The analogue generation’s lazy contempt for the digital generation.

No one would have thought it at the time, but the 90s looks like a golden age in this world of economic turmoil, double-dip recessions and Bieber-fever. Where jobs were once in abundance, now every vacancy is viciously fought for by a large group of savage but jaded recent graduates; it’s like the Hunger Games but with CVs instead of crossbows.

This has prompted debate about who’s to blame for recent graduates unable to get jobs. Is it the government for their “slash and burn” mentality in deficit reduction? Or employers unwilling to take risks on hiring younger staff? Perhaps it’s the bankers with their #yolo philosophy to market trading? Or is it the graduates themselves, myopic and feckless fools, who have dived head first into their History of Art Degree without thinking how it will actually help them get a job. A recent article by Sophie Heawood in the Independent lays the blame heavily on the lastgroup.

How Heawood probably views graduates

Heawood claims her patience has run out for unemployed graduates. Her conclusion is primarily because she is sick of young people using blogs to complain that they can’t get jobs and are “totes miffed” about it ( Heawood should be aware that this phrase is used far more by cultural commentators complaining about young people’s vocabulary than it is ever used by young people themselves). Seemingly, up until this point, she has been unaware that the primary purpose of blogging is so people can moan about something or other. Maybe next week she’ll write an article about how she’s run out of patience for sex because that there’s quite a lot of porn on the net.

There was particular reference to Heawood’s piece to an article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in the Guardian where she, with a good deal of self-awareness and humour, detailed the turbulent experiences of life after University. Heawood took this as a sign to comment that we are a bunch of spoilt, entitled, complaining brats who spent too much time with their heads in the clouds and not enough time watching the Young Ones (which is just one of many erroneous and patronising sweeping statements, especially because I remember watching reruns on BBC2 back in the 90s). We have also been poisoned by the self-involved hip-hip of Kanye West and Drake, instead of the entrepreneurial messages of Biggie Smalls. Apparently. 

Heawood's inspiration: Notorious B.I.G 

 

 

 But what she doesn’t seem to realise is that it’s not pity we’re after. Rather than sitting around and complaining about our position in life, we’re spending our days applying for job after job, doing countless unpaid internships and serving coffee in the meantime, just to meet the bills. How such an industrious and hard-working generation has got the label of unmotivated slobs is beyond me.

Maybe it’s a sense of intimidation. Generation X’s perpetual fear that the young, hard-working, more tech-savvy generation is going to overthrow them if they are given a chance in the work place. With many workplaces already irrevocably changed by the digital landscape, the “analogue generation” in charge are still fumbling in the dark as how to address issues caused by the switch over, all the time haemorrhaging money. Who better to find solutions to these modern enigmas than the generation who are more familiar with the digital landscape than that of print? The generation who treat smartphones as extra limbs and who grew up closer to the Internet than to their own parents?

These are the things that we offer. Far from being the useless bunch of feckless, mollycoddled idiots that popular media would have you believe, we’re a generation that is eager to work and are more than willing to if given the opportunity. We don’t want to be condemned to serve lattes to the previous generation who never gave us a chance in the work place.

If Haewood’s philosophy that hip-hop lyrics influence the motivations of a generation it’d be worth her remembering that the biggest selling hip-hop artist of our generation is Jay-Z; a serial entrepreneur who now rubs shoulders with the likes of Warren Buffet. And that’s a far better role model for the work place than Neil from the Young Ones.