What is this generation's identity?

You always here people complaining about how today's kids are media obsessed, despite the fact that us as a society have been media obsessed since the 1940's yeah I don't know about you but every argument I here against why this generation sucks could easily be transferred to any other generation, the music sucks? Yeah guess what, the 70's had a lot of shitty music as well, the big difference being the shitty stuff gets left behind in the 70's, only the good stuff carries over. Society & government are falling apart, no this is something that has been going on since...well, forever, but ever since the 1960's we've started to become more aware of this and started to fight back due to the boom in the media. Teenagers are obnoxious, yeah what else is new? Face it, a lot of these complaints aren't new details, you're just finally aware of them because society has become a lot more observant.

How is this any different from people looking at their phones?

The biggest deciding factor in this generation's identity is the media, we're becoming a lot more aware of everything happening in the world, we can travel to the middle of Central America without even leaving our homes, we can talk to people halfway around the world through a computer, and in more recent years, we're beginning to expose the corruption of the world that we've always suspected. If the government or police do something wrong then the world is going to know about it, if a cop beats an innocent person then that's on camera and once that gets uploaded to the internet it's never coming down. But that's really more of our society as a whole, I'm talking about this generation, the teens and young adults of the 2010's (okay we really need to think of a name for this decade). What is our identity?

Well we're the pioneers of the internet and have used it for entertainment, jobs, personal lives amongst all sorts, the idea of someone sitting at home in front of a camera and talking about their day doesn't sound like the type of thing one can do for a job, and yet, here it is, people have become celebrities through doing just that. Or if someone wanted to be a comedian but no major company or studio would give them a break, they can gather an audience through the internet. The possibilities for making a name for yourself are easier than ever; but then again, we're just the first generation to do this, what is something that we exclusively will have? What will people look back at and think of this culture.

Well the first thing would be fashion, things such as ugg boots, thrift shop clothes, spikey hair, belly button piercings, sure these things existed before hand but really, no one abused these things the same way our generation did. Also while it's hard to predict where we'll go in the future, there's also been a big change in what's considered "cool" and "hot". Just 10 or 20 years ago, the stereotypical hot guy would be the jock, the big tough guy that was hard as a rock, and while those people are still considered hot these days, they have some competition, nowadays what's often considered to be the hot guy is the sensitive guy, I mean still obviously really hot but the muscles aren't the big seller, guys that are more sensitive, focus more on their looks and are all round, less "masculine" than before. While for girls, again the thing before would be the super fashionable and popular girl, and again while they still are like that, these days the shy and introverted girls seem to be getting a lot more attention, and that's the big difference in this generation, suddenly being introverted and nerdy became cool.

Just look at how big things like Comic-Con or Doctor Who are these days, being a nerd is more popular now than it's ever been, before usually the stereotypical nerd was the unattractive introvert and was considered uncool, and again, those people still exist today but they're not necessarily the majority any more. Superheroes are the big movie seller, 50% of gamers are female, cosplay is a new form of modelling, hell I'm sure Doctor Who's fanbase is largely women nowadays. And while this has been an awesome development, though has had some backlash from "real nerds" it is a major change and I honestly think/hope it is here to stay.

But apart from that, this generation isn't really all that different, but that kinda is our identity, we realised that we're not different but we wanted to be, the fact that we're exposed to so much of the world it's become harder and harder to be unique or find your own thing, so everyone tries to be different and unique, whether it be liking obscure things or dressing in a strange way, now I know what you're thinking, I just described a hipster. Well...yes and no, you see a legit hipster is someone who is dressing up/acting like/liking something ironically, they don't actually enjoy what they're doing, they enjoy it ironically, this was considered the basic hipster description. But these days it is definitely more about not being ironic, but about being different, liking a band that no one else listens to, watching nothing but foreign films or anything that is different from what everyone else is doing. Because we don't want to be defined by our generation's identity, we want our own identity, which in turn, became this generation's identity.

-Danny