Some older people will marvel at how “Gen Y” people prefer to learn about current events from Stephen Colbert and why a video like The Great Schlep can speak more immediately to them than say, the BBC news or local political debates. I suppose they didn’t grow up in an age where you are told to distrust everything everyone tells you, but to buy all their products and services anyways. We’ve come a long way from the No Logo days. Being anti-evil-corporation didn’t seem to get us anywhere except more appropriated. (From the Capitalism & Hegemony handbook, “If you can’t beat em, brand em.”) It seems the only way to be heard in a consumerist society is to be a customer, and then you’re always right!*

Is it so surprising then, that Canadian youth don’t take traditional sources of authority or traditional institutions “seriously”? And if everything is such a joke, and everything is for sale, why not turn to information sources that are completely farcical to begin with? And while other mediums can produce materials that reflect this ethos (check out The Totally Untrue History Of…), what better place to mock The Author and The Truth or even The Facts than the internet?

(from Bob Staake)

The continentalists wrote about the death of the author, but perhaps not quite like this. Globalized generations are running out of spaces to believe in; God has been dead for ages, and the nation state is faltering. What has previous generations left for mainstream culture? We’ll take what we can get. I can always count on my next online distraction and retail therapy. In lolcats and branding we consume. There’s no post after postmodern and there’s nothing to take seriously anymore. You’ll never be trustworthy but you can at least be funny.

* And people wonder why Gen Y is so uppity in the workplace… This is the generation that was told to buy their career through rising tuition fees. Of course they’re so entitled; the education system has made them customers instead of scholars.