Innocence corrupted...again

This summer brought us a clever ad for a wireless company showing an eager mom and dad humiliating their kids in public: mom posting way too many "I love you" messages on the daughter's Facebook page; dad posting meaningless tweets from his mobile phone. It resonates with all of us, of course, because of what we have all experienced in the last two years. Young people, who, as early adopters, used to own social networking spaces, now have to share them with their later-adopting but relentlessly intrusive elders. Social networking sites on the Internet, including MySpace, Facebook, and more recently Twitter, used to be the special province of the under-25 set, and what the kids shared with each other was, they believed, a free space, sheltered from the prying and supervising eyes of parents. Now that we have invaded the space, young people, at least the ones I talk to, feel a sense of loss: their thing, their adult-less community, where they could be free with each other without danger, without predation, and without censure, is lost forever. We, the adults, couldn't stand being left out of their community, but what they valued about it was precisely that we were left out.

Sound familiar?

I was thinking of how this particular complaint resonates with the boomer generation of which I am a part. I recently finished the wonderful new Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice, which is set in Los Angeles during the days of the Charles Manson murder trial in 1970. Pynchon gets it all just right: our feelings about the love thing, the dope thing, the music thing, the anti-capitalist thing, all of which were our psychic reality for a little while. Hippie freaks really believed themselves to be a special, more evolved community who never exploited each other, who shared love and dope and everything else with a glorious innocence that our parents- because they were not freaks- could never understand. And, so the myth goes, because they could not understand it, they took it over, and spoiled it. They spied on, co-opted, criminalized, commodified, and finally brought the heel of the police state down on it. And we were kicked out of our self-created Eden.

Sure, it's a myth. But it resonates deeply with people of a certain age. The myth of the lost parent-free (and, therefore, in some way, reality-free) paradise has real power. Adolescents always know that the world they create with their peers has to be superior to the world their parents live in...they just know it. The irony, of course, is that we have this in common with our children (or in some cases grandchildren): we screwed up their paradise, just like our parents screwed up ours. Who cares if it is all a fantasy? I mean, in real reality, neither the pre-boomer-invasion Internet nor the Summer of Love were really all that perfect. But psychic reality is usually more real than real reality. And in psychic reality, we have one big thing in common: we got screwed.