ISJ April 2013: Fostering criticality for the iGeneration

Lodewijk van Oord & Ken Corn

Abstract:

In 1991 Canadian writer Douglas Coupland both identified a generation and noted its most salient features in his novel entitled Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (Coupland, 1991). What Coupland recognised over 20 years ago was that the incipient growth of the new media led by the world wide web and the internet (amongst other things including ‘old technologies’ such as the prevalence of television and MTV videos) was changing the way the post-baby boom generation were engaging with the world, society and the self, often without clear sign-posts that would help them to navigate this Brave New World. Looking back on that novel and some of its prognoses about how this Generation X was being affected by that world into which they were born, it all seems rather quaint, though in many ways prescient.