One of my colleagues went to Woodstock and another lived in Haight-Ashbury in 1969. While they’ve cut their hair since, they’re obviously baby boomers, and they sometimes tell me stories about protesting the Vietnam War, smuggling dope, and seeing Bob Dylan in concert. The strange thing is that I’m supposedly a baby boomer, since I was born in December 1958, but their stories recount a distant world. I only vaguely remember Vietnam on the news, have no memory of JFK, and find Bob Dylan grating. The events that made an impression on me were the Watergate hearings, stagflation, and the Carter and Reagan presidencies. Our music was different, too—OK, let’s forget Journey, but in our early 20s, we raised our lighters to some remarkable bands, like U2, the Cure, and, born in my year, Prince and Madonna.
According to standard accounts, the boomer generation encompasses those born in the long span between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s. But those born in the later 1950s through the early 1960s, like Barack Obama (b. 1961), have a different sensibility than those like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (both b. 1946). They came of age after the 60s. The cultural commentator and marketing consultant Jonathan Pontell has named them Generation Jones.
Pontell defines Jonesers as those born from 1954 to 1965, distinguishing them from boomers proper, born from 1942 to 1953, as well as from Generation X, born from 1966 to the late 1970s. Vietnam is a key coordinate: 1954 was the first birth year of those who came of age as the war was ending and who didn’t have to serve.
“We fill the space between Woodstock and Lollapalooza, between ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ and ‘Just say no,’ and between Dylan going electric and Nirvana going unplugged,” Pontell declares. With an eye to marketing data as well as culture, he argues that “generational identification is particularly compelling.” Obama himself remarked, “I identify with this generation between the baby boomers and Generation X. My mother was a baby boomer, and I’m part of Generation Jones.”
One reason Pontell calls the group “Jones” is because of its relative anonymity, particularly compared with boomers proper, who have gotten all the attention. A second reason is that it is characterized by a yearning (as in “jonesing”), a feeling that they missed out, arriving after the mythic flourishing of the 60s (indeed, boomers are often simply denoted as “the 60s generation”). A third reason is its sense of irony (think Seinfeld, b. 1954), more world-wise than the idealistic boomers, tongue-in-cheek about its generic name.
Though not yet in common parlance, Generation Jones has had a good deal of traction in marketing, particularly since it encompasses some 50 million Americans. For instance, an IBM Global Business Services report notes that Jonesers began the turn to consumption, take technology for granted, and are more willing than boomers to “co-create” new products. They came of age with the Apple Macintosh.
It has also become established as a political demographic, defining a new cohort of European politicians such as Angela Merkel (b. 1954) and Nicolas Sarkozy (b. 1955), as well as those in the United States, among them many of Obama’s advisers (for example, Arne Duncan, b. 1964) and opponents (Sarah Palin, b. 1964). That suggests one reason for Romney’s (b. 1947) lack of traction in the recent election: He seemed outdated, harking back to the halcyon 50s. But like Obama, Jonesers are less radical politically than boomers, more pragmatic, and more traditional. Coming of age with Reagan in office, they tack slightly conservative.
Moreover, Generation Jones helps characterize aspects of contemporary culture. For example, it lends definition to a wave of American novelists who have taken center stage since the mid-1980s, first with Jay McInerney, Lorrie Moore, and Bret Easton Ellis, and then Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Chang-rae Lee, and Jennifer Egan. In many instances, these writers return to realism, rather than the wild postmodern imagination of fiction in the 1960s and 70s.
In academic precincts, it helps place contemporary critics, such as Lauren Berlant, Michael Bérubé, Judith (Jack) Halberstam, and Andrew Ross, among others, who have become prominent since the 1990s. They form the “posttheory generation,” with less allegiance to one theoretical position than their predecessors had and more concern with the public influence of criticism.
The question of generations also speaks to the changing demographics of higher education, as Jonesers have become a major faculty bloc and begun to fill deanships, presidencies, and other key administrative positions. Less positively, Jonesers were the first generation to encounter the slide to casualized labor. Academic jobs started shrinking in the 1970s, so boomers didn’t always have it easy. But they constitute the last cohort that entered higher education with largely full-time, tenure-stream positions. Subsequent generations have experienced a progressively more strapped labor situation, marked by the breakup of what educational theorists call “the intergenerational compact.” Particularly after World War II, older generations of Americans provided generous public support for the higher education of those behind them. Since around 1980, that support has become more parsimonious, so each generation has seen tighter conditions, paying more of its own way with higher tuition, larger student debt, and iffier jobs.
Generations can be a fuzzy concept, like the zeitgeist. But while popular invocations often resort to rote generalizations and mechanical models, a good deal of sociological work has examined the formative effects of historical events and specific cultural changes on age cohorts. Think, for instance, of those who grew up during the Great Depression, who have trouble throwing anything away, are reluctant to spend money, and pay cash, while their boomer children are comparative spendthrifts, on credit no less.
A sociological touchstone is Karl Mannheim’s 1923 essay “The Problem of Generations,” which defines a generation as individuals who share not just a certain age but “a common location in the social and historical process … predisposing them for a certain characteristic mode of thought and experience, and a characteristic type of historically relevant action.” Of course not every member of a generation exhibits the same characteristics, but Mannheim argued that generations operate in a way similar to class. People might not be conscious of class or act the same way as others in their class, but it is still a social fact that accounts for social differences.
The popular writers William Strauss and Neil Howe discern a generational cycle occurring about every 20 years throughout American history. (Thus they labeled Generation X the “13th Gen” in a book so titled.) However, I think that generations vary more than that and have become more pronounced over the past century, for a few reasons. The French historian and social thinker Annie Kriegel once argued in an article in the journal Daedalus that generations have more influence now because of the rise in life expectancy. With high mortality rates, previous generations were not as pronounced as they are now, as we move through life stages in largely intact cohorts.
Another factor is the establishment of mass public education, which, the German sociologist Michael Corsten observes, “institutionalizes the life course, which includes standardized periods of transition” and makes “adolescence a socially defined stage.” If we consider that only about one of 10 Americans attended high school in 1900, and that more than nine in 10 did by the 1970s (with about three-quarters graduating), our schooling works to create contemporary generations, formalizing the development of one’s views in one’s cohort outside the family.
A third factor is the rise of mass consumer culture. In a consumer society dependent upon unrelenting innovation, our social groups are marked less by traditional and familial roles and more by our roles as shoppers. As the British social scientists June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner observe, after World War II “generational audiences appear to be as or more important than social class or ethnic divisions” in predicting patterns of consumption. Our students, for instance, might not even have watches, instead timing their lives according to their smartphones.
In a revealing chart, Pontell focuses especially on popular culture and consumer products to demarcate Generation Jones. If a signature song of the boomers was “Blowin’ in the Wind” (released in 1963) or “All You Need Is Love” (1967), Jonesers instead sang along with Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek in 1975 as the future of rock ’n’ roll) or, a decade later, Madonna’s “Material Girl” (1984). The music was less an anthem of rebellion than of the morning after or of longing (think Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”). And, as other sociologists have observed, boomers listened to their music on transistor radios, whereas the more tech-savvy Jonesers had the Walkman and cassettes—and Gen X the CD, millennials the iPod and other devices.
Boomers, as it’s often been noted, became the first generation weaned on TV. A quintessential show was Leave It to Beaver, which many little boomers watched in black and white from 1957 to 1963. A key show for Jonesers was The Brady Bunch (1969-74) or The Partridge Family (1970-74), portraying the new, blended family, in Technicolor, following upon the spike in divorces in the late 1960s and 70s.
With humor as well as perceptiveness, Pontell pinpoints a number of other shifts, for instance from IBM as a model company for the boomers, then Apple for Jonesers, and then Microsoft for Gen X—and one might add back to Apple for the millennials. Or the way, signature drugs moved from LSD to grass to Ecstasy. Or how the exemplary city moved from San Francisco to Austin to Seattle, and the symbolic political figure traveled from JFK to Jimmy Carter to Jesse Ventura.
Other commentators note that Jonesers have more respect than the polemical boomers for differing opinions, and are willing, like Obama, to work within the system rather than overthrow it. Not all observers see the shift as positively, however; they see Jones as an extension of the “me generation,” finding narcissism among its traits, although it’s undercut with ironic self-deprecation.
In my view, a key to explaining Generation Jones is the shift in political economy. It is not only the march of new products or popular culture but also the concrete conditions that shaped those who grew up in the 1960s—and in the 70s and 80s. Jones came of age during the ascension of neoliberalism in the late 1970s, which urged the privatization of public services. Its mantra rejected the expansive liberal welfare state that grew out of the general prosperity of the period after World War II, and that had defined the boomers and given them their sense of exceptionalism.
One marketing study holds that a key event for Jonesers was the oil shock of 1973, which pulled the economy into a trough after 30 years of growth. That caused a “debt imprint,” which conferred a less-heady vista than the boomers had. Instead of a world of seemingly endless prosperity, Jonesers encountered an economic obstacle course.
Jobs were also changing. If a signpost of the boomers was JFK’s Inaugural Address, on the good of public service, followed by Johnson’s Great Society, a signpost for Generation Jones was Reagan’s inaugural, stating that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” and breaking the air-traffic-controllers union in 1981. That marked the relative decline of wages for the working and middle classes. Jones was the first modern American generation for which a rising standard of living was no longer guaranteed.
As they entered the job market, Jonesers experienced the first turn to offshoring, downsizing, and casualization. Jobs with companies like IBM had previously carried a version of tenure and generous benefits, but the new model of employment shed such long-term guarantees.
In higher education, those changes have turned the majority of faculty members into a proletariat—lumped into part-time, temporary, or adjunct positions. Those entering academic jobs since the 1980s effectively experience a different university from the one that embraced their predecessors.
In Classical Sociology, Bryan S. Turner surmised: “As labour markets and life-styles have become more flexible and fragmented, it may be that generational experiences become markedly different … it may be that the material prosperity of older generations reinforces their sense of a separate identity from younger cohorts.” That probably accounts for why it took so long for senior faculty members to become aware of—not to mention to do something about—the job squeeze or student debt. They experienced a world of very different expectations and so had difficulty picturing the new reality.
Generation Jones has probably had its most far-reaching influence in fiction.
The 60s generation no doubt stamped the music we have heard since, but Generation Jones has probably had its most far-reaching influence in fiction. It began with those who burst on the scene in the 1980s, like Ellis, McInerney, and Moore, and solidified through the 1990s, with a wide pool of talent like Lee, Wallace, Michael Chabon, Rick Moody, Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, and Donna Tartt. It has dominated the scene in the past decade, with work by Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Franzen, and Jonathan Lethem, among many others.
Franzen’s (b. 1959) two big novels, The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010), portray his generation, the former depicting its struggle to gain a full adult hold, and the latter showing its members reaching their prime, taking major professional positions, reassessing their marriages, and dealing with their children leaving home. Likewise, Meg Wolitzer’s (b. 1959) The Interestings (2013) is a Jones tale, depicting the generation’s coming of age in the 1970s and its compromises and disappointments as the Jonesers age.
In keeping with the traits of Jones, this band of writers exhibits a new “sincerity,” as David Foster Wallace suggested in his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” instead of the more absurdist postmodern fiction that peaked in the 1960s and 70s. They tend to employ a more realist mode, often centering on the destabilized family and the damage it causes. Or they incorporate popular genres, not in parody as in postmodern fiction, but as a normal art form for those raised on color TV. And, while a good deal of fiction by boomers, such as Tim O’Brien and Bobbie Ann Mason, dwells on the scar of Vietnam, these writers largely abridge Vietnam and shift the main cultural tension to multiculturalism and the vicissitudes of assimilation.
For the cohort of critics gaining prominence since the 1990s, such as Amanda Anderson, Berlant, Bérubé, Marc Bousquet, Halberstam, Laura Kipnis, Amitava Kumar, Eric Lott, Christopher Newfield, Ross, and Michael Warner, the keyword is probably “public.” Rather than the theory guru, they gravitate toward the public intellectual. Instead of seeking a “revolution of the sign,” as it was sometimes put in the heyday of theory, they aim to renew the public sphere. Many of them have trade books, and they often write about the cultural politics of sexuality and liberal education.
Pursuits like literary theory grew in the rich loam of expanding universities, which bolstered even nonutilitarian fields like the humanities and encouraged speculative research. The public turn responds in some ways to contemporary pressures on higher education, particularly as it has lost its liberal mandate and been reconfigured as a privatized enterprise, with high tuition and squeezed labor, among other things.
A side effect of the shrinkage of full-fledged faculty jobs has been the graying of the professoriate. In 1969 one in three faculty members was 35 years old or younger, and only 17 percent were older than 50. Thirty years later, in 1998, only one in 12 was 35 or younger, and more than 51 percent were over 50. At the same time, those in tenure-stream positions have declined from 60 percent to less than 30 percent, so that those now entering academic work are far more likely to be off the tenure track than on it.
There has been no study of how this bears on particular age cohorts, but the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty suggests that casualization has had progressively more severe effects on each successive generation, starting with Jones. The faculty study of 1993 shows that there was a small but distinctive shift from 1987 to 1993, when those under 35 declined from 10.2 percent to 7.9 percent.
This of course does not pertain only to Jones. But it underscores how generational position adds another element to our understanding of identity—in our culture as well as in the brave new world of academe.
Jeffrey J. Williams is a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. His most recent book, edited with Heather Steffen, is The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics (Columbia University Press, 2012).
