necessarily jumping on Reuters for tilting its coverage in favor of Romney. I don’t think that’s the issue here. Even if the tech world remains a reliable source of Democratic donations, the president has every reason to be worried about the money race. His campaign was out-raised in June by a nearly 2-to-1 margin ($105 million to $70 million), and the amount of cash flowing into conservative super PACs like American Crossroads and affiliated non-profits like Crossroads GPS is immense.

The real problem is that, by hyping every blip and bleep in the race, the news service contributes to the low-information, high-drama atmosphere that has permeated Election 2012 from the beginning of the Republican primaries. With so much noise, it’s no wonder that readers and viewers find it difficult to separate the important aspects of the campaign — say, what each candidate would actually do with four years in the Oval Office — from the hyberbole-infused distractions (Romney’s house has a car elevator! Obama ate dog!).

Reuters itself isn’t even the biggest offender. Picking up the story from the wires, CNBC slaps on an even more egregious headline: Is Mitt Romney the New Darling of Silicon Valley? Outrageous questions are used as click-bait by every news site out there (see: “Did a Tick Bite Really Bring Down JPMorgan?“), but isn’t the financial press supposed to target a savvy, educated audience? Of course, perhaps I should give the audience more credit. Even the most cursory reading of the article supplies an easy answer to CNBC’s inquiry. Is Mitt Romney the new darling of Silicon Valley? Uh, no. Is he “making inroads” into Obama’s Facebook/Twitter/Square territory? Not particularly.

Not for the first time, I echo economist Brad DeLong, whose blog tends to be more enlightening (though slightly more comma-challenged) than Reuters and CNBC put together: Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

Making the Past Present

“Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land” (NYT, 7/26/11)

“Spirits of the South Pole” (NYT Magazine, 7/21/11)

“A Whiff of History” (Boston Globe, 7/17/11)

Three recent articles delve into new ways of exploring history. None of them are exactly Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine, but once the stacks of books have been written about battle tactics and 18th-century politics, I suppose researchers start looking everywhere for new material. Those dissertations won’t write themselves, you know.

As part of its occasional “Humanities 2.0” series, the Times explains how digital mapping software — think Google Earth and GPS devices — helps historians recreate the minutiae of the past. Want to know exactly what General Lee could see as he surveyed the battlefield at Gettsyburg? It’s cliche, but yes, there’s an app for that. The new field is called “spatial humanities,” and it leverages technology to provide a new look at historical events in much the same way that some scientists are applying pattern recognition software and computerized authorship verification to quantify literary criticism. Some of the supposedly revolutionary uses of technology seem like things that could have been done by less flashy methods fifty years ago; indeed, one wonders if there is anything unique about the research beyond its pretty graphs, and if the embrace of technology is anything other than jumping on the iEverything bandwagon. By mapping the spread of witchcraft charges across Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials, historian Benjamin Ray noticed that ““It looked like a kind of epidemic, almost a disease.” The article goes on to say that, “after adding church affiliation to the map, he saw there was also a correlation between church membership and the accusers, which reflected a rift in the village over support for the minister.” There is nothing new about such a conclusion, and Ray hardly had to employ snappy mapping software to reach it. Disagreements over the ministry of Reverend Parris have long been implicated in the outbreak of witch hysteria in Salem Village.

Of even less practical import is the research detailed in a Boston Globe article entitled “A Whiff of History.” Reporter Courtney Humphries marvels that, “despite [scent’s] primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history.” We look at museum dioramas of wagon trains and listen to scratchy recordings of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, “but our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized.” True, but our ignorance of the way history smelled hardly constitutes a gaping hole in our knowledge of the past. Science has allowed perfumers to capture previously-ephemeral scents, but do we need to recreate the precise aroma of Sinclair Lewis’ hog factory to know that lots of pigs produce a big stink? Historians are replicating old perfumes based on written descriptions, much as brewers are attempting to recreate the taste of the whiskey left at the pole by Sir Ernest Shackleton. At least the whiskey enthusiasts, described in a recent article in the NYT Sunday Magazine, are up front about their desire to turn a profit. Science may be a nice side effect, but it’s hardly the motivation behind the fact that, “for $160 or so, collectors in America will shortly be able to buy, nestled in a little crate made in China to look authentically Scottish, not a rarity, exactly, but a replica of one.” By contrast, the scientists interviewed for the Boston Globe article speak of the historical significance of recreating an ancient Egyptian perfume or the stench of a Viking village. It’s a relief when one researcher, who is working on the Viking project, points out that a smell, even one engineered to match an ancient aroma, is nothing without context. “The smell of a Viking latrine may disgust us,” Humphries writes, “but it doesn’t tell us how the Vikings experienced it.” Furthermore, she continues, smells carry different connotations in different groups of people:

[F]or instance, wintergreen became popular in chewing gum and toothpaste in the United States after World War II, but to the British, the smell would have evoked sickness, since it was used in ointments to treat the wounds of soldiers. If we don’t understand these meanings, we’re just smelling the past as we would now – not as people did at the time.

It’s a caveat worth remembering. Bringing technology into the humanities department can produce interesting results, but “interesting” is not the same as “meaningful.” The best history teacher I ever had — the one who introduced me to Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine — was as computer-savvy as the average eighty-year-old. In class, we watched film strips, the kind that featured droning narration over a series of still pictures that advanced with a click-whirr sound of a projector straight out of the 1960s. There weren’t even dry-erase boards in the room; this was a man who preferred old-style chalk. And yet — without the aid of digital maps or Smell-o-Vision technology, that teacher could bring history to life because he understood that the past is not a foreign country: it is a slightly off-kilter version of today, a world that is nothing if not a dirty, confusing and ultimately fascinating story.