The Patronizing Pew Poll on the Millennial Generation

It is time, once again, for the Baffler blog to consider what other people consider about the millennials. What do they think? What unseen forces move these mysterious creatures?

The Baffler blog has previously considered various political appeals to the Millennial Generation, which is, by all accounts, a demographic of frivolous onesie pajama-clad gay hipster man-children who enjoy things like beer and parties and premarital sex and cellular telephones and computers—while also being poor. How will the Powers that Be make these Youngsters purchase health insurance? Or support Social Security cuts? The political pollsters demand answers, but the answers continue to elude them.

“The Millennials” today are loosely defined as people in their twenties and early thirties. You know who else were once people in their twenties and early thirties? Every other generation before this one. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that all living people older than the millennials have been in their twenties and early thirties at one point. And so, when researchers and pollsters compare millennials to older generations, it’s only useful to compare their engagement with institutions and trends that have been equally available to previous generations. Oddly, though, these types of questions are frequently lumped together with questions about millennials’ engagement with new, emerging technology and pop cultural movements—even though comparisons to older generations in these cases aren’t possible.

Let’s consider the newly released Pew poll regarding “Millennials in Adulthood.“

There is, in fact, some interesting information out there about young people and their relationship with institutions that have been around forever. And you know what’s been around forever? Religion! For instance, about three in ten (29 percent) millennials tell Pew that they are not associated with any religion. Political parties have also been around forever. Half of millennials say they consider themselves political independents (though they mostly support Democrats). “These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics,” Pew writes.

Millennials have also been keeping their distance from another core institution of society—marriage. Just 26% of this generation is married. When they were the age that Millennials are now, 36% of Generation X, 48% of Baby Boomers and 65% of the members of the Silent Generation [aged 68 to 85] were married. . . . Most unmarried Millennials (69%) say they would like to marry, but many, especially those with lower levels of income and education, lack what they deem to be a necessary prerequisite—a solid economic foundation.

So far, so good (if obvious) information. But then Pew gives us this crap about what they call “digital natives,” and that’s where things get . . . cute:

They are “digital natives”—the only generation for which these new technologies are not something they’ve had to adapt to. Not surprisingly, they are the most avid users. For example, 81% of Millennials are on Facebook, where their generation’s median friend count is 250, far higher than that of older age groups (these digital generation gaps have narrowed somewhat in recent years).

Millennials are also distinctive in how they place themselves at the center of self-created digital networks. Fully 55% have posted a “selfie” on a social media site; no other generation is nearly as inclined to do this. Indeed, in the new Pew Research survey, only about six-in-ten Boomers and about a third of Silents [Older Boomers, age 68-85] say they know what a “selfie” (a photo taken of oneself) is—though the term had acquired enough cachet to be declared the Oxford Dictionaries “word of the year” in 2013.

Well, it doesn’t hurt to have the data. But what valuable analysis can we glean from the fact that people born during a wave of new technology, trends, or phrases are more likely to be involved with or be aware of those new technology, trends, or phrases? Are they somehow different from other generations in this regard?

People who came of age during the creation of “digital networks” and “the Internet” are probably more likely to incorporate those tools into their daily lives than people who previously came of age. Likewise, people who came of age after the invention of television were more likely to accept television as a given than those who came of age before then. People who came of age when the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were rocking were more likely to accept rock ‘n’ roll into their lives than those who came before it—those who came before it who thought those crazy kids had HAIRCUTS LIKE GIRLS!

Today, the people who are still purchasing televisions and listening to re-mastered Beatles and Rolling Stones CDs on their car stereos are typically older, while the youngins are spending their time watching television shows on their computers and cell phones and listen to weird nihilistic electronic hip-hop or something. And in another few decades, people in their twenties and thirties will all be creepy robots who have “content” uploaded directly into their robot eyeballs, making fun of the old fogies who still use electronic hardware instead of being electronic hardware themselves. (They will also all be underwater, which will be a problem, but that’s another story.)

It would much more useful for pollsters like Pew to compare one generation’s level of engagement with the technologies and trends of its time to other generations’ levels of engagement with the equivalent technologies of their times. So why do they bother researching the generational awareness of the word “selfie”?

Everyone understands that “selfie” is a very dumb and superficial word. So maybe that’s reflective of the pollsters’ implicit bias in conducting these surveys: that “The Millennials” are a dumb and superficial generation. They’ve abandoned God and marriage to take idiotic photos of themselves. And that gets to the patronizing, infantilizing core of all commentary on, studies of, and political appeals to the mysterious Millennial generation.