Interfaces: Generational Labels

The concept of nomenclature as interface is not a new one.  There is an old saying to the effect that to name a thing is to control  that thing.  In changing the name of an object, person, or concept, you can in fact change the perception of that object.

For example, very few people ever wanted to eat the lowly (literally; it's a bottom-feeder) toothfish, and with good reason: it is one ugly sumbitch.  Toothfishes look like a slime-covered reject from the Jim Henson Creature Workshop and come in a variety of colors ranging from black to lighter black.  Not only that, but their name is grammatically problematic.  What is the plural of a toothfish?  Toothfishes?  Teethfish?  Toothenfishen?  Feh.

However, fishermen kept catching the damn things and having to throw them back.  So the Toothfish Marketing Board, or another entity whose name I did not just now make up, decided that the easiest possible thing to do was to stop trolling the bottom of the water and come up with new and less-invasive ways of catching the fish that they really wanted.

I'm kidding, of course.  The marketing board just changed the name of the toothfish to the "Chilean Sea Bass."  Have you ever eaten Chilean Sea Bass?  I have.  Did you pay a lot for it?  I did.  Do yourself a favor and Google an image of the toothfish.  Yum.

Observe now as I circle around back towards some sort of a point.  If something so simple as a name change can convince people that a hideous toothfish is in reality a gourmet treat, what then are we to make of generational labels, those names slapped on us by...

...By whom, exactly?  Who establishes the criteria and labeling of generations?  Is there a Generation Labeling Authority that issues position papers and directives regarding these things?  Is there someone with a master calendar somewhere, carefully guarded and controlled, assigning labels to every American (these days, every Westerner) as they are born?  Who decides what the generations are and when they begin and end?

Well, you won't be surprised to discover that it was originally advertising and marketing executives in the 1950s and 1960s, hoping to tap into the disposable income of the postwar "baby boom" generation.  Granted, there had been some advertising directed at children prior to the war, but most of it had been of the gee-whillikers-fellers-lookit-this-swell-bike-I-got-from-selling-Grit-variety.  In other words, it wasn't until after the war that selling to kids ut res ipsa became a thing.  Before that, advertising and marketing to kids was literally a nickel-and-dime business.

Here's where we get into marketing theory a little bit.  In order to sell to a group, the obvious first order of business is to have a group.  Now, it's pretty easy to sell to some groups.  The elderly are easy as hell to market to, for example.  They have a shared set of general physical attributes, behaviors, and emotional triggers that can be broadly manipulated with a simple set of symbolic appeals to pathos, as expressed in the simple and perfect advertising line: "I've fallen and I can't get up."  This simple strategy works well with the elderly, who grew up in a "less complicated time," rife with subtle class distinctions, racial discrimination both great and small, heavily controlled media and limited information dissemination, sexual repression, gender inequality, outmoded concepts of science, little to no understanding of educational theory, monetary and banking systems that created wild swings in the economy, religious dominance, multiple wars, and polio.  ("Less complicated," my ass.)

The strange bit is that the baby boomers are now well and truly getting into that elderly group, and advertisers are having a rough time figuring out how to deal with them.  I have two older brothers who are both retired.  How do you sell Lotrimin to guys who still have ticket stubs from seeing It's A Beautiful Day at the Paramount in 1969?  These new old people are problematic.  Do we sell them as physically active?  Are they (gasp) sexually active?  Do they go hiking and jump out of airplanes and go surfing, or do they sit at home and shout at Fox News like the other old people did?

The answer lies in that marketing theory stuff that I was talking about a few paragraphs back and that you thought I forgot.  The key to these groups is the key to all magic: naming a thing defines the thing.  Once you have given a name to a group, the person or persons doing the naming has a certain measure of control over that group.  Just ask any internet fanbase that has ever existed.  If you are a Doctor Who fan, or a Trekkie, or a Marvel fan, or a Legophile, or an orchid enthusiast, or a breeder of exotic antelopes, there is a group somewhere that decides on your behalf: in or out.  Someone, somewhere, is the gatekeeper, and decides who gets to be in the group and who goes.  The group can be very small.  There have been, to the best of my knowledge, five humans who were members of XTC, at various times.  The group can be very large.  The VFW has about 1.2 million members as of 2016.  The criteria can be as arcane as you like.  Prairie Prince played drums on three or four XTC albums, but he's not a member of the band.  I'm a veteran, but I can't join the VFW because I wasn't lucky enough to get shot at overseas.

If there's a group, then there's someone minding the door.  If you're a marketing group or advertising consortium, the best thing you can do is create a group of your own, and make it really attractive.  Are you a baby boomer?  Then you should like the Beach Boys and feel bad that you didn't make to Woodstock and have some guilt about making it home alive from Vietnam when all those other guys didn't.  You should also have an affinity for Volkswagens, Whole Foods, NPR, craft beer, granola, Greek yogurt, and higher-end domestic red wines and Rieslings.  If you're a Gen-Xer, you like skateboards, tattoos, Snapple, green tea, Subarus, and you tell everyone that you saw Weezer on their first tour at a small bar near your college but really you saw them at a festival around the time Maladroit came out when Rivers was being all weird.  If you're a Millennial, who cares what you like because you don't have any money.  We guess that you like eating at Panda Express or Chipotle or maybe Panera Bread if you're feeling posh.

A label is more than just an easy way to name something or someone.  It is a contractual interface.  It wasn't created by the guys who invented "Keeping up with the Joneses," but they certainly put a keen edge on it.  When you agree to be labeled, you tacitly agree to conform to a certain set of expectations and boundaries.  You wanna be part of our group?  You buy these products, you share these tastes, you sing from this hymnal.  Calling someone a Boomer, or an Xer, or a Millennial, might seem, on the surface, to simply assign a age range to a person.

What it really does is diminish them, in a Huxleyan classification system that reduces all of a person's unique attributes, qualifications, and experiences to a minima that serves no other purpose than to catalog their habits of consumption.

But then, what do I know: I'm a Taurus.