Arthur Asa Berger (Auth.) - Cultural Perspectives On Millennials-Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

CULTURAL
PERSPECTIVES
ON MILLENNIALS
Arthur Asa Berger

Cultural Perspectives on Millennials
Arthur Asa Berger
Cultural Perspectives
on Millennials
Arthur Asa Berger
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, California, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-69684-3 ISBN 978-3-319-69685-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0
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In memory of my brother Jason Berger (1924–2010).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editor of the various MediaPost publications for
giving me permission to quote from their posts. The MediaPost articles
have been of great value to me not only in my work on Millennials but also
for my other works on marketing and American consumer culture. I also
made considerable use of material from eMarketer, whose editor also gave
me permission to use eMarketer material, from the Claritas corporation,
which supplied the chart on the sixty-six different kinds of Americans, and
from the work of a number of writers and scholars who have had impor-
tant things to say, in a distinctive manner, about Millennials or about top-
ics that help us understand Millennials better. There’s hardly a day that
goes by that I don’t receive email postings from some publication or indi-
vidual or group about this or that aspect of life for Millennials. I have
chosen to use postings that provide insights into the Millennial mind and
psyche, Millennial behavior, Millennial culture, and related concerns, rec-
ognizing that many people have something interesting to say about
Millennials. I begin each chapter with quotations, integrated into the
chapter, relevant to the topics being discussed. I have made minor modi-
fications to the quotations in terms of their paragraphing but have not
changed their contents. I use quotations because of the information they
provide and the distinctive way in which this content is written and
explained. Finally, I would like to thank my editor, Shaun Vigil, for his
support and encouragement.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 The Mind and Psyche of Millennials 11
3 A Sociology of Millennials 29
4 Myth and Millennials 39
5 Millennials and the Media 47
6 Marketing to Millennials 63
7 Millennials as Shoppers and Consumers 75
8 Postmodernism and Millennials 85
9 Politics and Millennials 101
ix
x Contents
10 Sexual Identity, Gender and the Millennials 113
11 Coda 119
References 127
Index 131
Fig. 3
Fig. 1
Fig. 2 Fig. 4
xi
About the Author
Arthur Asa Berger is professor emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic

Communication Arts at San Francisco State University, where he taught
between 1965 and 2003. He graduated in 1954 from the University of
Massachusetts, where he majored in literature and philosophy. He received
an MA in journalism and creative writing from the University of Iowa in
1956. He was drafted shortly after graduating and served in the US Army
in the Military District of Washington in Washington, D.C., where he was
a feature writer and speech writer in the District’s Public Information
Office. He also wrote about high school sports for the Washington Post on
weekend evenings while in the army.
Berger spent a year touring Europe after he got out of the Army and
then went to the University of Minnesota, where he received a Ph.D. in
American Studies in 1965. He wrote his dissertation on the comic strip
Li’l Abner. In 1963–1964, he had a Fulbright to Italy and taught at the
University of Milan. He spent a year as visiting professor at the Annenberg
School for Communication at the University of Southern California in
Los Angeles in 1984 and two months in the fall of 2007 as visiting profes-
sor at the School of Hotel and Tourism at the Hong Kong Polytechnic
University. He spent a month lecturing at Jinan University in Guangzhou
and also lectured at Tsinghua University in Beijing in Spring 2009. He
spent a month in 2012 as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Argentina, lec-
turing on semiotics and cultural criticism, a month in Minsk in 2014 and
three weeks lecturing on semiotics and media in Iran in 2015. He is the
author of more than one hundred articles and more than seventy books on
semiotics, media, popular culture, humor and tourism. Berger is married,
xiii
xiv ABOUT THE AUTHOR
has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Mill Valley, California.
He enjoys foreign travel and classical music. He can be reached by e-mail
at arthurasaberger@gmail.com.
His books have been translated in nine languages. A selected list of
these books follows.
Li’l Abner, 1970 (Twayne)

The Evangelical Hamburger, 1970 (MSS Publications)
Pop Culture, 1973 (Pflaum)
About Man, 1974 (Pflaum)
The Comic Stripped American, 1974 (Walker & Co., Penguin, Milano Libri)
The TV‑Guided American, 1975 (Walker & Co.)
Language in Thought and Action (in collaboration with S.I.Hayakawa), 1974,
1978 (HBJ)
Film in Society, 1978 (Transaction)
Television as an Instrument of Terror, 1978 (Transaction)
Media Analysis Techniques, 1982. Sixth edition in 2018.
Signs in Contemporary Culture, 1984 (Longman); 2nd edition, Sheffield, 1998.
Television in Society, l986 (Transaction)
Media USA, 1988, (Longman, 2nd Edition, 1991)
Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication, 1989.
Political Culture and Public Opinion, 1989 (Transaction)
Agitpop: Political Culture and Communication Theory, 1989 (Transaction)
Scripts: Writing for Radio and Television, 1990 (SAGE)
Media Research Techniques, 1991, 2nd edition 1998 (SAGE)
Reading Matter, 1992 (Transaction)
Popular Culture Genres, 1992 (SAGE)
An Anatomy of Humor, 1993 (Transaction)
Improving Writing Skills, 1993 (SAGE)
Blind Men & Elephants: Perspectives on Humor, 1995 (Transaction)
Cultural Criticism: A Primer of Key Concepts, 1995 (SAGE)
Essentials of Mass Communication Theory, 1995 (SAGE)
Manufacturing Desire: Media, Popular Culture & Everyday Life, 1996 (Transaction)
Narratives in Popular Culture, Media & Everyday Life, 1997 (SAGE)
The Genius of the Jewish Joke, 1997 (Jason Aronson)
Bloom’s Morning, 1997 (Westview/HarperCollins)
The Art of Comedy Writing, 1997 (Transaction)
Postmortem for a Postmodernist, 1997 (AltaMira)
The Postmodern Presence, 1998 (AltaMira)
Media & Communication Research Methods, 2000 (SAGE)
Ads, Fads & Consumer Culture, 2000 (Rowman & Littlefield)
Jewish Jesters, 2001 (Hampton Press)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
xv
The Mass Comm Murders: Five Media Theorists Self-Destruct, 2002 (Rowman &
Littlefield)
The Agent in the Agency, 2003 (Hampton Press)
The Portable Postmodernist, 2003 (AltaMira Press)
Durkheim is Dead: Sherlock Holmes is Introduced to Social Theory, 2003 (AltaMira
Press)
Media and Society, 2003 (Rowman & Littlefield)
Ocean Travel and Cruising, 2004 (Haworth)
Deconstructing Travel: A Cultural Perspective, 2004 (AltaMira Press)
Making Sense of Media: Key Texts in Media and Cultural Studies, 2004 (Blackwell)
Shop Till You Drop, 2004 (Rowman & Littlefield)
Vietnam Tourism, 2005 (Haworth)
Mistake in Identity: A Cultural Studies Murder Mystery, 2005 (AltaMira)
50 Ways to Understand Communication, 2006 (Rowman & Littlefield)
Thailand Tourism, 2008 (Haworth Hospitality and Tourism Press)
The Golden Triangle, 2008 (Transaction Books)
The Academic Writer’s Toolkit: A User’s Manual, 2008 (Left Coast Press)
What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, 2009 (Left Coast Press)
Tourism in Japan: An Ethno-Semiotic Analysis, 2010 (Channel View Publications)
The Cultural Theorist’s Book of Quotations, 2010 (Left Coast Press)
The Objects of Affection: Semiotics and Consumer Culture, 2010 (Palgrave Macmillan)
Understanding American Icons: An Introduction to Semiotics, 2012 (Left Coast Press)
Media, Myth and Society, 2012 (Palgrave Macmillan)
Theorizing Tourism, 2012 (Left Coast Press)
Bali Tourism, 2013 (Haworth)
Dictionary of Advertising and Marketing Concepts, 2013 (Left Coast Press)
Messages: An Introduction to Communication, 2015 (Left Coast Press)
Gizmos, or The Electronic Imperative, 2015 (Palgrave Macmillan)
Applied Discourse Analysis, 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan)
Marketing and American Consumer Culture, 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan)
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Emulator 3

Fig. 1.2 Time Spent with Social Media Among Generations 4
Fig. 1.3 Other Definitions of Generations 8
Fig. 2.1 Aristotle 12
Fig. 2.2 Sigmund Freud 13
Fig. 2.3 Iceberg Model of the Psyche 14
Fig. 2.4 Id, Ego and Superego in Psyche 15
Fig. 2.5 Oedipus Complex and Mothers 16
Fig. 2.6 Gustav Le Bon 18
Fig. 3.1 Clotaire Rapaille 31
Fig. 3.2 Claritas Typology 35
Fig. 5.1 Arthur Asa Berger’s Facebook Page 49
Fig. 5.2 US Internet Users Addicted to Digital Devices 58
Fig. 5.3 Smartphone Usage by Millennials 59
Fig. 5.4 Time Spent Online by Generations in US 61
Fig. 6.1 Consumer Spending by Generations 65
Fig. 6.2 Mary Douglas 70
Fig. 8.1 Jean-Francois Lyotard 86
Fig. 8.2 Fredric Jameson 91
Fig. 8.3 Millennials as Smartphone Users 99
Fig. 10.1 Judith Butler 114
Fig. 11.1 Robert Musil 120
Fig. 11.2 Michel Foucault 124
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Abstract This chapter describes Millennials and asks why they are of
interest and whether there are important differences between different
kinds of Millennials. It offers statistics about the amount of time Millennials
spend with social media as compared to other generations. It offers a num-
ber of lists describing the different generations and concludes that
Millennials are persons (in 2015) who are between eighteen and thirty-
four years of age. Then it discusses the notion that marketers see Millennials
as “trailblazers” who may be setting new courses for older generations to
follow. It concludes with statistics about Millennials gathered from various
sources.
Keywords Millennials • Generations • Marketing • Trendsetters
We begin with two quotations of interest to our concerns. The first quota-
tion deals with the number of Millennials (and there is some debate about
how many Millennials there are in the United States) and how Millennials
relate to other generations. This material comes from the Pew Research
Center Fact Tank.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A.A. Berger, Cultural Perspectives on Millennials,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_1
2 A.A. BERGER
Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living gen-
eration, according to population estimates released this month by the
U.S. Census Bureau. Millennials, whom we define as those ages 18–34 in
2015, now number 75.4 million, surpassing the 74.9 million Baby Boomers
(ages 51–69). And Generation X (ages 35–50 in 2015) is projected to pass
the Boomers in population by 2028. The Millennial generation continues
to grow as young immigrants expand its ranks. Boomers—whose genera-
tion was defined by the boom in U.S. births following World War II—are
older and their numbers shrinking as the number of deaths among them
exceeds the number of older immigrants arriving in the country.
Generations are analytical constructs, and developing a popular and expert
consensus on what marks the boundaries between one generation and the
next takes time. Pew Research Center has established that the oldest
“Millennial” was born in 1981. The Center continues to assess demo-
graphic, attitudinal and other evidence on habits and culture that will help
to establish when the youngest Millennial was born or even when a new
generation begins. To distill the implications of the census numbers for
generational heft, this analysis assumes that the youngest Millennial was
born in 1997. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/25/
mill
The second quotation deals with Millennials and marriage and the
reluctance Millennials seem to have about getting married. It is from Meg
Murphy’s “NowUKnow: Why Millennials Refuse to Get Married.”
Millennials are saying no to traditional marriage in record numbers … and

that’s not all. In Western culture in the late 18th century, marriage trans-
formed from an economic arrangement into a union based on love. Now
it may again be heading toward radical change. The median age at first
marriage is now 27 for women and 29 for men—up from 20 for women
and 23 for men in 1960. Today an unprecedented portion of millennials
will remain unmarried through age 40, a recent Urban Institute report
predicted. The marriage rate might drop to 70 percent—a figure well
below rates for boomers (91 percent), late boomers (87 percent) and Gen
Xers (82 percent). And declines might be even sharper if marriage rates
recover slowly, or not at all, from pre-recession levels, according to the
report. www.bentley.edu/impact/articles/nowuknow-why-millennials-
refuse-get-married
INTRODUCTION 3
Fig. 1.1 Emulator
As befits a book on Millennials, most of the sources used in this

book come from the Internet. Almost every day I receive one or more
articles from MediaPost or some other Internet publisher about
Millennials. And I’ve used Google to search for articles on certain top-
ics related to Millennials. Millennials spend a great deal of time on the
Internet so it is only fitting that I found much of the material in this
book there.
Who are the Millennials? Are they important? If so, why and in what
ways? How did Millennials get to be the way they are? What impact are
Millennials having on American culture and society? Are they more or less
all the same or are there important differences between male and female
Millennials, between the youngest and the oldest Millennials, between
American Millennials and Asian, African and European Millennials? Are
there significant differences between rich and poor Millennials, between
4 A.A. BERGER
African-American and Caucasian Millennials, and between Christian,

Jewish and Muslim Millennials? I will deal with many of these questions,
and others, in this book.
American Millennials represent something like two hundred billion
dollars in buying power a year and, on average, will check their phones
forty-three times a day. And twenty-five percent of them will never get
married. Does that tell us anything interesting about them?
An article by Rimma Kats, Rahul Chadra and Alisa McCarthy that
appeared in eMarketer (based on data from Nielsen) shows how the differ-
ent generations and different genders use smartphones (January 23,
2017):
It’s no surprise that millennials’ social media time is mainly spent on smart-
phones. But what about older folks—are Baby Boomers and older users
mostly mobile when it comes to social? Turns out, the answer is yes, if not
quite to the same extent.
Share of Time Spent with Social Media Among US

Social Media Users, by Device and Age, Q3 2016
% of total
18–34
78% 12% 10%
35–49
69% 18% 13%
50+
63% 25% 12%
Smartphone Desktop/laptop Tablet
Note: smartphone and tablet includes apps and web for Android and iOS
Source: Nielsen, “2016 Nielsen Social Media Report,” Jan 17, 2017
222226 www.eMarketer.com
Fig. 1.2 Time Spent with Social Media Among Generations

INTRODUCTION 5
According to Q3 2016 data from Nielsen, even those age 50 and up spend
the vast majority of their social media time on mobile devices. Three-
quarters of the older users spent most of their social media time on mobile—
that includes smartphone and tablet. Not surprisingly, the level was even
higher among Millennials. Fully 90% of their social media time occurred on
smartphones and tablets. By extension, younger social media users were less
likely than older generations to spend social media time on a PC. For exam-
ple, just 12% of 18–34-year-olds’ social media time takes place on a PC. The
study also pointed up a huge gap in social media use between men and
women. According to Nielsen, among women, 25% of their overall weekly
media time was spent using social media—around 6.5 hours. Among men,
19% of overall weekly time was spent on social, an average 4.2 hours.
https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Its-Not-Just-Millennials-That-Tap-
Mobile-Social/1015091
We see that there are differences in the amount of time the generations
spend with social media and how men and women access social media. I
will have more to say about gender and Millennials later in the book.
Wikipedia says the following about Millennials:
Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y,

abbreviated to Gen Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation
X. There are no precise dates for when the generation starts and ends; most
researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s
to around 2000. Pew Research offers the following data about Millennials,
those born at the beginning of the new Millennium:
As of April 2016, an estimated 69.2 million Millennials (adults ages
18–35 in 2016) were voting-age U.S. citizens—a number almost equal to
the 69.7 million Baby Boomers (ages 52–70) in the nation’s electorate,
according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau
data. Both generations comprise roughly 31% of the voting-eligible popula-
tion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials
There is some disagreement about when Millennials were born but the
Pew report suggests that if they are adults aged 18–35, they were born
from around 1980–1998 or, roughly speaking, the year 2000.
6 A.A. BERGER
Obviously, there’s a big difference between a Millennial aged thirty-five

and one aged eighteen. Yet, we group them all together when we talk
about their generation and believe that they are similar in many important
ways. We realize that talking about a collection of more than seventy mil-
lion (some would say eighty million) people involves making some large
generaizations, but marketers have used generational typologies to deter-
mine differences in generations for many years.
You will find many lists of traits of Millennials in this book. When schol-
ars and authors write about Millennials they often list their characteristics,
personality traits, socioeconomic status, how they were raised by their
families, and other topics. I use many of these lists in this book. They are
similar in many respects, but they often have differences that are worth
thinking about.
The Generations
Below I offer some lists detailing characteristics of the different genera-
tions and when they were born, so you can see how our description of
Americans has evolved. There are, as you might well imagine, minor
disagreements about the names and age ranges for some of the
generations.
Generation Dates born Age in 2015
Traditionalist 1922–1943 Over 70

Baby boomers 1944–1964 51–70
Generation X 1965–1980 35–50
Millennials 1981–1994 21–34
Generation Z 1995– Under 20
What marketers and others who are interested in generations suggest is

that despite their differences in age, they have certain beliefs, values and
attitudes that shape their behavior in a number of areas.
INTRODUCTION 7
The National Chamber Foundation offers a Research Review of

Millennials that offers the following dates for the generations and gives
some of them different names.
Generation Dates
GI generation 1901–1924
Silent generation 1925–1946
Baby boom generation 1946–1964
Generation X 1965–1979
Millennial generation 1980–1999
Generation Z Today’s generation 2000
https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/reports/millennial-generation-
research-review
They call Generation Z “Today’s Generation” and refer to the

Traditionalist as the “Silent Generation,” and their dates for the Millennials
are a bit different.
I was born in 1933 and my wife was born in 1937 so we are both
“Traditionalists” or members of the “Silent generation.” Our daugh-
ter was born in 1962 so she is a Baby Boomer, and our son was born
in 1965 so he is a member of Generation X. Our daughter has one
twenty-two-year-old Millennial daughter and an eight-year old who is
a member of Generation Z. Our son has two Generation Z children
who are twelve and fourteen. So in a typical family, there are many dif-
ferent generations represented and if the marketers and others who are
interested in generations are correct, members of each generation are
different from one another in many important respects.
The Pew Research Center offers another way of presenting information
on the generations. People who compile lists of generations do not always
use the same terms, but everyone uses the term “Millennials” for people
born between approximately 1980 and 2000. The Pew Research Center
provides another list of generations:
8 A.A. BERGER
Fig. 1.3 Other Definitions

of Generations The Generation
Defined
The Millennial Generation
Born: 1981 to 1997
Age of adults in 2015: 18 to 34*
Generation X
Born: 1965 to 1980
Age in 2015: 35 to 50
The Baby Boom Generation

Born: 1946 to 1964
Age in 2015: 51 to 69
The Silent Generation

Born: 1928 to 1945
Age in 2015: 70 to 87
The Greatest Generation

Born: Before 1928
Age in 2015: 88 to 100
* No chronological end point has been set

for this group. For the purpose of
following a cleanly defined group,
Millennials are defined as those ages 18 to
34 in 2015.
PEW RESEARCH CENTER
We will consider Millennials to be persons (in 2015) who are between

eighteen and thirty-four years of age.
Millennials as Trendsetters
Frederic Charles Petit’s article, “Millennials: Wanderers or Trailblazers”
(Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2016 in MediaPost’s “Engage Millennials”) offers two
perspectives on Millennials—one is that they are “wanderers” and the
other is that they are “trailblazers.” He concludes that while other genera-
tions do some of the same things Millennials do, Millennials function as
trailblazers for marketers and thus are of considerable use to them. As he
explains:
INTRODUCTION 9
Modern methods of marketing and advertising depend heavily on content

engagement online. As a result, experts in these fields are constantly seeking
out information on how they can reach their target audiences in the digital
space. Our recent survey of 1000 respondents, based in the U.S. and UK,
confirmed one of the most frequently made assumptions about internet
users—that a younger demographic has a higher level of online engagement.
But the data also confirm a predictable caveat: millennials are the leaders of
online practices but they are by no means the exclusive users. Many brands
believe that online marketing is best designed to reach millennials, but this
approach assumes that millennial behavior is an anomaly, as opposed to a
predictor of broader trends. Our data indicates that millennials are not
merely wandering from traditional behaviors; rather they are setting the new
course for older and younger generations to follow. A primary concern for
marketers is finding where their target consumer will be and when they will
be there. When it comes to digital platforms that serve advertisements prior
to use, such as Pandora, Spotify and YouTube, 89% of millennial respon-
dents stated they use these websites frequently—compared to 63% of non-
millennials. A similar pattern was observed with other online streaming
services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. True, the millennials are
disproportionately represented as users of these services, but significantly
more than half of non-millennials are users as well. This supports the idea of
the millennial trendsetter. It stands to reason that advertisers can use millen-
nials’ behaviors as a predictive model for where the general population is
moving.
Millennials serve, then, as canaries in coal mines, and their behavior can be
used to predict how members of other generations will behave, especially
when it comes to matters digital. I will be exploring various aspects of the
Millennial psyche and Millennial behavior in the pages that follow. But
first, I will provide some data on the Millennials that will give you a better
idea of this generation.
Data on American Millennials from a Variety

of Sources on the Internet
60% of Millennials are non-Hispanic white

43% of Millennials in USA are not white
25% of Millennials in the USA don’t speak English at home
85% of Millennials own smartphones
71% of Millennials live in cell-phone only households (compared to 51%
of non-Millennials)
10 A.A. BERGER
Millennials touch their smartphones 43 times a day

33% of older Millennials (26–33) have earned a college degree from a
four-year college
6% of Millennials consider online advertising to be creditable
26% of Millennials are married
19% of Millennials are Hispanic
14% of Millennials are Black
4% of Millennials are Asian
3% of Millennials are of mixed race
75% of Millennials have a profile on a social networking site
38% of Millennials have one to six tattoos
23% of Millennials have a piercing other than in an earlobe
65% of Millennials get news from television
59% of Millennials get news from Internet
24% of Millennials get news from newspapers
18% of Millennials get news from radio
20% of Millennials are living in poverty
Millennials represent $200 billion in direct purchasing power
Millennials are involved in $500 billion in indirect spending (influenced
by parents)
Millennials are 2.5 times more likely to be early adopters than members of
other generations
Millennials switch attention between media platforms at 27 times per hour
40% of Millennials say government should limit speech offensive to minor-
ity groups
7.3% of Millennials identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Reference
Petit, Frederic Charles. 2016. Millennials: Wanderers or Trailblazers.
MediaPost’sEngage Millennials, October 25.
CHAPTER 2
The Mind and Psyche of Millennials
Abstract In this chapter I deal with the psychological makeup of Millennials.

I discuss Freud’s topographic hypothesis about the unconscious, precon-
scious and consciousness, and the role of the unconscious in our lives. I also
discuss Freud’s structural hypothesis about the id, ego and superego and
their role in our behavior, his ideas about the Oedipus complex and his book
on group analysis and the ego. This sets the stage for a discussion of narcis-
sism and Millennials. Are they more narcissistic than other generations? And
what impact does narcissism have on Millennials? I then deal with a discussion
of the “Millennial Mind” and helicopter parents. This leads to a treatment of
Omar Mateen, a Millennial who massacred 49 people in Orlando, Florida on
June 17, 2016. I conclude with a discussion of Millennials as fathers.
Keywords Psyche • Unconscious • Narcissism • Oedipus complex •

Helicopter parents
We begin, again, with some quotations. The first deals with what is “dis-
tinctive” about Millennials and what impact they may be having on
American culture. It from David J. Fisher’s September 2015 dissertation
at the Naval Postgraduate School:
More than any other budding generation in recent decades, Millennials are
uniquely distinctive: they are more numerous, affluent, and educated. They
embrace diversity far more than any other generation. They exhibit positive

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_2
12 A.A. BERGER
social habits that older Americans do not associate with youth. They are far
more generous with their time and money, according to a Walden University
study. According to authors William Strauss, a historian, and Neil Howe, a
historian and demographer, “Over the next decade, the Millennial generation
will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat
and engaged—with potentially seismic consequences for America.” They are
also reputed to be “high-maintenance,” to want to achieve high rank or status
without paying their dues at the entry level first, and … have an aversion to
secrets and secret-keeping. https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=788525
The second, by Melissa Bachelor Warnke, from the August 3, 2016 Los
Angeles Times, deals with Millennial sexuality. She writes:
A new study in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior that finds younger
millennials (i.e. those born in the 1990s) more than twice as likely to be sexu-
ally inactive in their early 20s as Gen Xers were. Compared with baby boom-
ers, millennials look like nuns and priests. The proffered reasons for millennial
abstinence? A culture of overwork and an obsession with career status, a fear
of becoming emotionally involved and losing control, an online-dating
milieu that privileges physical appearance above all, anxieties surrounding
consent, and an uptick in the use of libido-busting antidepressants. “The
Millennial generation as an insider threat: high risk or overhyped?”
A Psychoanalytic Perspective
Fig. 2.1 Aristotle
THE MIND AND PSYCHE OF MILLENNIALS 13
Aristotle wrote (circa 320 BC) about the problems Ancient Greek society
had dealing with young people:
The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no
reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They
talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is
foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and
unladylike in speech, behavior and dress. proto-knowledge.blogspot.
in/2010/11/what-is-wrong-with-young-people-today.html
So trying to figure out what motivates young people is a matter that has
perplexed thinkers for thousands of years. How Millennials got their
mindset is a complicated matter that I will deal with in various places in
this book. Was it because of the economic downturn that occurred when
they were growing up? Was it the technology explosion? Was it postmod-
ernism? Was it “helicopter” parents? Was it some combination of all of
these matters?
Whatever the case, there seems to be a widespread agreement that
Millennials are distinctive from members of other generations. Members
of every generation are different from members of every other generation,
even if they are similar in many respects.
Fig. 2.2 Sigmund Freud

14 A.A. BERGER
Freud’s Topographic Hypothesis: Consciousness,

the Preconscious and the Unconscious
To understand the minds of Millennials, let’s begin with the theories of
Sigmund Freud. The Freudian topographic model of the psyche argues
that our minds have three levels: consciousness, a preconscious and, most
importantly, an unconscious. We are aware of the contents of our mind at
the conscious level. We are dimly aware of the contents of our minds at the
subconscious (some call it the preconscious) level. But we are completely
unaware of the content of our unconscious and cannot access it without
the assistance of a psychologist, a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist.
he Iceberg Model of the Mind

T
I suggest our minds can be seen as like icebergs and have drawn an image
of an iceberg that represents the three levels of the mind. We are aware of
the contents of our consciousness. We can also dimly make, generally
speaking, out some of the contents of our preconscious (the part of the
iceberg just below the water) but we have no access to our unconscious. It
is the part of the iceberg that lies hidden in the darkness. It also is about
eighty-five or some would say ninety-five percent of our psyches.
What we must recognize is that many of our decisions are influenced or
shaped by imperatives in our unconscious—imperatives that we are
unaware of but which affect much of our behavior. That is, we are not as
rational as we think we are, and much of what we do and think is affected
by what is going on in what has been described as “the shadows of our
minds,” a matter I deal with in a quotation from Gerald Zaltman, a profes-
sor of marketing at the Harvard Business School.
Fig. 2.3 Iceberg Model of the Psyche

he Iceberg Model of the Psyche

T
Zaltman wrote a book, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the
Mind of the Market, in which he discusses what he calls “the 95–5 split” in
the human psyche. He writes (2003:50):
Consciousness is crucial in daily life for many obvious reasons. However, an

important fact and one of the key principles of this book is the 95–5 split. At
least 95 percent of all cognition is below awareness in the shadows of the
mind while, at most, only 5 percent occurs in higher order consciousness.
Many disciplines have confirmed this insight.
What Zaltman calls the “shadows of the mind” is what Freud called the
unconscious. It affects how we think and other aspects of our behavior,
and it plays a larger role in our lives than we can imagine.
Fig. 2.4 Id, Ego and Superego in Psyche

16 A.A. BERGER
Freud’s Structural Hypothesis: The Id, the Ego and the Superego

Freud had another theory of the mind which suggested that there is a
continual battle in our minds between what he called our ids, egos and
superegos. In his book, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Charles
Brenner describes these three parts of the psyche (1974:38):
We may say that id comprises the psychic representatives of the drives, the
ego consists of those functions which have to do with the individual’s rela-
tion to his environment, and the superego comprises the moral precepts of
our minds as well as our ideal aspirations. The drives, of course, we assume
to be present from birth, but the same is certainly not true of interest in or
control of the environment on the one hand, nor of any moral sense or
aspirations on the other. It is obvious that neither of the latter, that is neither
the ego nor the superego, develops till sometimes after birth. Freud
expressed this fact by assuming that the id comprised the entire psychic
apparatus at birth, and that the ego and superego were originally parts of the
id which differentiated sufficiently in the course of growth to warrant their
being considered as separate functional entities.
We get our energy from our ids, but if they are not constrained by the
ego, they run wild and we cannot get anything done. We get our moral
sensibilities from our superegos, but if they are not constrained by the ego
we are guilt ridden. If there is a balance between the power of the ego and
the superego, we can function tolerably well.
If there is an imbalance, we have problems and sometimes neuroses
develop. The ego has various things it can do to maintain a decent balance,
but in many cases it is not able to do so and then we find troubled people.
Fig. 2.5 Oedipus Complex and Mothers
he Oedipus Complex
T
Freud suggested that all children have to deal with their unconscious love
of their parent of the opposite sex and their hostility towards their parent
of the same sex. Freud took his idea for this complex from the Greek myth
of Oedipus, who without realizing what he was doing, killed his father and
married his mother. He called this unconscious love and hate of one’s
parents the Oedipus complex because it resembled the myth of Oedipus.
It manifests itself in children around the age of three. Generally children
resolve their Oedipal strivings, but some do not and their unresolved
Oedipal feelings have an impact on their adult lives.
On October 15, 1887, Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to a friend,
Wilhelm Fleiss, that offers us insights into this matter. He deals with peo-
ple who see a production of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex:
The Greek myth seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes

because he has felt traces of it in himself. Every member of the audience was
once a budding Oedipus in fantasy, and the dream-fulfillment played out in
reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repres-
sion which separates his infantile from his present state. The idea has passed
through my head that the same thing may lie at the root of Hamlet. I am
not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intentions, but supposing rather
that he was impelled to write by a real event because his own unconscious
understood that of his hero. Cited in Martin Grotjahn, Beyond Laughter,
1957, pp. 84–85
We will find these psychoanalytic concepts of use in understanding the

psyches of Millennials—a matter I deal with in my discussion of what I call
“the Millennial Mind.” There are approximately eighty million Millennials
in the United States and each of them is different and has a different mind
and personality, but they are similar in some ways and these similarities are
of interest to us.
reud on Group Psychology

F
In the introduction to his book, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego (1922), Freud turns his attention to the relationship that exists
between individuals and groups. As he explains:
The individual in the relations which have already been mentioned—to his
parents and to his brothers and sisters, to the person he is in love with, to his
friend, and to his physician—comes under the influence of only a single per-
son, or of a very small number of persons, each one of whom has become
18 A.A. BERGER
enormously important to him. Now in speaking of Social or Group

Psychology it has become usual to leave these relations on one side and to
isolate as the subject of inquiry the influencing of an individual by a large
number of people simultaneously, people with whom he is connected by
something, though otherwise they may in many respects be strangers to him.
Group Psychology is therefore concerned with the individual man as a mem-
ber of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a
component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group
at some particular time for some definite purpose. When once natural conti-
nuity has been severed in this way, it is easy to regard the phenomena that
appear under these special conditions as being expressions of a special instinct
that is not further reducible, the social instinct (‘herd instinct’, ‘group mind’),
which does not come to light in any other situations. But we may perhaps
venture to object that it seems difficult to attribute to the factor of number a
significance so great as to make it capable by itself of arousing in our mental
life a new instinct that is otherwise not brought into play. Our expectation is
therefore directed towards two other possibilities: that the social instinct may
not be a primitive one and insusceptible of dissection, and that it may be pos-
sible to discover the beginnings of its development in a narrower circle, such
as that of the family. (www.Bartleby.com/290/1.html)
What Freud calls the “social instinct” and his suggestion that it can be
analyzed sets the stage for my attempt to understand the Millennial Mind.
Freud points out that the individual is often “a component part of a crowd
of people.”
Fig. 2.6 Gustav Le Bon

He quotes the great French sociologist Gustav Le Bon, who writes in

his classic The Crowd (1895/1960:2):
The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological group is the

following. Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or
unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their
intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts
them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel,
think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each indi-
vidual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.
There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do
not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals form-
ing a group. The psychological group is a provisional being formed of
heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the
cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being
which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each
of the cells singly.
With Freud’s insights into group psychology and Le Bon’s ideas about the
nature of crowds (Freud avoids the term crowd and uses “groups”) we can
start our examination of the “mind” and the psyches of the Millennials.
Narcissism and Millennials
An article by Jody Allard in The Washington Post, “What Happens When
Narcissists Become Parents” (carried in the Marin Independent Journal,
January 10, 2017, page B1), raises the question of what happens when
Millennial narcissists have children. She writes:
Narcissistic personality traits seem to have risen as quickly as obesity in

recent years. Entitlement has become a defining characteristic of millennials,
and everything from selfies to the everyone-gets-a-trophy mentality has
been implicated in increased narcissism…. Narcissism is a personality pattern
characterized by a lack of empathy, increased levels of grandiosity and enti-
tlement, and a chronic seeking of admiration and validation…. Narcissists
genuinely believe they are unique and entitled to special treatment and they
have a chronic need for admiration and validation—at any cost.
Allard discusses the work of Ramani Durvasala, the author of a book

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist,
20 A.A. BERGER
who suggests the core of narcissism is superficiality, greed and vanity. The
problems that happen when narcissists have children is that although they
may be superficially engaged with their children, narcissists remain emo-
tionally distant from their children and lack warmth. Narcissists want to
validate their importance by having trophy wives and want trophy chil-
dren. The children of narcissists are pushed to excel in every way—in
sports, in attending elite universities and finding high-status jobs after they
graduate.
If Millennials are brought up with a heightened sense of entitlement
and have received endless trophies (mostly undeserved), can we suggest
that there is a strong likelihood that Millennials will be, to varying degrees,
narcissists and this narcissism will shape their behavior in many different
aspects of their lives? And when they get married to their trophy wives, will
their narcissism shape the way they relate to their wives and raise their
children?
There is a debate about whether Millennials are more narcissistic than
previous generations. An article by Brooke Lea Foster, “The Persistent
Myth of the Narcissistic Millennial,” explains:
In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality, San Diego State

University psychology professor Jean Twenge found that narcissistic behav-
iors among college students studied over a 27-year period had increased
significantly from the 1970s. A second study published in 2008 by the
National Institutes of Health showed that 9.4 percent of 20–29-year-olds
exhibit extreme narcissism, compared with 3.2 percent of those older than
65. But there’s a problem with all of this evidence: The data is unreliable.
“It’s incredibly unfair to call Millennials narcissistic, or to say they’re more
so than previous generations,” says Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor of
psychology at Clark University and author of Getting to 30: A Parent’s Guide
to the Twentysomething Years…. (www.theatlantic.com, Nov. 19, 2014)
Foster suggests Twenge’s argument about young people being more nar-
cissistic is flimsy since it is based on a forty question Narcissistic Personality
Inventory Test whose results are open to many interpretations and are
unreliable.
Whether Millennials are more narcissistic than earlier generations is an
interesting question. A more interesting one involves the impact of narcis-
sism on the behavior of Millennials and on their families and circles of
friends. The fact that so many Millennials were brought up with a
eightened sense of entitlement and praised endlessly by parents who

h
wanted to make sure their children didn’t suffer from a lack of self-esteem
gives one reason to believe that Millennials, more than other generations,
have, at the very least, a strong inclination towards narcissism. Their use of
social media contributes to this narcissism as I will explain in a later chapter
which reviews the findings of an Australian psychiatrist who traces a height-
ened grandiosity and narcissism to those who participate in social media.
The term “narcissism” comes from the myth of Narcissus, the Greek
figure who fell in love with his image when he gazed at it in a stream. The
myth is described below (taken from my book Media, Myth and Society,
2013: 57–58).
Narcissus was a young man who was so handsome that all young women
who saw him were attracted to him, but he paid no attention to any of them.
One young nymph, Echo, who, like all the other fair maidens, loved
Narcissus. She wanted to find a way to make him aware of her. She followed
him around, but since she only spoke in echoes, could not address him
directly. One day Echo had her chance. Narcissus was in a deserted place and
wanted to find out if any of his friends were around. He called out to his
friends “Is anyone here?” Echo, who was hiding behind a tree, replied
“Here, here.” Narcissus then said “Come, come.” Echo came out from
behind the tree and said “Come,” with outstretched arms. But Narcissus
turned away from her and said he would die before he gave her power over
him. Narcissus scorned all the beautiful women who loved him. One of
them made a prayer to the gods, “May he who cannot love others love only
himself,” that was answered by the gods. The goddess Nemesis decided to
take matters in hand. One day, as he bent over a spring to drink, he saw a
reflection of his image in the water. He thought to himself, “Now I under-
stand how all those who loved me feel for I am possessed of a love of myself.”
He could not tear himself away from his image in the water and died. His
body disappeared and where he had been appeared a beautiful flower, which
was named after him—Narcissus.
This myth was the basis of Freud’s article, “On Narcissism,” in which he
described various kinds of self-absorbed behavior as narcissism. Narcissism
ranges on a continuum from a healthy sense of the self to neurotic and
pathological forms, and has been used not only to analyze individuals but
also generations and societies.
The question that bothers me is whether we can apply the concept of
narcissism to Millennials in general and suggest that they tend to be more
22 A.A. BERGER
narcissistic than members of other generations. If they are, what impact

does this narcissism have on their lives, their families, their friends and
their societies? There is no doubt about the fact that a considerable num-
ber of Millennials show symptoms of narcissism, but narcissism, we must
remember, isn’t always neurotic and isn’t always pathological. Sometimes
it is healthy. This matter of the Millennial psyche informs this book, but
there are other topics about Millennials that I also consider. I turn now
from the Millennial psyche to the Millennial Mind (assuming that there
are differences between our minds and psyches) and the points made in
the epilogue.
The Millennial Mind

Let’s consider some of the points made by Fisher in his dissertation.
Millennials are, he suggests:
1. Affluent
2. Better educated than other generations
3. Generous with their time and money
4. Upbeat, not downbeat
5. Engaged, not alienated
His view of Millennials is, of course, different from many other views.
There are countless lists of characteristics of Millennials, as I pointed out
earlier, but his list does cover some of the more important agreed-upon
characteristics of Millennials. I will offer many other lists of traits of
Millennials in this book, and we will see that there are conflicting views of
what Millennials are like, what they like and how we can expect them to
behave.
Their affluence means that they are an important market, which explains
why so many advertising agencies and marketing organizations are focused
on them. They grew up during the economic downturn, but it does not
seem to have traumatized them the way children who grew up during the
great depression of the thirties were affected. The fact that they are much
better educated than other generations suggests that they are, most likely,
socially and politically liberal, since there is a correlation between educa-
tion and liberalism. I should add that while there are many millionaire
Millennials and many affluent Millennials, there are large numbers of them
who are not affluent and cannot afford to live on their own.
Democratic Party Millennials were overwhelmingly supporters of Bernie

Sanders and many of them attended his rallies. But it seems they didn’t
actually go out and vote for him in large numbers, which makes one won-
der whether their attendance at his rallies was seen as “fun” and whether
the Sanders rallies were, in a sense, seen as the political equivalent of rock
concerts. The basic motivation seems to have been entertainment, not a
sense of political purpose, which would have led more Millennials to vote
for Bernie Sanders.
This would suggest that, for Millennials, the Bernie Sanders rallies were
essentially an id activity, and not one of the ego or superego. If the rallies
were superego activities, Millennials would have voted in large numbers,
driven by a sense of responsibility or guilt. It’s hard to determine what
unconscious imperatives were operating in the Millennials that led them
to attend Bernie Sanders rallies. They may have been motivated by a sense
that he shared many of their values, or by a feeling that they should be
“hip” and go to the rallies to be seen by other Millennials. Attending the
rallies would be an indicator of engagement but not of serious engage-
ment that would lead to actual voting.
Millennials and Helicopter Parents

An article by Nick Gillespie in the August 21, 2014 issue of Time magazine
deals with attitudes Americans have about Millennials. In essence, Americans
see Millennials as self-absorbed individuals with a sense of entitlement that
distorts the way they see the world and function in it. He writes:
If millennials are self-absorbed little monsters who expect the world to come
to them and for their parents to clean up their rooms well into their 20s, we’ve
got no one to blame but ourselves—especially the moms and dads among
us…. We think that our precious bundles of joy should be 12 before they can
wait alone in a car for five minutes on a cool day or walk to school without an
adult, and that they should be 13 before they can be trusted to stay home
alone. You’d think that kids raised on Baby Einstein DVDs should be a little
more advanced than that. Curiously, this sort of ridiculous hyperprotective-
ness is playing out against a backdrop in which children are safer than ever.
This quotation raises an important question. If Millennials are over-

protected and have an unreal sense of entitlement, who is ultimately
responsible? The answer would seem to be their parents and families
24 A.A. BERGER
and American society in general. Helicopter parents endlessly tell their

children how wonderful they are and give them unrealistic ideas about
their abilities and talents. There are consequences to this kind of
behavior.
All these helicopter parents and “tiger-mothers” (and maybe “tiger
fathers”) have helped create a generation of children who, for the most
part, no longer know how to play by themselves and have spent most
of their “free” time supervised by someone and always being pro-
tected. Millennial children didn’t play “pick up” games of baseball or
soccer (or, at least the way children used to play) but generally
belonged to leagues and teams and were carted around from game to
game by their parents. Belonging to these clubs costs money and time
and probably generated unconscious hostile feelings in parents, who
spent countless hours lugging their children to this or that soccer prac-
tice or match.
Statistics show that couples without children are happier than couples
with them. As I understand it, parents are most unhappy during their chil-
dren’s middle school years, when parents have to deal with their children’s
anxieties and changes in their sexual maturity. As a middle school teacher
explained the problems she faced teaching middle school, “It’s the hor-
mones.” The pressures children feel from their helicopter parents and
tiger mothers and fathers may explain why Millennials spend so much time
with social media. It is, among other things, an escape mechanism. It is
when their children leave home that most couples are able to salvage their
marriages and their relationships with one another. So, strange as it might
seem, the “empty nest” is, statistics suggest, a much happier nest for
parents.
The difficulties involved in raising children, felt by both parents and
children, may explain why so many Millennials don’t want to get married
and don’t want to have children. Their economic status may also play a
role here. The question we return to here is: who created these needy
Millennials? Are they monsters or should they be seen as victims? Or some
combination of both?
Omar Mateen: The Most Murderous Millennial

The most famous mass-murderer in American history was also a Millennial.
Omar Mateen, who massacred 49 people at a LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) site in Orlando, Florida was a Millennial.
An article by Katie Savadaski that appeared in the June 17, 2016 issue of
The Daily Beast, explains that Mateen had a violent temper and a lack of
remorse. This combination ended up with him massacring 49 people and
wounding another 50 people with an assault weapon. She writes:
Born in 1986 to Afghan immigrant parents in Queens, New York, Omar

Mir Seddique Mateen attended kindergarten at an Islamic school in
Westbury, New York, before the family moved to Florida in 1991. While his
grades in kindergarten indicated a need for academic improvement, Mateen
began to slip behind once he was enrolled in public school in Florida. As he
did, he became more violent. By fourth grade, school officials said he was
“academically behind [by] at least two years.”
Mateen grew more violent the following year, when he hit a fellow stu-
dent, according to school records that show he was disciplined for six
other incidents. In seventh grade, teachers wrote that Mateen was disrup-
tive and uttered obscenities. His lack of remorse suggests an all-powerful
id (that was completely out of control) and an undeveloped superego. His
lack of remorse, when he was just a child, is an indicator of a psyche out of
balance, and he lived that way all his life. Other people paid the conse-
quences for his psychological problems.
Another explanation is that as a very religious Muslim, he might have
felt that non-Muslims, and especially members of the LGBTQ commu-
nity, were not really human so killing these people was not a bad thing.
Mass murderers often dehumanize their victims to escape the guilt that
their superegos would inflict upon them. There is also reason to believe
that Mateen was a closeted homosexual or, at the very least, ambivalent
about his sexual identity. It is a sad fact that Islamic terrorists seem to feel
no remorse in killing anyone, including large numbers of Muslims. We
seldom think about it but most of the victim of Muslim terrorist groups
are other Muslims, or more precisely, other kinds of Muslims: those who
are either not Shiites (for Shiite terrorists) or not Sunnis (for Sunni terror-
ists). Many Sunnis do not consider Shias to be Muslims and so lack any
remorse they might feel about killing fellow Muslims.
Millennium Fathers
Maria Bailey, in her MediaPost “Engage: Moms” column of June 17,
2016, offers some insights into what is distinctive about Millennial fathers.
Her discussion involves marketing to families but also offers insights into
26 A.A. BERGER
how Millennial fathers differ from their fathers and fathers from other
generations. Her article was published on Friday, June 17, 2016 on the
Internet. She writes:
1. The role of dad has changed for millennial couples. Raised by

Boomer and Gen X parents, millennial moms and dads were taught
to believe they could achieve anything….
2. Millennial Dads parent differently than their fathers. Millennial
Dads are much more involved in their children’s lives and more
active in sharing household responsibilities. Previous generations
saw dad’s role ranging from traditional breadwinner, financial plan-
ner and often the disciplinarian….
3. Today’s dads value family time. In a 2015 parenting survey, an
overwhelming majority of millennials agree with the statement,
“Dads do more around the house and have no qualms about man-
ning up to help with the children.” It’s an interesting conversation
to start with today’s dads about how they see their own fathers and
what they want out of family life.
Her article was meant to supply insights to marketers, but it also provides
information about how the family has changed for Millennials. Much of
the material that I’ve found about Millennials comes from marketers who
are interested in finding ways to reach Millennials and get them to pur-
chase various products and services. We can only wonder what the chil-
dren of Millennials will be like. If the fathers take a more important role in
raising their children, will we have another generation that feels entitled—
or will they have a more realistic view of themselves and their place in the
scheme of things?
Don Lee’s article, “Millennials aren’t big spenders or risk takers, and
that’s going to reshape the economy,” offers some interesting insights in
the psyches of Millennials and their attitudes toward risk:
There’s evidence that young adults today would rather work for big compa-
nies than take their chances at budding firms or in their own garages.
Compared to boomers, millennials are more interested in having the same
job through most of their life, says Jean Twenge, a San Diego State
University psychologist and author of “Generation Me.” Their relative risk-
aversion may have something to do with the protective environment that
parents and schools created for millennials, emphasizing participation over
winning. Said Twenge: “Everybody got a trophy.” Partly because of such

pampering, Twenge argues, millennials are more self-absorbed than prior
generations, even narcissistic. But at the same time, research suggests that
young adults today are also very community-minded. www.latimes.com/
business/la-fi-the-millennial-factor-20161010-snap-story.html
So the psyches and minds of Millennials are matters of considerable inter-

est to us, and it has yet to be determined which forces operating on their
psyches will play an important role in the shape that American society
takes over the coming years.
References
Allard, Jody. 2017. What Happens When Narcissists Become Parents. The
Washington Post, January 10.
Bailey, Maria. 2016. Hey, Dudes…Happy Father’s Day. MediaPost’sEngage
Moms, June 17.
Berger, Arthur Asa. 2013. Media, Myth and Society. New York: Palgrave.
Brenner, Charles. 1974. An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis. New York:
Anchor Books.
Fisher, David. 2015. The Millennial Generation as an Inside Threat: High Risk or
Overhyped? September 2. calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/47256/
15Sep_Fisher_David.pdf?sequence=1
Foster, Brooke Lea. 2014. The Persistent Myth of the Narcissistic Millennial.
WWW.theatlantic.com, November 19.
Freud, Sigmund. 1922. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.www.Bartleby.
com/290/1.html
Gillespie, Nick. 2014. Millennials Are Selfish and Enabled. Time, August 21.
Grotjahn, Martin. 1957. Beyond Laughter. New York: McGraw-Hill.
LeBon, Gustav. 1895/1960. The Crowd. New York: Viking Press.
Wamke, Melissa Bachelor. 2016. The Millennial Generation as an Insider Threat:
High Risk or Overhyped? Los Angeles Times, August 3.
Zaltman, Gerald. 2003. How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of
the Market. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
CHAPTER 3
A Sociology of Millennials
Abstract This chapter starts with a discussion of the relationship between

individuals and society and with marketer/psychoanalyst Clotaire
Rapaille’s theory about the way children are “imprinted” by their societies
between the age of one and seven. Next I deal with the ideas of Karl
Mannheim who focused attention on the social origins of thought. This is
followed by a discussion of Gustave LeBon’s classic book The Crowd and
how his ideas relate to our interest in Millennials. This leads to a discussion
the Claritas typology which posits that there are sixty-six different kinds of
Americans; this suggests there are different ways of thinking about people
other than in terms of generations. Next, I discuss the economic status of
Millennials and the fact that while many of them are financially stressed,
some of them are quite wealthy.
Keywords Imprinting • Claritas typology • Crowds
This chapter deals with sociological aspects of the Millennials phenome-

non. It begins with two quotations. The first is from the French sociolo-
gist Pierre Bourdieu, who writes in his book Sociology in Question
(1993:27):
Sociology reveals the idea of personal opinion (like personal taste) is an illu-
sion. From this point it is concluded that sociology is reductive, that it

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_3
30 A.A. BERGER
isenchants, that it demobilizes people by taking away all their illusions….

d
If it is true that the idea of personal opinion itself is socially determined, that
it is a product of history reproduced by education, that our opinions are
determined, then it is better to know this; and if we have some chance of
having personal opinions, it is perhaps on condition that we know our opin-
ions are not spontaneously so.
The second quotation is by another French sociologist, Gustave Le

Bon, who writes in his classic work, The Crowd (1895/1960:23):
Under certain circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an

agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from
those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the
persons in the gathering take one and the same direction and their con-
scious personality vanishes…. Whoever be the individuals that compose
it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their
character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed
into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which
makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in
which an individual would feel, think, and act were he in a state of
isolation.
As Bourdieu points out in the quotation above, our ideas are based
upon or stem from our social relationships. We are social animals and our
ideas and beliefs are based, to a considerable degree, on our social rela-
tionships and what we learn from them. Sociologists call the process by
which we are taught how to function in society “socialization,” and this
process involves our learning the rules, roles, values, beliefs and codes of
behavior that are dominant in our society—or some region or subsection
or subculture in that society.
Clotaire Rapaille, a French psychoanalyst and marketing expert, sug-
gests that this process takes place during the first seven years of our
lives. He argues, in his book The Culture Code, that we become
“imprinted” by our societies during the first seven years of our lives and
these imprints shape our behavior for the rest of our lives. He writes
(2006:21–22):
A SOCIOLOGY OF MILLENNIALS 31
Most of us imprint the meanings of the things most central to our lives by
the age of seven. This is because emotion is the central force for children
under the age of seven (if you need proof of this watch how often a young
child’s emotional state changes in a single hour) while after this they are
guided by logic (again, try arguing with a nine-year-old). Most people are
exposed to only one culture before the age of seven…. Therefore, the
extremely strong imprints placed in their subconscious at this early age are
determined by the culture in which they are raised.
That explains why people in different countries are so different and why
they generally react to the same thing so differently. He gives an example.
The French see cheese as alive and thus keep it in a cloche (a container that
is kept in the kitchen) while Americans see cheese as dead and keep it in a
refrigerator. He offers another example. At the end of a meal Americans
tend to say “I’m full” while French people would usually say “That was
delicious.” This suggests that Americans see food as fuel. This attitude
may be changing now that so many Millennials are “foodies.”
Fig. 3.1 Clotaire Rapaille

32 A.A. BERGER
Another important theorist who gives us insights into the sociological

perspective is Karl Mannheim. He writes in his classic study Ideology and
Utopia (1936:3):
Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather
it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other
men have thought before him. He finds himself in an inherited situation
with patterns of thought which are appropriate to this situation and attempts
to elaborate further in inherited modes of response or to substitute others
for them in order to deal more adequately with the new challenges which
have arisen out of shifts and changes in his situation. Every individual is
therefore in a two-fold sense predetermined by the fact of growing up in a
society: on the one hand he finds a ready-made situation and on the other
he finds in that situation preformed patterns of thought and conduct.
Mannheim focuses upon the social origins of thought and explains that while
it is correct to say that only individuals are capable of thinking, it is incorrect
to assume that an individual’s thoughts have their origin in his life. We have
reason to argue, then, that society plays a big role in giving us ideas and in
shaping our behavior. The mind-set of Millennials is, then, shaped by the soci-
eties in which they grew up as well as the families in which they were raised.
From Gustav Le Bon we learn that a group of individuals can, in some
cases, have characteristics quite different from the characters of each of the
individuals in the group. We can be swayed by the group of which we are
a part. Le Bon wasn’t talking about generations, but it isn’t too much of a
leap to suggest that being a member of a generation has an effect similar
to that of being a member of a group on the thinking and behavior of the
individuals in that group. Le Bon was talking about crowds but his insights
into crowds have some relevance to our discussion of generations and of
one particular generation, the Millennials.
Generations Versus Other Groupings

The notion that different generations think and behave in distinctive ways
is basic to the approach marketers and advertisers take on Millennials.
Some marketing organizations offer other ways of grouping people to
understand their behavior—especially their behavior as consumers.
Marketers are always coming up with typologies which they believe help us
understand consumer behavior. The most extreme and interesting exam-
ple of a typology that excluded generations, I would suggest, is that made
by Claritas which argues that there are 66 different and distinctive micro-
groups in American society. Claritas explains that “birds of a feather flock
together,” which is the reason zip codes are so important in their research.
The first ten Claritas consumer categories are:
01. Upper Crust 06. Winner’s Circle

02. Blue Blood Estates 07. Money & Brains
03. Movers & Shakers 08. Executive Suites
04. Young Digerati 09. Big Fish, Small Pond
05. Country Squires 10. Second City Elite
All of these groups are wealthy and have high status. The bottom Claritas
consumer categories are just the opposite and include groups such as:
61: City Roots 64: Bedrock America

62: Hometown Retired 65: Big City Blues
63: Family Thrifts 66: Low-Rise Living
For Claritas, there are more than sixty consumer categories in the United
States and knowing about these categories—their interests, their socioeco-
nomic status, their taste levels, and so on—is useful for advertising agencies
who wish to sell products to them. The consumer categories follow below:
Y1 Midlife Success Y3 Striving Singles

03 Movers & Shakers 42 Red, White & Blues
08 Executive Suites 44 New Beginnings
11 God’s Country 45 Blue Highways
12 Brite Lites, Li’l City 47 City Startups
19 Home Sweet Home 48 Young & Rustic
25 Country Casuals 53 Mobility Blues
30 Suburban Sprawl 56 Crossroads Villagers
37 Mayberry-ville
F1 Accumulated Wealth
Y2 Young Achievers 02 Blue Blood Estates
04 Young Digerati 05 Country Squires
16 Bohemian Mix 06 Winner’s Circle
22 Young Influentials
F2 Young Accumulators
23 Greenbelt Sports
13 Upward Bound
24 Up-and-Comers
17 Beltway Boomers
31 Urban Achievers
18 Kids & Cul-de-Sacs
35 Boomtown Singles
20 Fast-Track Families
54 Multi-Cult Mosaic
29 American Dreams
34 A.A. BERGER
15 Pools & Patios

F3 Mainstream Families 21 Gray Power
32 New Homesteaders 26 The Cosmopolitans
33 Big Sky Families 27 Middleburg Managers
34 White Picket Fences 28 Traditional Times
36 Blue-Chip Blues
50 Kid Country, USA M3 Cautious Couples
51 Shotguns & Pickups 38 Simple Pleasures
52 Suburban Pioneers 39 Domestic Duos
40 Close-In Couples
F4 Sustaining Families 41 Sunset City Blues
63 Family Thrifts 43 Heartlanders
64 Bedrock America 46 Old Glories
65 Big City Blues 49 American Classics
66 Low Rise Living
01 Upper Crust M4 Sustaining Seniors
55 Golden Ponds
M1 Affluent Empty Nests 57 Old Milltowns
07 Money & Brains 58 Back Country Folks
09 Big Fish, Small Pond 59 Urban Elders
10 Second City Elite 60 Park Bench Seniors
M2 Conservative Classics 61 City Roots
14 New Empty Nests 62 Home
An Example: Low-Rise Living

Claritas gives each group a jazzy descriptive name so you get an idea of what
the people in each of these groupings are like. What this typology doesn’t
do is deal with the fact that we have all these Millennials, the largest and
most important consumer group in the United States, and they are spread
among these sixty-six groups. So what is more important, being a member
of Claritas’ “shotguns and pickup” category or being a “shotguns and
pickup” Millennial? It is reasonable to assume that many of the children (or
grandchildren) of members of each of the sixty-six categories are Millennials.
Claritas describes people in the Low-Rise Living, its bottom category,
as follows:
Low-Rise Living: The most economically challenged urban segment, Low-

Rise Living is known as a transient world for young, ethnically diverse sin-
gles and single parents. Home values are low—about half the national
average—and even then less than a quarter of residents can afford to own
real estate. Typically, the commercial base of Mom-and-Pop stores is strug-
gling and in need of a renaissance. http://www.claritas.com/
People in the Low-Rise living category are at the very bottom of the socio-
economic totem pole and thus are not of great interest to companies that
sell products and services of interest to middle-class and upper-class people.
Claritas divides the United States into four social groups based on their
geographic location: Urban, Suburban, Second city, and Town & Rural. It
also ranks them in terms of their wealth, from high to low. The most afflu-
ent categories are in the Elite Suburbs grouping, containing the three
most affluent groups: Upper Crust, Blue-Blood Estates and Movers and
Shakers. The Urban Uptown contains the fourth most affluent category,
Young Digerati. Low-Rise living is at the bottom of the list, in a category
called Urban Cores. The Claritas chart, which contains all of these group-
ings, should be read as a way of classifying Millennials, for children between
eighteen and thirty-five from Upper Crust families and other upscale fami-
lies, are, we must remember, Millennials.
Fig. 3.2 Claritas Typology

36 A.A. BERGER
I offered my discussion of the Claritas typology because I wanted to

show that there are other ways of analyzing societies. What complicates
matters is that since Millennials are approximately a quarter of the
American population, a quarter of the members of the sixty-six Claritas
groups are Millennials. Thus we may have Upper-Crust Millennials and
Low-Rise Living Millennials. What then becomes the salient factor in their
behavior? Is it their socioeconomic status or the fact that they are
Millennials? Or some combination of both?
Political Rallies and Crowds

Gustav Le Bon has explained how crowds have the ability to strip away
individual behavioral traits and beliefs and allow individuals act quite dif-
ferently from the way they would in isolation. There is an emotional
contagion that grips people and excites them, and sometimes, in crowds,
people act in ways they never would if they weren’t in the crowd. Many
people go to political rallies for the sheer excitement of being at an event
with thousands of other people holding similar beliefs and, in addition, for
reinforcement. We see this in the many Trump rallies. And the people at
Trump rallies want to avoid cognitive dissonance, which happens when
one’s beliefs are challenged.
They want to have their core political beliefs discussed and reinforced
and to have the political beliefs of their opponents attacked. So attending
a political rally, aside from its social benefits, is a means by which we per-
suade ourselves that our political beliefs are correct and valid. When sur-
rounded by thousands of others with the same or similar beliefs, we get a
sense that our political ideas are correct and that our choices, when it
comes to politics and elections, are and will be the correct ones.
This also applies to what Le Bon called “aggregated” crowds—people
who follow the events of a political rally—in contrast to people actually
attending a political rally, the crowd. But the impact of being at a political
rally is much stronger than watching it on television or reading about it in
newspapers.
When Bernie Sanders gave his support to Hillary Clinton in the 2016
presidential election, there was a question about his Millennial followers:
would they transfer their allegiances from Bernie Sanders to Hillary
Clinton or would they sit out the election, or vote for a candidate from
another party? It seems that a number of Millennials didn’t like Clinton
and voted for a third party candidate, such as the Libertarian candidate or
the Green Party candidate.
The Libertarian candidate showed himself to be incredibly uninformed

and inept so one must ask—how can intelligent Millennials vote for such
a person when their vote might make a difference in who is elected presi-
dent of the United States? Is getting Millennials to vote, or do anything,
similar in nature as trying to herd cats? Donald Trump won the election
because though Millennials voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, they didn’t
vote in large enough numbers for her to win.
Money and Millennials
We often read that Millennials are poor but statistics suggests that many of
them are quite wealthy. An article by Bob Shulman in the Oct. 5, 2016 edi-
tion of MediaPost’s “Engage Affluents” provides the following information:
To provide some context regarding the sizes of the market segments pro-
filed in this column, the following exhibit presents the Bureau of the
Census’s estimate of the proportion of adults in the four generational seg-
ments that constitute the adult population in the United States and our
estimates of the generational split of the 19 million adults with personal
liquid assets of $1 million or more.
Generation Age range Total adults Millionaires
Millennials 18–34 30% 41%

Gen-Xers 35–50 27% 23%
Boomers 51–69 30% 31%
Seniors 70 or older 12% 5%
Millionaires with personal liquid assets of $1 million or more differ, as one

might expect, from the average American … and differ from each other as
well, especially when you look at them across the generations. For a start, this
wealthy segment of 19 million Americans reports they have almost 10 times
as much saved or invested as the average adult—and they have more than
twice the average household income. The Gen Xer millionaires report they
hold more personal liquid assets on average than the other generations.
However, marketers targeting all the millionaire generations would be wise to
realize there are other surprising differences in this world of the wealthy. For
example, when it comes to entrepreneurship, millionaire Gen Xers are in the
forefront, but millionaire Millennials lead the way when it comes to reporting
they own a business with gross sales or revenues of $100 million or more.
That, in turn, shows up in their ability to provide jobs, with Millennials virtu-
ally tied with Gen Xers in the number of employees their businesses employ.
38 A.A. BERGER
So, while many Millennials lack income and have a great deal of debt, we
find that, according to the United States Census, a significant percentage
of Millennials are millionaires. There are, then, many different kinds of
Millennials as far as socioeconomic status and other socially significant fac-
tors are concerned.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Sociology in Question. London: Sage.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Rapaille, Clotaire. 2006. The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why
People Around the World Buy and Live as They Do. New York: Broadway Books.
Shulman, Bob. 2016. MediaPost’s Engage Millennials, October 5.
CHAPTER 4
Myth and Millennials
Abstract Myths are defined and their role in our thinking and behavior is
discussed. It is suggested that myths play a larger role in our lives than we
recognize. The myth of Cronus is told, and it is suggested that it helps us
understand Millennial behavior. This leads to a description of a “myth
model” which focuses attention on the role of myth in psychoanalytic
theory, history, elite culture, popular culture and everyday life. The myth
of Cronus, the god of time, is used in the myth model to help us under-
stand the roots of Millennial behavior. It concludes with a discussion of
the ideas of Erich Fromm who has a theory of “social character” that can
be used to understand Millennials better.
Keywords Myth • Cronos • Myth model • Social character
This chapter begins with a description of the myth of Cronus, which has
interesting implications for our understanding of Millennials. It is taken
from Wikipedia:
During antiquity, Cronus was occasionally interpreted as Chronos, the per-

sonification of time. The Greek historian and biographer Plutarch asserted
that the Greeks believed that Cronus was an allegorical name for χρόνος
(time). The Roman philosopher Cicero elaborated on this by saying that the
Greek name Kronos is synonymous to Chronos (time) since he maintains

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_4
40 A.A. BERGER
the course and cycles of seasons and the periods of time, whereas the Latin
name Saturn denotes that he is saturated with years since he was devouring
his sons, which implies that time devours the ages and gorges. The philoso-
pher Plato in his Cratylus gives two possible interpretations for the name of
Cronus. The first is that his name denotes “κόρος” (koros), the pure
(καθαρόν) and unblemished (ἀκήρατον) nature of his mind. The second is
that Rhea and Cronus were given names of streams (Rhea—ῥοή (rhoē) and
Cronus—Xρόνος (chronos)) Proclus, the Neoplatonist philosopher makes
in his Commentary on Plato’s Cratylus an extensive analysis on Cronus;
among others he says that the “One cause” of all things is “Chronos” (time)
that is also equivocal to Cronus. In addition to the name, the story of
Cronus eating his children was also interpreted as an allegory to a specific
aspect of time held within Cronus’ sphere of influence. As the theory went,
Cronus represented the destructive ravages of time which devoured all
things, a concept that was definitely illustrated when the Titan king ate the
Olympian gods—the past consuming the future, the older generation sup-
pressing the next generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronus
Let me say something here about the nature of myths. The Greek word
“mythos” means story. We find a useful definition of myth in Raphael
Patai’s Myth and Modern Man. He describes myth in the following terms
(1972:2)
Myth … is a traditional religious charter, which operates by validating laws,

customs, rites, institutions and beliefs, or explaining socio-cultural situations
and natural phenomena, and taking the form of stories, believed to be true,
about divine beings and heroes … Myths are dramatic stories that form a
sacred charter either authorizing the continuance of ancient institutions,
customs, rites and beliefs in the area where they are current, or approving
alterations.
Patai adds that myths play an important role in shaping social life and
writes that “myth not only validates or authorizes customs, rites, institu-
tions, beliefs, and so forth, but frequently is directly responsible for creat-
ing them.” (1972:2).
I will not be considering the popular use of myth as false or unfounded
beliefs here. There are many mistaken ideas or myths about Millennials.
Instead, I will be focusing on the cultural, psychological and social mean-
ings of myths as narratives and the way these narratives inform so much of
our lives—as reflected in a model I developed a number of year ago of the
MYTH AND MILLENNIALS 41
way myths inform societies. I argue that myths and mythological themes
can be found in many films, television programs and other texts carried by
the media and in many other aspects of culture.
As Marcel Danesi explains in his book Understanding Media Semiotics,
myths play an important role in our cultures, societies and everyday lives
(2002:47–48).
As Barthes argued [in Mythologies], the themes of humanity’s earliest stories,

known as myths, continue to permeate and inform pop culture’s story-
telling efforts. As in the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and other ancient
heroes, Superman’s exploits revolve around a universal mythic theme—the
struggle of Good and Evil. This is what makes Superman, or any action hero
for that matter, so intuitively appealing to modern audiences…. The word
“myth” derives from the Greek mythos: “word,” “speech,” “tale of the
gods.” It can be defined as a narrative in which the characters are gods,
heroes, and mystical beings, in which the plot is about the origin of things
or about metaphysical events in human life, and in which the setting is a
metaphysical world juxtaposed against the real world. In the beginning
stages of human cultures, myths functioned as genuine “narrative theories”
of the world. That is why all cultures have created them to explain their
origins…. The use of mythic themes and elements in media representations
has become so widespread that it is hardly noticed any longer, despite
Barthes’ cogent warnings in the late 1950s. Implicit myths about the strug-
gle for Good, of the need for heroes to lead us forward, and so on and so
forth, constitute the narrative underpinnings of TV programmes, block-
buster movies, advertisements and commercials, and virtually anything that
gets “media air time.” (2002:47–48)
Myths, then, help us understand our place in the world and how things
became the way they are. They are stories that we use to make sense of
things and are so widespread that we hardly notice them or are aware of
their impact and importance.
A Millennium is a thousand year period. As one might imagine, know-
ing the way human beings can complicate everything, there has been a
controversy about whether the millennium started in the year 2000 AD or
the year 2001 AD. This dispute has to do with the nature of ancient cal-
endars. Whatever the case, the generation called the Millennials refers to
men and women who became adults at the beginning of the new millen-
nium up to 2015 and refers to people between the ages of (approximately)
eighteen and thirty-five. There are, it has been estimated, around
42 A.A. BERGER
seventy-five to eighty million Millennials in the United States, and they

formed the largest generational cohort until recently. They have just been
superseded by the next generation, which is approaching its maturity.
Since the term “Millennium” refers to a period of time, it is reasonable
to think about the mythic roots of our concern with time, with chronol-
ogy. The Titan Cronus comes to mind at this point. He is associated with
time, and as the material in the material quoted above indicates his name
suggests many other things—including the revolution of the young against
older generations.
We see this in the story of Cronos, described below.
In an ancient myth recorded by Hesiod’s Theogony, Cronus envied the

power of his father, the ruler of the universe, Uranus. Uranus drew the
enmity of Cronus’s mother, Gaia, when he hid the gigantic youngest chil-
dren of Gaia, the hundred-handed Hecatonchires and one-eyed Cyclopes,
in Tartarus, so that they would not see the light. Gaia created and gathered
together Cronus and his brothers to persuade them to castrate Uranus.
Only Cronus was willing to do the deed, so Gaia gave him the sickle and
placed him in ambush. When Uranus met with Gaia, Cronus attacked him
with the sickle, castrating him and casting his testicles into the sea. From the
blood that spilled out from Uranus and fell upon the earth, the Gigantes,
Erinyes, and Meliae were produced. The testicles produced a white foam
from which the goddess Aphrodite emerged. After dispatching Uranus,
Cronus re-imprisoned the Hecatonchires, and the Cyclopes and set the
dragon Campe to guard them. He and his sister Rhea took the throne of the
world as king and queen. The period in which Cronus ruled was called the
Golden Age, as the people of the time had no need for laws or rules; every-
one did the right thing, and immorality was absent. Cronus learned from
Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own sons, just
as he had overthrown his father. As a result, although he sired the gods
Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades and Poseidon by Rhea, he devoured them all
as soon as they were born to prevent the prophecy. When the sixth child,
Zeus, was born Rhea sought Gaia to devise a plan to save them and to even-
tually get retribution on Cronus for his acts against his father and children.
(Cronus also fathered Chiron, by Philyra.) Rhea secretly gave birth to Zeus
in Crete, and handed Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, also
known as the Omphalos Stone, which he promptly swallowed, thinking that
it was his son. Rhea kept Zeus hidden in a cave on Mount Ida, Crete.
According to some versions of the story, he was then raised by a goat named
Amalthea, while a company of Kouretes, armored male dancers, shouted
and clapped their hands to make enough noise to mask the baby’s cries from
Cronus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronus
Eventually, when he was a grown man, Zeus did overthrow his father
Cronos and used an emetic to make him cough up the stone and then
cough up his swallowed children. So the Cronos story contains a number
of themes of interest to us in our attempt to understand the psyches of
Millennials.
First, there is the rebellion of a son against his father, leading to the son
castrating his father and ruling with his sister in a “golden age” when there
was no need for laws, because everyone knew what the right thing to do
was and did it. Then there is the fear that Cronos had that he would even-
tually be overcome by his sons in a manner similar to the way he overcame
his father, which led to his swallowing all his children as soon as they were
born. We see in this story the seeds of the relationships between many
Millennials and their parents, and politically, the antagonism of the young
for older generations who are in power and, the story alleges, do not use
their power wisely. They may be thought to “swallow their children’s
lives” in a manner similar to the way that Cronus swallowed his children.
This notion that a son will overcome his father is also at the root of the
Oedipus myth and is, Freud argued, a constant in human history. He
described this rivalry between fathers and their children as an essential
ingredient of the Oedipus complex. It occurs, he explained, when children
are young and become, for a period, strongly attached to the parent of
their opposite sex. Most children grow out of their Oedipal period but
some do not, and these people then have psychological problems that
afflict them for years. They need the help of a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst
to overcome this problem.
In Martin Grotjahn’s Beyond Laughter, he quotes from a famous letter
that Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss on October 15, 1897. I
quoted another part of this letter earlier in the book:
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. Only one idea of gen-
eral value has occurred to me. I have found love of the mother and jealousy
of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenom-
enon of early childhood, even if it does not always occur so early as in chil-
dren who have been made hysterics.… If that is the case, the gripping power
of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the rational objections to the inexorable fate
that the story presupposes, becomes intelligible, and one can understand
44 A.A. BERGER
why later fate dramas were such failures. Our feelings rise against any arbi-
trary individual fate.
For Freud, everyone experiences Oedipal strivings but most people learn
to overcome them and are not tormented by them. Freud used the term
Oedipus complex because it was the story found in the Oedipus myth and
in the great Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles. Freud argued that
it also explained why Shakespeare’s Hamlet has such an impact on every-
one who sees the play.
The Myth Model

I have developed what I call the “myth model” to suggest the way a myth
plays a role in history, in psychoanalytic thought, in elite culture, in popu-
lar culture and in everyday life. Using this model I argue that certain myths
inform our culture, and we can see this in the different areas described
above. The theme of the myth I will be working with here involves time,
since the notion of a millennium is based on time. The Greek word Chronos
means time. Chronometers are devices for measuring time in a precise
manner. The existence of digital watches, such as the Apple Watch, is a
signifier that our passion about time remains with us—though the Apple
Watch has other features that expand on its role in our daily lives.
So we think about history in terms of thousands of years, that is, mil-
lennia, but, at the same time, are concerned, some would say obsessed,
about the passage of minutes and seconds in our daily lives and may
believe, in our unconscious, that our watches somehow give us power over
time. I will take my myth model and fill it in with details. I will start with
the myth of Cronos.
The Myth Model
Myth Cronos, god of time

Historical Experience Celebration of the millennium in 2000 AD
Psychoanalytic Theory Oedipal conflict on personal level, conflict between
generations on societal level
Elite Culture Kronos quartet, paintings of Chronos devouring his
children, etc.
Popular Culture Film Millennium (1989)
Everyday Life Millennial generation buys digital watches and smartphones
(and other digital devices)
What we find, then, is that in the myth of Cronos there are themes that
help us understand something about the nature of the Millennial genera-
tion and of their conflicts with other generations.
We are not conscious, I believe, of the way that myths inform our cul-
tures and impact upon our daily lives. But we can see how a myth might
have an impact on our societies and on the elite culture and popular cul-
ture that we consume and upon our everyday lives. I would suggest that
myths play an important role in what Erich Fromm describes as social
character. As he explains in his book Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My
Encounter with Marx and Freud (1962:77–79):
Individuals within a given society differ, of course, in their personal charac-

teristics…. Yet, if we disregard minute differences, we can form certain types
of character structures which are roughly representative for various groups
of individuals. Such types are the receptive, the exploitative, the hoarding,
the marketing, the productive character orientations. The problem of char-
acter structure gains in importance far beyond the individual, if it can be
shown that nations or societies or classes within a given society have a char-
acter structure which is characteristic for them, even though individuals dif-
fer in many specific ways, and even though there will be always a number of
individuals whose character structure does not fit at all into the broader
pattern of the structure common to the group as a whole. I have named this
character which is typical for a society the “social character.”
What Fromm points out is that it is possible to say things about nations, and
in our case, a large population, this makes sense, even though there will
always be members of that nation or group—in this case Millennials—who
are different from one another and most of the other members of their
country or generation. The exemplary case to show how a myth informs
cultures and human behavior would be Millennials walking around with
iPhones in their pockets and Apple Watches on their wrists. Apple’s icon and
name suggests its link with myth: in this case, the myth of Adam and Eve.
References
Danesi, Marcel. 2002. Understanding Media Semiotics. London: Arnold.
Fromm, Erich. 1962. Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and
Freud. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Patai, Raphael. 1972. Myth and Modern Man. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
CHAPTER 5
Millennials and the Media
Abstract The subject of this chapter is how Millennials use the media and
how the media attempt to use Millennials. It starts with a discussion of
Millennials and social media and offers a discussion by a psychiatrist, David
Brunskill, of the negative impact social media have on people, what he
calls the “net effect.” Research suggests there may be a relationship
between social networking and narcissism. An overview of Millennials and
media is offered, and Millennials’ role as “digital natives” is discussed. This
leads to a discussion of Millennials and “virtual communities.” Next, there
is a description of the Hikikomori problem—troubled Millennials—in
Japan. Will American Millennials end up like them? A discussion of the
“Generation C” segment of Millennials and their use of social media fol-
lows. The question of addiction to media is discussed, which is followed
by a section on affluent Millennials and their use of social media and of the
“overuse” of social media by Millennials of all kinds.
Keywords Net effect • Digital natives • Hikikomori • Generation C
The material quoted here offers insights into what is distinctive about the
way the Millennials relate to the media. I begin with a quotation from
Fool.com.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_5
48 A.A. BERGER
Two and a half years ago, everybody freaked out when Facebook’s … David
Ebersman, said the company was seeing a decline in daily usage among
younger teens. To be sure, 2013 marks the beginning of the decline of
Facebook as teens’ “most important” social network. But that doesn’t mean
teens and young adults are no longer visiting Facebook. A recent report
from comScore shows that 18–34-year-olds in the United States use
Facebook more than any other social network. That’s not really a surprise,
of course. Facebook counts 1.6 billion monthly active users around the
world, which is 4 times bigger than its closest competitor, Instagram. More
interesting is the fact that according to the comScore data, millennials spend
2.5 times more time on Facebook than on the next-closest social network,
Snapchat. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/04/
millennials…
I offer, next, some statistics about Millennial use of the Internet and
smartphones and related concerns. It is by Tanya Gazdik and comes from
her article “Millennials Most Digitally Connected Generation,” Marketing
Daily. July 2, 2014.
Millennials spend 14.5 hours each week texting, talking and accessing social
media on their smartphone, more than any other generation, according to a
report from Experian Marketing Services. These adults, ages 18–34, are also
the most diverse, informed and digitally connected generation, with 77%
owning a smartphone. Millennials spend so much time on their smartphones
that they account for 41% of the total time that Americans spend using
smartphones, despite making up just 29% of the population. In the report,
“ ” 50% of Millennial smartphone owners say that they access the Internet
more often through their phone than through a computer. Millennials also
spend the most time using media compared with other generations, at
approximately 9.5 hours a day, or 67 hours a week….
The way that Millennials use media and the way that media attempt to use
Millennials is the subject of this chapter. This material quoted above points
out that many Millennials still use Facebook, though research suggests
they use it differently now than they did years ago.
MILLENNIALS AND THE MEDIA 49
Fig. 5.1 Arthur Asa Berger’s Facebook Page
Millennials and Facebook
Research, as I pointed out above, suggests that many Millennials still use
Facebook. They are on Facebook for around thirty minutes a day, and
forty-one percent of Millennials are on Facebook every day. What impact
does their use of Facebook have on their lives and what does it reflect
about their psyches? An article by psychiatrist David Brunskill, “Social
Media, Social Avatars and the Psyche: Is Facebook Good For Us?”
(Australasian Psychiatry, 2013, 21(6), 527–532) offers some insights.
He argues that when we post on social media, we tend to self-select
favorable material to represent ourselves, which leads to the creation of
what he calls “a socially-derived and socially-driven composite online
image.” (A “social avatar.”) There is a big gap, then, between our online
image, a representation of ourselves, and our offline identity. These avatars
50 A.A. BERGER
contribute to a number of psychological problems we face, leading to

what he describes as psychopathology. He calls this psychopathology the
“net effect.” He discusses these problems as follows:
It has also been proposed that five psychological forces (Grandiosity,

Narcissism, Darkness, Regression and Impulsivity) vie to assert themselves
as the material from which the e-personality is built and that they—in a
twenty-first century confirmation of the Freudian id—cause a transforma-
tion (and fracture) of personality, known as the Net Effect.
Brunskill’s point is that using Facebook the way Millennials generally do

has an impact upon their psyches and personalities which we, and they,
may not recognize. When someone is on Facebook thirty minutes a day it
is reasonable to suspect that the experience may have unrecognized conse-
quences. There are also obviously harmful behaviors, such as cyber bully-
ing, to be considered. There is also the matter of when our relationship
(time spent) to Facebook and other social media becomes an addiction
and has a negative impact on our lives as individuals, and those with whom
we interact, and upon society in general.
Instead of asking what Millennials do with Facebook, we must also ask
what Facebook is doing to Millennials. The psychological forces he
describes above—Grandiosity, Narcissism, Darkness, Regression and
Impulsivity—are not positive ones, and though Millennials derive positive
benefits from using Facebook, there are, we must recognize, dangers as
well.
A study on the use of social networking sites reveals that there may be
a subtle link between narcissism and social networking. An article titled
“Millennials, narcissism, and social networking: What narcissists do on
social networking sites and why” by Shawn M. Bergman, Matthew
E. Fearrington, Shaun W. Davenport, and Jacqueline Z. Bergman offers
the following insights (Personality and Individual Differences 50 (2011),
706–711):
While we are not proposing that everyone who uses SNSs is a narcissist, the
medium appears to provide the narcissistic individual an ideal opportunity
to display vanity, self-promote, manipulate his/her public-image, and gain
approval and attention. Surprisingly, we found that narcissism was not a
strong predictor of the reported amount of time spent on SNSs or frequency
of status updates. This suggests that Millennials’ SNS usage is not solely
about attention-seeking or maintaining self-esteem (a common stereotype
for “Generation Me;” e.g., Kelley 2009), but is also a means of staying con-
nected and communication. While previous generations accomplished this
via letter, telephone, or email, the Millennials may simply prefer to connect
and communicate via SNSs. Thus, this may not be a sign of pathology, but
a product of the times.
The insight we get from this article is that while a good deal of Millennial
behavior has narcissistic elements to it, their use of social networking sites
can also be seen in a positive light—as the way they communicate with
others and stay connected with them, a sign of the times.
Millennials Like Radio

It turns out that Millennials like radio. It has been estimated that ninety-
two percent of Millennials tune into radio at least once a week. We can
understand why when we recognize that radio is very mobile friendly. As
Tim Murphy explains in his article “Millennials Love Radio. Wait. What?”
(August 3, 2016 in MediaPost’s Engage Millennials):
Consumers, particularly Millennials, notice the time and energy these radio
stations put into their local communities. According to Nielsen, radio’s
weekly reach among the millennials across the country is 92 percent. What
other medium reaches 92% of Millennials on a weekly basis? Additionally,
between February 2015 and February 2016, millennials reported a listening
growth of 10.5 percent. This sizable reach among millennials and adults,
coupled by the fact that 66 percent of radio consumption occurs outside of
homes, puts radio in the best position to reach consumers close to point of
purchase, according to Jacob’s Tech.
We all see how Millennials are wired, but what is surprising is that they are
listening to radio from their smartphones more than we might imagine.
Earlier I quoted statistics to the effect that most Americans, over the
age of twelve, spend between nine and ten hours a day with media, sug-
gesting they live in a media-saturated environment which, it is reasonable
to suggest, affects them in various ways. In my chapter on the psyches of
Millennials I quoted a psychiatrist, David Brunwell, who argues that our
use of social media, like Facebook, can have a negative effect on our psy-
chological wellbeing, so media doesn’t just wash off the backs of Millennials
like water off a duck’s back. Some of the media soaks in.
52 A.A. BERGER
An Overview of Millennials and the Media

In the case of Millennials, in America, we find a postmodern, mass-media
saturated society, where smart phones and the Internet play a pivotal role
in their development. Millennials are wired and the electronic media play
an important role in their everyday lives. Americans spend around eleven
hours a day with electronic media of one kind or another:
5.04 hours with live television

2.46 hours with radio
1.07 hours on their smartphones
1.01 hours on the Internet using personal computers
And this also includes a couple of hours with games consoles, DVDs and
other multimedia devices. We have to keep this attachment to the media
in mind when dealing with Millennials. Millennials watch forty-seven per-
cent less television than adults thirty-five and over, but Millennials still are
great consumers of media.
Millennials Are Digital Natives

in Search of Community
Unlike other generations, Millennials grew up with digital media and have
not had to learn to adapt themselves to it. As a Pew Report on Millennials
and the Digital Media explains (accessed 9/24/2016):
They are “digital natives”—the only generation for which these new tech-
nologies 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 say they know what a “selfie” (a photo taken of one-
self) is—though the term had acquired enough cachet to be declared the
Oxford Dictionaries “word of the year” in 2013. http://www.pewsocial-
trends.org/2014/03/07/millennials-in-adulthood/
The Millennials use digital media to generate self-created digital networks,

where they find a virtual kind of community and attempt to escape from
the alienation found in contemporary societies.
Thus, they average two-hundred and fifty “friends” on Facebook, much
higher than other generations. Most of these friends are virtual friends. I
have around three hundred “friends” on Facebook, but only a half dozen
or so of my Facebook “friends” are people I know or have actually met.
The way Millennials use social media suggests they may be searching for
something that is missing in their everyday lives.
We may wonder whether the reason Millennials are so attracted to
social media is because the institutions of society are breaking down and
the communitarian aspects of American society are withering and degen-
erating (we go bowling alone nowadays) or whether the new digital media
are causing our social institutions to deteriorate. We can look at contem-
porary Japanese culture to see how growing up in a media-saturated soci-
ety can have negative effects.
Millennials and Virtual Communities

We know that Millennials use digital media more than members of many
other segments of the population. What are the effects of all this involve-
ment with digital media and social media? Generally speaking, scholars
who deal with Millennials suggest the impact of all this involvement with
social media is negative. But there may be reasons for some hope, as an
article in MediaPost’s Engage Millennials by Jojo Roy, January 10, 2017
suggests. The article, “Millennials Driving Digital Togetherness in the
Physical World,” offers reasons for optimism. Roy explains that more than
80 percent of Millennials wished that digital games could find ways to cre-
ate more face-to-face relationships and bring families together, in what
Roy calls “digital togetherness.” But there are negative aspects of the
involvement of Millennials with media. Roy describes a recent survey that
reveals that
79% of millennials play digital games multiple times a week, if not daily. But
no matter how many hours they spend absorbed in virtual realities or tap-
ping away on screens, people still crave real life interaction and rely upon
interpersonal relationships to shape their understanding of society. One
study by the Alberta Brain and Cognitive Development Lab found that one
54 A.A. BERGER
of the primary detrimental factors of increased screen time is the decreased

amount of human interaction. They state that young people learn best
through interaction with others and when a large portion of their time is
allocated to screens, it could lead to decreased cognitive functioning. Thus,
creating a juxtaposition of two types of social fulfillment—online and
offline—which millennials believe the digital game design and construct
could bridge. Digital games also get a shaded reputation associated with
hindering socialization and impeding acceptance of society. But having
grown up playing these games, millennials are turning to what they know to
combat these impressions and reveal a brighter, more inclusive side of what
could be if digital games were used to bring people together. So the chal-
lenge now, and what this age group is pushing for, is to bring this digital
community together in real life.
I have some reservations about digital communities, because there is a dif-

ference between seeing others on a screen and being face-to-face with
them. If Millennials are playing video games multiple times a week, they
are losing time that they could spend personally interacting with others. I
heard a report on National Public Radio about a company that has special
training for Millennials to teach them how to converse with “real” people
since so many Millennials aren’t used to face-to-face interactions.
The Hikikomori in Japan: A Case Study

of Troubled Millennials
In Stephen T. Brown’s book, Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese

Visual Culture, he writes about a strange Japanese film, Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s
Kairo. The film, which he describes as a “techno-horror” work, is of inter-
est because Brown suggests it reflects a widespread social disorder in
Japan, which the Japanese call hikikomori. It means, literally, both to “pull
away” and “to seclude oneself.” The term, he explains, describes “both
the social disorder and those who suffer from it” (2010:118). Brown
writes (2010:117–118):
Hikikomori is a term coined by psychiatrist Saito Tamaki to describe the

social withdrawal of reclusive youth, 80 percent of whom are male, who shut
themselves in their rooms and avoid face-to-face interaction for six months
or longer following acute social or psychological trauma, typically triggered
by an event that has occurred at school, such as academic failure, bullying or

jilted romance…. It is estimated that approximately 1.2 million Japanese
men (20 percent of all adolescent males or 1 percent of the entire popula-
tion) in their late teens and early twenties suffer from hikikomori, thus mak-
ing it a social disease of nearly epidemic proportions. The majority of those
suffering from hikikomori are eldest sons who live with their middle-class
parents in the suburbs of Japan’s largest cities. Many hikikomori sleep during
the days and spend their nights in seclusion, playing video games, watching
television, reading books and manga, and surfing the Internet.
Brown says that this behavior is slowly spreading to Korea and China. He
quotes a Japanese scholar, Fujiwara Mariko, who argues that the problem
has developed because Japanese teens spend so much time interacting with
electronic devices that they’ve lost the ability to interact with others, face-
to-face. The hikikomori are mostly teen and adolescent males and their
average age is thirty-one years. That means the average hikikomori was
born in 1985 (for the year 2016). Of course many hikikomori are younger
than that and some may be a bit older.
Murakami Riu, a Japanese novelist, suggests that the hikikomori may be
harbingers of a new kind of society, full of people who are socially
withdrawn and whose problems are exacerbated by their increased reliance
on electronic media, the Internet, and the various gizmos that adolescents
use to entertain themselves. What makes things worse is that these socially
withdrawn Japanese youth rely to a considerable extent on what has caused
the problems they face—the Internet and electronic devices, which both
help create and then facilitate their self-imposed seclusion.
There are certain aspects of Japanese culture that might explain why the
hikikomori developed. Japan is a very conformist culture, where fathers
generally have relatively little to do with their children, where there is tre-
mendous pressure put on children and young people to succeed academi-
cally, and where economic problems have had a profound impact on the
sense of possibility of Japanese youth. Research I did on the problem for a
book I wrote on Japanese tourism and culture shows that when they do
return to society the hikikomori generally don’t get full-time jobs, don’t
find girlfriends and don’t lead “normal” lives. Brown concludes that the
epidemic of social withdrawal has created a “lost generation” that will be
a burden on Japan’s health and welfare system for many years.
56 A.A. BERGER
The Novel ME and Contemporary

Japanese Millennials
In ME, a novel by Tomoyuki Hoshino, Hitoshi, an electronics clerk, steals
a stranger’s mobile and uses it to have the mother of the mobile’s owner
wire money to him. Shortly after this, the stranger’s mother appears at his
apartment, refuses to believe he isn’t her son, and pesters him about get-
ting married. When Hitoshi returns to his childhood home, he finds a
young man of around his age who looks like him and uses his name. As
Sam Sacks, from whom I’ve taken this review of the novel, writes in his
article, “Young Urban Japanese Singles,” (Wall Street Journal, Saturday,
June 17, 2017–2018, page C8)
Part existential fable, part “Night of the Living Dead,” Mr. Hoshino’s novel
… paints a nightmare vision of Japan’s rootless millennials, who work grind-
ing dead-end jobs that leave them little time for family or individual pas-
sions…. At first, Hitoshi and his fellow MEs are happy to band together
against an uncaring world. But the camaraderie doesn’t last, since every time
one reveals a character flaw the others take it as an indictment of themselves.
As the ME’s failures and weaknesses become intolerably magnified onto the
“living but useless rabble” they’re gripped by a suicidal impulse that
unleashes a crazed murder spree. The frenetic knife-wielding finale reaches
its climax in—a McDonald’s, of course. None of them can think of any place
else to eat.
Sacks discusses two other novels in an article with a subhead “Three novels
about millennials disconnected from society, from one another and from
hope.” These novels suggest that Millennials pose a significant problem to
Japanese culture and society—perhaps aggravated by certain character
traits of Japanese people.
We may now ask, is Japan, with its distinctive culture, an exception, or
are other countries, even if they aren’t as conformist as Japan, heading in
the direction of Japan? Will other cultures start experiencing the problem
with large numbers of socially withdrawn youth that we find in Japan? Is it
the culture that is at fault or the unrecognized imperatives in the elec-
tronic devices that youth everywhere use so much? Or can it be both? We
know that there is a similar problem with some young people in China and
Korea, but the scale is not the same as in Japan because the cultures in
China and Korea are quite different. But they may have certain similarities
that generate their own Hikikomori.
The Generation C Segment of the Millennials

David L. Williams, Victoria L. Crittenden, Teeda Keo and Paulette
McCarty explain, in an article titled “Study of usage among digital
natives,” that there are differences within the Millennial generation that
are important. One of these subgroups of Millennials is known as
“Generation C” and it refers to Millennials who were born after 1990. So,
in 2008, when the article was published, they were eighteen years old and
now, in 2017, they are at least twenty-seven years old. Their use of the
media is somewhat different from other younger Millennials. The authors
explain that these “Generation C” Millennials are either starting to attend
college or are beginning to find jobs. They write:
They love content creation and mashing (mashing or mash-up is the com-
bining of content material from multiple sources to create new content);
They have the tendency to form active communities rather than remain
passive, and as such, they gravitate toward social media sites where they can
participate in discussions about different ideas and get involved in cultural
conversations;
They have a desire to be in control of their own lives;
They are content with complexity; and
They have a desire to work in more creative industries and be less restricted
by rigid social structures. No matter the label attached to this group, one
characteristic that they share in large numbers is that they were born into a
digital world and, as such, are frequently referred to as digital natives. https://
www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Williams54/publication…
So we see that there are considerable differences among Millennial age

groups, which is only to be expected. A thirty-year old non-“Generation
C” Millennial has considerably different interests than an eighteen to
twenty-four old member of “Generation C.” The “Generation C”
Millennials make great use of their smartphones to access games, videos
and other things of interest on the Internet, which they use to form virtual
communities of one sort or another.
An article in the August 5, 2016 issue of eMarketer, “Young Internet
Users Say They are Addicted to Their Devices,” shows that seventy-four
percent of thirteen to twenty-four year old Americans say they are addicted
to their phones and they check them constantly. Some sixty-six percent of
twenty-five through thirty-four year old Americans admit to being
addicted. A chart showing the addictions by age follows:
58 A.A. BERGER
US Internet Users Who Say They Are Addicted to Their

Digital Devices, by Age, July 2016
% of respondents
13–24 76%
25–34 66%
35–54 58%
55+ 39%
Total 59%
Note: computer, smartphone, etc,; “definitely” and “somewhat”
Source: CivicScience as cited in company blog, July 12, 2016
Fig. 5.2 US Internet Users Addicted to Digital Devices
The author of the article writes:
By and large, internet users can’t get enough of their digital devices.
According to July 2016 research, more than half of internet users are
addicted to them—and it’s most common among younger users. In fact, the
survey from CivicScience uncovered that more than three-quarters of
13–24-year-olds said they were “addicted” to their digital devices, which
included computers and smartphones. To compare, self-declared device
addiction among this age group was more than double that of users ages 55
and older.
Furthermore, internet users ages 25–34 were also almost as likely to be

addicted to their devices as 13–24-year-olds. Indeed, two-thirds said they
were.
Younger users’ smartphone additions may not be surprising: Ownership
of smartphones among teens has surged in recent years. eMarketer esti-
mates that 84.0% of 12–17-year-olds will own and use a smartphone on a
monthly basis this year.
The following chart, published on July 07, 2016 offers statistics of
interest.
Frequency with Which US Millennial Smartphone

Users Check Their Smartphone, Feb 2016
% of respondents
A few times More than

per day 10 times per hour
19% 20%
At least once
At least twice every 15 minutes
an hour 25%
36%
Note: ages 18–30

Source: Coupofy, “The 2016 Smartphone User Behavior Report: Millennials
& Their Smartphone Habits,” June 6, 2016
Fig. 5.3 Smartphone Usage by Millennials
Research from Coupofy reveals that twenty percent of American

Millennials check their smartphones at least every six minutes and twenty-
five percent of them every fifteen minutes, or four times an hour. The
hypervigilance can be interpreted as signifying a widespread unease and a
diffuse sense of anxiety found in the American public that is generated by
access to the Internet. We know that the Internet has led to remarkable
developments in many different areas. Neurologists in India can scan
x-rays taken at midnight in American hospitals when no neurologists are
on duty. We now have free universities and other forms of mass education
on the Internet. There are sites on the Internet on every possible subject.
The Internet has made Uber and Airbnb possible.
But there are also negative consequences to the Internet. Herbert
L. Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California in
Berkeley, discusses research in his book about some negative effects of the
Internet. He quotes, in his book On the Internet (2nd edition), from an
article by R. Kraut et al. titled “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology
60 A.A. BERGER
that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being”

(American Psychologist, 1998, vol. 53, no. (9), pp. 1017–1031):
The research examined the social and psychological impact of the Internet
on 169 people in seventy-three households during their first one or two
years online…. In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for com-
munication. Nonetheless, the greater use of the Internet was associated with
declines in participants’ communication with family members in the house-
hold, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in depression
and loneliness…. On-line friendships are likely to be more limited than
friendships supported by physical proximity…. Because on-line friends are
not embedded in the same day-to-day environment, they will be less likely
to understand the context for conversation, making discussion more diffi-
cult and rendering support less applicable … The interpersonal communica-
tion applications currently prevalent on the Internet are either neutral
toward strong ties or tend to undercut them rather than promote them.
We can argue, then, that the Internet is a two-edged sword, which has
both positive and negative features. Its impact on Generation C Millennials,
and Millennials in general (and other generations as well), is not all posi-
tive and, as the example of the hikikomori in Japan suggests, young people
who become obsessed with their media devices can experience serious
psychological problems. The search for community is understandable

since human beings are social animals, but the virtual communities fos-
tered by the Internet are not as satisfying as real communities in which
people have face-to-face conversations, interactions and experiences. And
too much reliance on the Internet and social media can, paradoxically, lead
to withdrawal and isolation.
Affluent Millennials Spend Lots of Time Online

According to a report published in eMarketer, on October 20, 2016, afflu-
ent millennials spend twice as much time online as affluent seniors. The
chart from eMarketer shows how much time members of the different
generations tend to spend online. It reveals that affluent millennials spend
an average of fifty-three hours a week online, approximately ten more
hours than Generation X members (35–51).
Weekly Time Spent Online by US Affluent Internet

Users, by Generation, July 2016
hours
Millennials (18–34) 53%
Gen X (35–51) 45.4
Baby boomers (52–70) 37.2
Seniors (71+) 28.0
Note: among those who have household income of S100K+
Source: IPSOS Connect, “Fall 2016 Ipsos Affluent Survey USA,” Sep 29. 2016
Fig. 5.4 Time Spent Online by Generations in US
We learn from a report by Ipsos Connect, based on a survey it con-

ducted that
The average millennial with household income of at least $100,000 spends

53 hours per week online, more than their counterparts in any other genera-
tion. Gen X affluents are almost 10 hours behind. Assuming equal amounts
of time spent online each day of the week, that translates to about 7.5 hours
of daily internet time for millennial affluent internet users, about 6.5 hours
for Gen Xers, about 5.3 hours for baby boomers and 4 hours for seniors. For
comparison, eMarketer estimates that the average US adult internet user
spends 2 hours 49 minutes each day going online via desktop or laptop PCs,
and the average adult smartphone user spends an additional 2 hours 30 min-
utes each day on nonvoice mobile activities.
This report says that the average adult American spends close to six hours
involved with “digital media activities” a day, with millennials typically
spending almost eight hours a day. This means that millennials are, more
than other generations, online creatures who spend almost a third of each
day with digital media.
62 A.A. BERGER
References
Bergman, Shawn Z., et al. 2011. Millennials, Narcissism, and Social Networking:
What Narcissists Do on Social Networking Sites and Why. Personality and
Individual Differences 50: 706–711.
Brown, Stephen T. 2010. Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual
Culture. New York: Palgrave.
Brunskill, David. 2013. Social Media, Social Avatars and the Psyche: Is Facebook
Good for Us? Australasian Psychiatry 21 (6): 527–532.
Kraut, R., et al. 1988. Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social
Involvement and Psychological Well-Being. American Psychologist 53 (9):
1017–1031.
Millennials and the Digital Media. Pew Report, September 24, 2016.
Murphy, Tim. 2016. Millennials Love Radio. Wait. What? MediaPost’sEngage
Millennials, August 3.
Roy, Jojo. 2017. Millennials Driving Digital Togetherness in the Physical World.
MediaPost’sEngage Millennials, January 10.
Young Internet Users Say They Are Addicted to Their Devices. eMarketer, August
5, 2016.
CHAPTER 6
Marketing to Millennials
Abstract Marketers are interested in Millennials because they are a huge

market, and understanding how they think is important to marketers and
advertisers. There are an estimated seventy to eighty million Millennials and
their purchasing power is very large. How they shop is of considerable inter-
est to marketers, who wish to find and engage with them. The chapter offers
various strategies for engaging with them. One marketer offers a typology
with twelve different kinds of Millennials, which means marketing to them
is a complicated matter. Grid-group theory is used to suggest another typol-
ogy, with four “lifestyles” for Millennials: egalitarians, elitists, individualists,
and fatalists. Social anthropologist Mary Douglas is quoted suggesting that
unconscious imperatives in each of the four lifestyles shapes the consump-
tion practices of Millennials. The chapter ends with a discussion of the
impact Millennials have had on traditional advertising practices.
Keywords Marketing • Grid-group theory • Lifestyles
This chapter deals with how marketers are attempting to “reach” Millennials.
I begin with a quotation from an eMarketer article on Feb. 23, 2016:
Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 305 US agency and marketing professionals

who are involved in media brand selection decisions and recommending,
specifying or approving spending for mobile advertising. Of the total media

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_6
64 A.A. BERGER
budget that marketers have allocated to reach millennials (34%), 39% is allo-
cated to mobile budgets to reach this age group. Additionally, marketers
estimated that millennials and Gen Xers account for almost half of all con-
sumer spending, according to the data. And notably, teens and tweens com-
bined spent as much as baby boomers. It’s not surprising that marketers want
to reach millennials—they are impulse shoppers. A January 2015 survey
from Chase found that 83% of US millennials had made an impulse purchase.
A separate August 2014 study by Gallup found that millennials were more
likely than Gen Xers or baby boomers to make impulse purchases.
We turn, next, to some surprising statistics about the wealth of different

generations. This information is found in Bob Shulman’s article in
MediaPost: Engage: Affluents Op-Ed. Sept. 7, 2016
The average household income of adults who live in the 31 million house-
holds with household incomes of $100,000 or more is about $190,000,
while adults in the 4 million households with household incomes of $250,000
have household incomes of about $475,000 on average. In comparison, mil-
lionaires—19 million adults in total—have average household incomes at just
about the same level as adults in households with $100,000 or more in
household income. Depending on the products or services an affluent mar-
keter is selling, the sizes of these three affluent target groups and the range in
their average household incomes make a big difference to a marketer’s prob-
ability of being successful in selling products and services. When profiled by
adult generations, Boomers predominate in households with household
incomes of $100,000 or more (about 40% are Boomers). The $250,000+
households contain more Gen-Xers than other generations (about 39% are
Gen-Xers), while 31% of millionaires are Boomers and 41% are Millennials.
Bob Shulman, MediaPost: Engage: Affluents Op-Ed. Sept. 7, 2016
Nobody is more interested in Millennials than marketers and people who

work in advertising agencies. Marketing to Millennials is a topic endlessly
discussed by marketers who want to find out how to reach Millennials and
persuade them to purchase various products and services. In the epigraph by
Bob Shulman we read that many Millennials are millionaires. So some of
them have a lot of money to spend and, even better for marketers, Millennials
tend to be impulse buyers. The eMarketer article quoted at the beginning of
this chapter also pointed out that Millennials account for twenty-four per-
cent of consumer spending, but the share of money spent on media allocated
to reach Millennials is thirty-four percent. That is why Millennials are such a
valuable market segment. Many marketers seem to believe that if they can
find a Millennial, that Millennial and his or her money will soon be parted.
MARKETING TO MILLENNIALS 65
Estimated Consumer Spending Share According to US

Marketers, by Age/Generation, Aug 2015
% of total
Kids
4%
Seniors Tweens
8% 7%
Teens
Baby boomers
13%
19%
Gen X Gen Y/millennials

24% 24%
Note: n=305 agency and marketing professionals involved in media brand

selection decisions; numbers may not add up to 100% due to rounding
Source: Advertiser Perceptions, “Mobile Advertising Study - Wave Three,”
Jan 2016
Fig. 6.1 Consumer Spending by Generations
This eMarketer chart, published in February 22, 2016, shows that

Generation Xers have the same share of consumer spending as Millennials
(Generation Y) and Tweens and Teens together have a twenty percent
share. Millennials, we are told, are more prone to make impulse purchases,
which makes them an especially valuable target audience. There are an
estimated seventy five to eighty million Millennials, and even though some
of them are financially distressed, Millennials still have two-hundred bil-
lion dollars in annual buying power. And, as I mentioned earlier, they are
prone to making impulse purchases—a very interesting bit of information
as far as marketers and advertisers are concerned.
An article by Sean Hargrave in MediaPost, June 23, 2016 titled
“Mcommerce Leaders Double Up and Pull Ahead—Have You Left It Too
Late?” offers an interesting insight into the way millennials shop. Hargrave
writes:
66 A.A. BERGER
The research is in and the results are conclusive, at least for 18–34-year-olds.
At least one in ten buy something on the mobile phone every day, which is
double the national average, and the propensity to embrace mcommerce is
linked to social use. Thus, while 17% of the population have bought some-
thing on their mobile device, that proportion doubles for Facebook users
and goes up to around one in two Instagram users and two in three Snapchat.
So it is the mobile phone that dominates the shopping practices of

Millennials, who shop with their mobile phones at twice the national aver-
age. We can only wonder what will happen when Millennials have pur-
chased Amazon.com’s very popular Echo devices, which will enable them
to purchase things at Amazon.com with voice commands.
Engaging Millennials
How do marketers “engage” with Millennials? Shlomo Wiesen writes in a
column on MediaPost’s Engage Millennials (July 29, 2016) that there are
“Three Thematic Strategies for Engaging Millennials.” He discusses the
first two below (I’ve eliminated some passages here and there but have not
changed the meaning of the quoted material):
Millennials own on average about 4 mobile devices. Sure, they’re more

likely to be distracted, but if a company doesn’t have a mobile presence,
then they can forget about millennials and even Generation Z….
Gamification, or corporate gamification for that matter, is a necessary tool
to keep any Millennial engaged and interested. Whether it’s an employee or
even a prospective employee, gamification will break down what might be
otherwise dull subject matter, and turn it into an interesting and possibly
competitive activity. Of course, Millennials were the first generation to grow
up with video game consoles in their homes, so there is the aspect of a rather
simple appreciation for video games as the core of this aspect.
His third theme is fairness, about which he writes:
Though this seems like a no-brainer, fairness is the most important and
complicated theme to be used for engaging Millennials. Sure, everyone likes
to be treated fairly. But Millennials in particular seem to have a chip on their
shoulder.
Wiesen’s focus on “gamification” suggests that the boundaries between

work and play are breaking down and it is now necessary—if one wishes to
target Millennials—to turn work into something like play, to the extent
that this is possible. And the discussion of fairness implies an implicit egali-
tarian perspective on society, in which everyone is treated the same way.
The fact that Millennials crave reassurance suggests a certain amount of
anxiety they feel about their possibilities.
A Typology of Millennials
On an Adweek 2014 website titled “Marketing to Millennials” we find a
typology describing different types/kinds of Millennials. They are:
1. The Boss Babe, 8. The Exuberant,

2. The Brogrammer, 9. The Collector,
3. The Nostalgic, 10. The Millennial Martha,
4. The Underemployed, 11. The Millennial Mom
5. The Shut Out, 12. The Quarter-Life Crisis.
6. The Travel Enthusiast, 13. The Activist
7. The Culinary Explorer, 14. The High End Minimalist
https://www.slideshare.net/Curalate/marketing-to-millennials-the-power-of-
generation-y
The last two kinds of Millennials were developed using qualitative data.
We learn:
As millennials place increased importance on understanding the social

impact that brands have, and exactly how products are manufactured, we
were compelled to define these personas as well. Exponential outlined the
type of buying power each of their personas carries, but with today’s shop-
ping landscape being dominated by visual consumers, it’s imperative that
marketers consider the type of imagery that will hook them.
The term “persona” means mask in Latin. Are these Millennials’ perso-
nas best thought of as masks they put on for the public or are they charac-
terizations of the true nature of members of each group. The thesis that
“Marketing to Millennials” expounds is that Millennials, growing up in a
media-saturated environment, are very interested in visual images, and so
knowing the kind of visual images that will appeal to each persona or kind
68 A.A. BERGER
of Millennial is important if you want to catch their attention and sell

them something.
When marketers make their typologies, they generally have some kind
of a basis for determining the different categories found in the group they
are studying. And they give each category a jazzy name, like “Quarter-Life
Crisis” or “High-End Minimalist.” It is generally assumed that we can
figure out what each category means. Thus, we can assume that “Quarter-
Life Crisis” refers to Millennials who experience some kind of crisis in their
early twenties, assuming the average American of their generation will live
to around eighty years. But what is a Millennial Martha?
We might ask, on what basis were the different categories created? How
(on what basis) did they get so many, or why did they stop at fourteen?
The problem with most typologies is that there is no way to determine
how to break up whatever group being analyzed—in this case Millennials—
in a logically satisfying way. Some of the Exponential Interactive personas
relate to types of personalities (Boss Babe, Exuberant, Nostalgic) and
some relate to interests (Travel Enthusiast, Culinary Explorer). Can a
Millennial Mom or Nostalgic also be a Travel Enthusiast? If I were to
examine the data used by Exponential Interactive, would I come up with
a different set of Millennial personas?
Almost all typologies are arbitrary and cannot explain themselves. These
typologies are often quite interesting and even useful, but they don’t rest
on any kind of logical basis, which explains why typologists only break the
groups being analyzed into certain categories, personas or subgroups.
Understanding Millennials
Jeff Urban, a columnist for MediaPost’s series on millennials offers more
insights into their preferences. He writes in an article titled “Understand
A Demographic: Multicultural Millennials” (Friday, November 18, 2016):
The Buzz Marketing Group did a study of 21–36-year-old multicultural

millennials to get a pulse as to what they want, where they want it and when
they want it. According to CEO and founder Tina Wells, “When it comes to
loyalty, multicultural millennials give as much as they get. They know what
they like, and aren’t shy about sharing that information with their friends
and contacts.”
As a general demographic, multicultural millennials breakdown their
preferences as the following:
93% download apps for their smartphones monthly

89% watch TV daily
87% read magazines monthly
Daily News Consumption:
TV—81%
Facebook—73%
Radio—66%
Friends—63%
Newspapers—60%
Brand Loyalty:
95% consider themselves to be loyal to brands they like
83% like it when brands take a public stand for or against issues they
believe in
78% feel like they have power as a consumer to influence big brands
What do we as marketers need to know about the millennial demo-
graphic to concept our content strategies? Understanding millennials and
the factions of the demographic are crucial to seeing success. In terms of
brand breakdown, 38% of millennials state that from the brands, products
and services, they purchase regularly, “they make their life better” is the
most important factor in their choice, according to the report. That, cou-
pled with the fact that millennials are consuming content on multiple screens
at the same time, proves that we need to bring content to our audience and
provide them with live streams, and total content, that excites, engages and
makes them want to share it with their own networks.
What do we learn from this? Almost forty percent of millennials say they
purchase things that will make their lives better. Are they different from
other generations in that respect? I don’t think so. The fact that they con-
sume content from many screens at the same time suggests they are differ-
ent from other generations, though more and more people from other
generations check their emails and use their mobiles when watching
television.
It is surprising to find that sixty percent of millennials read newspapers,
but we don’t know how much time they spend with them. Most Americans
get their news from television and the millennials are like other genera-
tions in that respect. One problem with this survey is that there is a big
difference between twenty-one-year-old millennials and thirty-six-year-old
ones. It is likely that by thirty-six, many millennials have married and may
have children, so their interests are quite different from twenty-one year-
olds, who probably are not married and have not settled down.
70 A.A. BERGER
Fig. 6.2 Mary Douglas
Grid-Group Theory and Millennials

Many years ago a British social anthropologist, Mary Douglas, worked out
a typology that rests on logical foundations. She argued that people face
two problems: the first, which involves identity, is “Who am I?” The sec-
ond, which involves behavior, is “What should I do?” She suggested that
we answer the first question by belonging to a group that has either strong
or weak borders. If the borders are strong, you cannot move through them
easily. Think, for example, of the difference between Catholic Priests and
Jewish Reform rabbis or Unitarian ministers. The second question is
answered by being a member of a group that has either few or many rules
and restrictions. We can use the Catholic Priest and Reform Rabbis and
Unitarian ministers here as well. When I was drafted into the US Army I
found very strong borders and many prescriptions and rules.
These two dimensions, weak or strong borders and few or many rules,
generate four groups—which Douglas calls “Lifestyles.” She did some col-
laborations with a political scientist, Aaron Wildavsky, who also used the
term “political cultures” in his writings instead of “Lifestyles.” The four
groups or “lifestyles” are: Elitists (sometimes Hierarchical Elitists),
Egalitarians, Individualists (sometimes Competitive Individualists) and
Fatalists. Different theorists use different terms.
Lifestyles in grid-group theory

Lifestyle Group boundaries Many/few prescriptions
Elitists Strong Many

Egalitarians Strong Few
Individualists Weak Few
Fatalists Weak Many
In their book Culture Theory, Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis and

Aaron Wildavsky explain how the four lifestyles come about (1990:6–7):
Strong group boundaries coupled with minimal prescriptions produce social

relations that are egalitarian.… When an individual’s social environment is
characterized by strong group boundaries and binding prescriptions, the result-
ing social relations are hierarchical [sometimes known as elitist].… Individuals
who are bounded by neither group incorporation nor prescribed roles inhabit
an individualistic social context. In such an environment all boundaries are
provisional and subject to negotiation.… People who find themselves subject
to binding prescriptions and are excluded from group membership exemplify
the fatalistic way of life. Fatalists are controlled from without.
Elitists and Individualists are the establishment, the dominant lifestyles in

all societies. Egalitarians function as critics of the Elitists and Individualists
and try to elevate Fatalists, who generally find themselves at the bottom of
the economic ladder. We must recognize that we are unaware of our mem-
bership in one of these lifestyles, but they play an all-important role in our
lives as consumers. We can think of these lifestyles as four different consumer
cultures operating in the same society and each of them antagonistic toward
the others. Many of the choices we make as consumers are based on the fact
that we don’t like the kind of choices members of other lifestyles would logi-
cally make. The two dimensions of sociality, weak or strong boundaries and
few or many rules and prescriptions, yield four and only four lifestyles.
Douglas wrote an important article, “In Defence of Shopping,” in
which she argues that (1997:23) “cultural alignment is the strongest pre-
dictor of preferences in a wide variety of fields.” For her, it is their cultural
alignment or membership in one of the four lifestyles that determine what
anyone (including Millennials) consumes. The advertisements that lead
Millennials to buy certain goods and services must be, then, focused upon
their lifestyles. She explains how this works (1997:17):
72 A.A. BERGER
We have to make a radical shift away from thinking about consumption as a

manifestation of individual choices. Culture itself is the result of myriad
choices, not primarily between commodities but between kinds of relation-
ships. The basic choice that a rational individual has to make is the choice of
what kind of society to live in. According to that choice, the rest follows.
Artefacts are selected to demonstrate that choice. Food is eaten, clothes are
worn, cinema, books, music, holidays, all the rest are choices that conform
with the initial choice for a form of society.
Douglas claims that there are four distinct and mutually antagonistic life-
styles or consumer cultures, but Millennials, who are in each of them, are
not aware they belong to one of them. This would mean that it wouldn’t
be demographic or socioeconomic class or personal taste or discretionary
income that is basic in Millennials consumption decisions, but their life-
styles or membership in one of the four mutually antagonistic consumer
cultures. When it comes to consumption, one is an elitist or individualist
or egalitarian or fatalist first, and a Millennial second.
We are left then with four Millennial publics for marketers to focus their
attention on because the consumption decisions members of a lifestyle
make are not based on individual taste (though most people think they
are) as much as the hidden imperatives stemming from one’s lifestyle.
Shopping, Douglas explains, is a struggle to define not what one is but
what one is not. This reminds us of the semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure’s
dictum that concepts are differential. A concept’s most precise character-
istic, he suggested, is in being what other concepts are not.
Advertisements, then, must be designed to appeal to one of the four
different lifestyles and involve the implicit rejection of the tastes of all the
other lifestyles. What Mary Douglas reminds us is that we find out who we
are by discovering who we aren’t and whose taste we don’t like. This
means that marketers must figure out ways to determine which Millennial
lifestyle might be most interested in a product they are selling and which
ones wouldn’t. According to grid-group theorists, there are, then, four
and only four Millennial target audiences/lifestyles and advertisements
must appeal to one and only one of them.
Millennial Marketers
An article in the Thursday, Oct. 20, 2016 “Research Brief” of the Center
for Media Research, “Millennials Upend Traditional Madison Avenue
Advertising Practices,” offers some insights into the way Millennial
arketers attempt to reach customers. It cites research done by Magisto

m
which surveyed 500 American-based small- and medium-sized businesses
and their digital and mobile marketing strategies. Some of the key findings
of the survey, conducted in September 2016, follow:
Millennials spend 58% of their marketing budget on digital media; Baby

boomers spend only 14% of their marketing budget on digital media, mak-
ing millennials 3X more likely than baby boomers to spend the majority of
their media budget on digital advertising. Nearly half 41% of millennials
spend the bulk of their marketing budget on mobile media. Less than 10%
of baby boomers rely on the same media. In order to successfully cross the
digital divide, says the report, businesses of any size need to put digital and
mobile media at the core of their strategy rather than treating it as an exten-
sion. Small and medium sized businesses led by millennials do just that and
are finding scalable and sustainable ways to deploy growing digital media
marketing budgets.
Millennials in the United States spend one-quarter of all the money that is
spent on consumer goods. It is only logical that marketers devote a great
deal of energy to attracting their attention by any means they can. To fur-
ther complicate matters, there is another way to think about Millennials
that I will discuss now—the way Millennials shop.
References
Douglas, Mary. 1997. In Defence of Shopping. In The Shopping Experience, ed.
P. Falk and C. Campbell, 15–30. London: Sage.
Hargrave, Sean. 2016. MCommerce Leaders Double Up and Pull Ahead—Have
You Left It Too Late? MediaPost, June 23.
Millennials Upend Traditional Madison Avenue Advertising Practices. Center for
Media Research, October 20, 2016.
Shulman, Bob. 2016. MediaPost’s Engage Affluents, September 7.
Thompson, Michael, et al. 1990. Culture Theory. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Urban, Jeff. 2016. Understand a Demographic: Multicultural Millennials.
MediaPost’s Engage Millennials, November 18.
Wiesen, Shlomo. 2016. Three Thematic Strategies for Engaging Millennials.
MediaPost’s Engage Millennials, June 29.
CHAPTER 7
Millennials as Shoppers and Consumers
Abstract The focus shifts now from marketers to Millennials as shoppers

and consumers. It turns out that they love diamonds and buy more dia-
monds than any other generation—perhaps because they are young and
are getting engaged more than members of other generations. They are
“core customers” of fast food restaurants but do not like Big Macs and are
switching their allegiance to “fast casual” restaurants. They also like to clip
coupons and show a preference for small grocery stores like Trader Joe’s
instead of big box stores. They also like news but don’t wish to pay for it
by purchasing newspapers. They keep up with the news by using the
Internet, social media, and television news shows such as those found on
CNN. They also like name brands such as Nike, Apple, Samsung and
Sony. This discussion is followed by a list of their favorite brands. The
preferences of Millennials are important since they spend so much money
on products and services.
Keywords Shopping • Coupons • Social media • Brand preferences
Having dealt with the way marketers are dealing with Millennials, it is
logical to consider the way Millennials deal with marketers. As Christopher
Donnelly and Renato Scaff explain in Accenture.com: Outlook (June 2013):

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_7
76 A.A. BERGER
Millennials—born between 1980 and 2000—are both the 20th century’s

last generation and its first truly digital one. This old century/new technol-
ogy dichotomy gives pause to marketers attempting to understand and con-
nect with this key demographic.… There are roughly 80 million Millennials
in the United States alone, and each year they spend approximately $600
billion. While originally typecast as financially dependent teens, today’s
Millennials include young adults in their 20s and 30s. Many have careers,
are raising kids and live in their own homes. While Millennials are already a
potent force, they will truly come into their own by 2020, when we project
their spending in the United States will grow to $1.4 trillion annually and
represent 30 percent of total retail sales. https://www.accenture.com/
us-en/insight-outlook-who-are-millennial-shoppers-what-do-they-
really-want-retail.aspx
Another assessment comes from a Pew Report on Millennials and deals

with the fact that generations are “analytical constructs.”
Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living gen-
eration, according to population estimates released this month by the
U.S. Census Bureau. Millennials, whom we define as those ages 18–34 in
2015, now number 75.4 million, surpassing the 74.9 million Baby Boomers
(ages 51–69). And Generation X (ages 35–50 in 2015) is projected to pass
the Boomers in population by 2028…. Generations are analytical con-
structs, and developing a popular and expert consensus on what marks the
boundaries between one generation and the next takes time. Pew Research
Center has established that the oldest “Millennial” was born in 1981. The
Center continues to assess demographic, attitudinal and other evidence on
habits and culture that will help to establish when the youngest Millennial
was born or even when a new generation begins. To distill the implications
of the census numbers for generational heft, this analysis assumes that the
youngest Millennial was born in 1997. www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2016/04/25/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers
The Accenture article, quoted above, offers us important insights into the
way Millennials function as shoppers and consumers. They will represent
thirty percent of all retail sales by 2020 and spend 1.4 trillion dollars annu-
ally. The population of the United States is approximately 323 million
people, so the Millennials represent a quarter of the population, but by
2020 they will be spending thirty percent of all money spent which means
they are consuming about five percent more than one might expect them
MILLENNIALS AS SHOPPERS AND CONSUMERS 77
to consume based on their percentage of the American population. They

also have particular interests when it comes to purchasing things.
Millennials Love Diamonds

Patrick Coffee’s article in Brandweek, “The Diamond Industry’s First
Campaign in 5 Years Encourages Millennials to Make a ‘Real’
Commitment,” describes some romantic ads directed to Millennials. The
diamond industry concluded that they had neglected the Millennials mar-
ket and so launched a campaign to sell them diamonds. They chose an
advertising agency, “Mother,” which they thought had good ideas about
how to reach Millennials and launched a brand campaign “Real is Rare.”
Mother’s research revealed that Millennials buy the most diamonds of any
generation in the United States—perhaps because they are at age when
young people get engaged or give diamonds as a signifier of their love.
The shop’s first campaign for its newest client debuts this week, and it positions
real diamonds as the truest symbols of a deep emotional commitment between
two young people … even if that bond isn’t made official in the eyes of the law.
The development of the new brand campaign “Real Is Rare” is the result of
more than six months of field research and development by Mother and research
firm The Sound Market Research, which interviewed young people across the
United States. The resulting ads serve as intimate, impressionistic portraits of
two relationships at pivotal moments. In keeping with the campaign’s premise,
both of these romances follow non-traditional trajectories. www.adweek.com/
brand-marketing/diamond-industrys-first-campaign-5…
There is a value to convincing Millennials to give diamonds to people they

love, even if they don’t end up getting married. If the relationship breaks
up, there is still a good chance that the Millennial will give a diamond to
someone in the next relationship.
Or purchase a diamond to give to someone in that relationship.
Millennials Don’t Like Big Macs

In the October 7, 2016 edition of The Wall Street Journal there is an
article by Julie Jargon with the title “McDonald’s is Losing the Burger
War.” It tells us that Millennials are the “core customers” of fast food
restaurants but that only one in five of them have had a McDonald’s Big
78 A.A. BERGER
Mac, its flagship product. As she explains, Millennials are now more inter-
ested in fast casual chains like Panera Bread Co. and better burger chains
like Smashburgers and Shake Shack. She writes (page A10):
The percentage of millennials who visited the much smaller Smashburgers

more than once a month, for example, grew by 11 percentage points
between the end of 2013 and the second quarter of this year, while those
who visited McDonald’s grew by 6.5 percentage points….
So McDonald’s is having trouble attracting Millennials, who seem to have

found more upscale hamburger restaurants preferable. The article cites a
study by Consumer Reports which claimed that McDonald’s had the worst
tasting hamburger and a chain called The Habit the best. A comparison of
the two hamburgers follows for their Los Angeles outlets. The Habit got
an 8.1 rating for its hamburgers, Smashburger got a 7.9 rating and
McDonald’s got a 5.8 rating.
McDonald’s The Habit
5.8 rating 8.1 rating

Big Mac Double Charburger with Cheese
$4.29 $4.85
Two frozen 100% ground beef patties Two fresh 100% ground beef patties
Served on a grill and kept warm Grilled over an open flame, made-to-order
14,259 US outlets 142 US Outlets
The problem McDonald’s faces is that Millennials are willing to spend a

bit more money, in many cases, to buy a better hamburger, and Millennials
are the largest generation in the United States. McDonald’s has more than
14,000 outlets in the United States, which means that making any
changes—such as switching to fresh meat instead of frozen meat—is very
difficult.
Millennials Like to Clip Coupons

It seems that Millennials like to clip coupons, a behavior that we might not
expect from them, given that they spend so much time on the Internet
and are so digitally driven. An article by Aliza Freud, “Millennials Moms
(And Dads) Bringing Back the Art of Couponing,” published on Friday,
October 7, 2016 in MediaPost’s “EngageMoms” posting describes the

situation:
Over the last 40 years, it was not uncommon to see moms (and increasingly
dads) huddled around kitchen tables, scissors in hand, clipping out all those
little squares of savings known as coupons. From penny savers to local news-
papers, budget-minded families made coupons a part of every shopping trip.
It seems that Millennials learned a lot from their parents as they are now
keeping couponing alive, but in a much more tech-savvy way. Bloomberg
Businessweek reports about the Millennial couponing craze that has kept sav-
ings alive in a time where coupons seemed to be going out of style. Why are
Millennials so savings hungry? Maybe it has something to do with all of the
student loan debt encouraging Millennials to look for deals, but a report
from Valassis says that 9 out of 10 Millennials use coupons. Rather than
reaching for the scissors and newspaper, Millennials turn to the Internet to
find all the best deals. Websites like RetailMeNot, Groupon and cash-back
programs like Ebates allow Millennials to save big.
We are talking about older Millennials who may have families and who
wish to make sure that they don’t waste any money when shopping for
groceries and other products. And they prefer paper coupons which, it
turns out, are easier to use than digital ones. Safeway and other stores
allow you to transfer coupons to a card which means you don’t have to
bother cutting out the coupon and carrying it with you to a store.
Millennials Like Small Stores

Big-box stores are a problem for many consumers who may wish to pur-
chase a few items at a large supermarket, for example, but have to navigate
the huge store to find their purchases and then wait in line to pay for
them. Some supermarkets have instituted self-pay lines where the consum-
ers scan the items they have purchased and avoid having to wait in line to
deal with cashiers. During a recent trip to London, I noticed that a num-
ber of the supermarket chains had self-scanning aisles which greatly expe-
dited paying for things purchased in these stores.
Another way to deal with this problem of having to navigate a large store
is to set up smaller stores which are psychologically friendlier and don’t
require customers to wander around many aisles to find the products they
want. An article by Khadeeja Safdar in the October 5, 2016 Wall Street
Journal, “Target Hopes Smaller Stores Will Bring in More Millennials,”
80 A.A. BERGER
makes this point. Safdar describes a new Target store that opened near the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis that is less than fifteen percent of
the size of typical Target stores found in suburban shopping malls. Being
near a large university, it stocks products college students need.
Most of the smaller Target stores are around 50,000 square feet,
approximately one-third the size of typical Target stores. Target is opening
these stores in urban areas and focusing on products that city dwellers
typically want and making it easier for them to find things. With these
urban mini-stores, Target differs from Wal-Mart, which opened up many
so-called “Express Wal-Marts” in suburban areas that were not successful.
Target believes it can prosper because of the location of these stores and
because of the products they will carry.
The paradigmatic example of the successful small store would be Trader
Joe’s. They are much smaller than the typical supermarket, and they carry
fewer brands and products than the typical supermarket does. Trader Joe’s
carries 4000 items and the typical supermarket carries 20,000 items. Trader
Joe’s is owned by the German discount supermarket chain Aldi’s, which
has now entered the United States with its own smaller no-frills stores.
Big box stores can be seen as gigantic labyrinths through which consum-
ers must wander in search of whatever it is they are looking for. Statistics
reveal that many people who shop at supermarkets only want a few items, so
these huge supermarkets don’t serve their needs very well. That explains
why Target and other chains are experimenting with smaller stores that will
be more psychologically appealing to Millennials and members of other gen-
erations who don’t want to buy very much during a visit to a store. Target is
also using the Internet to allow shoppers to order products online and pick
them up at a Target store. This service is designed to appeal to Millennials
who use the Internet and their smartphones for many different things.
What will happen to grocery stores in the future, when Amazon has
purchased Whole Foods, remains to be seen. Many commentators have
suggested that Amazon will do away with checkout clerks and that eventu-
ally all grocery stores and supermarkets will be only self-checkout.
Millennials Like News but Don’t Want to Pay for It

Mary Leigh Bliss, a columnist for MediaPost’s Engage Millennials (Friday,
Oct. 14, 2016), explains that Millennials like news. As she writes in her
article, “Millennials’ And Teens’ Top 20 News Sources,” teens and
Millennials are interested in the news, but they don’t want to pay for it:
At this point, less than one in ten 13–33-year-olds say they are buying news-
papers each month, and only 4% are paying for online news site access—but
that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in the news. Our monthly survey
revealed that 69% of 13–33-year-olds follow the news some or all of the
time—and the top reason they do is because they like to be informed and in
the know. In fact, there seems to be somewhat of a “news rush” to provide
young consumers with their breaking headlines and news stories. Vice
reports that their fastest-growing division is news, and the media brand has
struck gold with younger audiences by filling the “big white space” that co-
founder Shane Smith says was created by the “perception that Gen Y didn’t
really care about news, which is obviously not true.” Startups like Mic and
Vox are creating more competition in the digital news space, using apps and
even chatbots to deliver the news to Millennials and teens across the plat-
forms they’re spending time on. Clearly, the competition to be Millennials
and teens’ news source is cutthroat—and complicated by the fact that they
don’t want to pay anyone for news.
So Millennials use social media, among other things, to keep up with the
news. She lists the favorite news sites that Millennials use to obtain the
news. This list is based on a survey of one thousand thirteen to thirty-
three year olds which asked respondents to reveal the one source they
turned to when they wanted to find out what’s going on in the world.
1. CNN 6. Twitter
2. Local news channel/site/app 7. NPR
3. Facebook 8. Google News
4. Fox 9. Buzz Feed
5. The New York Times 10. BBC
This list is quite eclectic. We found the Fox network followed by its antith-
esis, The New York Times, and we find BuzzFeed and the BBC. Around
sixty-seven percent of Millennials access news on their smartphones, sixty-
three percent use their computers and fifty-three percent watch the news
on television. Sixty percent of Millennials search for unbiased news while
forty percent look for news that shares their perspectives. One might
imagine that Fox news would be a major source of news for people look-
ing for reinforcement for their views. Its ideological commitment to the
Republican party leads many to suggest that Fox really isn’t a news net-
work but a propaganda arm of conservative political views.
82 A.A. BERGER
Millennials Like Name Brands

The Huffington Post had an article about Millennials that listed the top
brands which they tend to favor. They are listed below.
1. Nike 6. Target
2. Apple 7. Microsoft
3. Samsung 8. Coca-Cola
4. Sony 9. Jordans (sneakers)
5. Wal-Mart 10. Pepsi
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-are-the-coolest-brands-to-generation-
z-and-millennials_us_58f4eb8be4b04cae050d
All of these products are highly advertised and are among the favorite
brands of other generations of Americans as well. It is how these products
are marketed to Millennials that is the important thing, not the products
themselves; Millennials like stories we are told, so advertisers have to find
a way to inject compelling narratives into their commercials.
It is curious that Millennials like a brand like Wal-Mart, since it has
been widely criticized for exploiting its employees, but the financial diffi-
culties many Millennials face probably helps explain that choice. The pref-
erence Millennials have for Apple products reflects the importance of
“face” and the desire of Millennials to have the most popular brand of
smartphones. Approximately seventy percent of high school students in
America who have mobiles have iPhones.
The list of favorite brands of Millennials cited above is interesting
because it is so unsurprising. I favor many of the brands Millennials like
and I’m eighty-four years old. So the question marketers face is how to
reach the Millennials and sell them the most popular brands. It is the kinds
of advertisements that the brands use and where Millennials will see them
that makes the difference.
In 2016, the list of favorite brands of Millennials had changed, and we
find the ten most popular brands are, in order of popularity:
Apple Samsung
Target Wal-Mart
Nike Amazon
Sony Microsoft
Coca-Cola Victoria’s Secret
https://www.inc.com/guadalupe-gonzalez/top-ten-millennial-brands.html
We see that half of the brands involve the Internet and technology
(shown in bold face), but missing from the list is Google, an Internet pres-
ence they probably use every day. There are around eighty million
Millennials. Their preferences are of enormous interest to marketers and
shape more than a quarter of American consumer behavior.
CHAPTER 8
Postmodernism and Millennials
Abstract The chapter compares postmodernism to modernism and sug-

gests that postmodernism represents a “widespread cultural mutation”
that has shaped human relations and modern societies. This occurred in
the United States around 1960. It discusses the theory of “intertextual-
ity,” which asserts that all texts are based, to varying degrees, on texts that
preceded them, which weakens the modernist emphasis on originality. It is
suggested that there is a strong connection between postmodernity and
consumerism and that postmodernism’s delegitimation of authority, ratio-
nality and “grand theories” has had an impact on the thinking and behav-
ior of Millennials. The chapter discusses Fredric Jameson’s notion that
postmodernism is really a new form of capitalism and then suggests that
Millennials are the quintessential postmodern generation and Millennials
are very different from their parents. The chapter offers a chart showing
the differences between modernism and postmodernism in many different
areas and discusses the fact that many Millennials were not raised with two
parents, which may have had an impact on their psyches and behavior. The
chapter then discusses the ideas found in Jack Solomon’s The Signs of Our
Times and in my mystery novel Mistake in Identity, both of which are rel-
evant to our understanding of postmodernism’s impact on Millennials. It
concludes with a discussion of the role smartphones play in the lives of
Millennials.
Keywords Postmodernism • Modernism • Intertextuality • Pastiche

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_8
86 A.A. BERGER
Fig. 8.1 Jean-Francois

Lyotard
Any discussion of the relationship between Millennials and postmod-

ernism has to consider what postmodernism is and is not—a topic of con-
siderable interest to cultural theorists, philosophers and others. I begin
with one of the most famous descriptions of postmodernism, found in
Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge:
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-

narratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sci-
ences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the
metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis
of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the
past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero,
its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. (1984:xxiv)
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. xxiv. University of Minnesota Press
Another attempt to understand or define postmodernism comes from

Sarah Joseph, and is found in her book Interrogating Culture: Critical
Perspectives on Contemporary Society Theory. (New Delhi: Sage Publications,
1998, pp. 40–41).
The rejection of any notion of objective and universal truth and the author-
ity of particular narratives claiming to represent truth has provided the basis
POSTMODERNISM AND MILLENNIALS 87
for the attack on the grand narratives of the French and British
Enlightenment. The notions of progress, universality and freedom, and a
collective emancipatory project to attain them, which were found in the
writings of philosophers of the Enlightenment have been targets of attack.
The end of history has been proclaimed along with the dissolution of man.
Instead, it is held, we should learn to listen to the voices which were sub-
merged by the grand narratives, whether they be the voices of the colonial
subjects or of women or any other marginalized group. This has revived
interest in the everyday culture of different groups as expressed in the rou-
tines and rituals of their lives as also in the multiple, decentered struggles
which are waged by people against the power which may be embodied in
such practices.
There are endless debates about what postmodernism is and isn’t, and
whether it is dead and we are now in some kind of a post-postmodern
period, whatever we might want to call it. The two passages quoted above
deal with an essential feature of postmodernism: the rejection by
postmodernism of the grand narratives that used to be widely accepted
(such as a belief in progress) and the rejection of the notion that there are
absolute truths. Instead, we find a world in which authority is now ques-
tioned everywhere and people have to rely on their own notions of how to
live. The grand narratives have been replaced by personal narratives that
shape people’s behavior. This led to a crisis of legitimacy. How do we
know what is the right thing to do in certain situations? Is it whatever we
think we should do or something else?
Postmodernism is said to have replaced modernism, which was charac-
terized by the acceptance of grand narratives (or metanarratives), in the
sixties in the United States. People growing up in the sixties, Baby Boomers
and members of Generation X, were different from those growing up ear-
lier. A widespread cultural mutation had occurred that we call postmod-
ernism. Cultural mutations occur regularly. For example, it can argued
that, all of a sudden, modernism replaced traditionalism. Virginia Woolf
explains what happened. She writes, in 1924:
On or about December, 1910, human character changed.… all human rela-

tions have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives,
parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same
time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature. https://thebio-
scope.net/2009/08/13/on-or-about-december-1910-human…
88 A.A. BERGER
Woolf was describing the development of the modernist sensibility, which

she suggested, led to all kinds of other changes in every aspect of daily
life. Modernism held sway between approximately 1910 and 1960 in
America.
One of the best short descriptions of postmodernism appears in Ellis
Cashmore and Chris Rojek’s anthology, Dictionary of Cultural Theorists.
In the book they explain that in postmodernity what seemed to be fixed
and universal categories and certainty become replaced by a focus on dif-
ferences, that there no longer are any agreed-upon cultural boundaries or
certainties, and that we have abandoned a belief in scientific rationality and
all-embracing theories of truth and of progress.
Cashmore and Rojek also offer a discussion of some of the implications
of postmodernism on our attitudes toward elite and popular culture and
the importance of intertextuality, among other things. In a nutshell,
intertextual theorists argue that all texts are based, to varying degrees, on
other texts that preceded them—either consciously, as in the case of par-
ody, or, and this is generally the case, unconsciously. Modernist beliefs in
hierarchy and the difference between high culture and low or popular
culture are no longer accepted, and human relations are seen as fragmen-
tary and changeable. We live in a world in which simulation is all-impor-
tant—in which real objects are replaced by their copies and in which
culture has to be seen as an assemblage of texts, all of which are intertex-
tually related to one another and gain their meaning from their connec-
tion to other texts that preceded them.
Our authors suggest that the impact of intertextuality is to weaken our
belief in the importance of originality and to emphasize the degree to
which we must “read” people, events and objects by seeing their relation-
ships with other people, events and objects. And that is because all mean-
ing comes from seeing relationships, from recognizing that nothing has
meaning in itself and that we find meaning by relating our experiences to
texts, in all media, with which we are familiar.
Postmodernists make the same argument that Woolf made. They
believe that around 1960 there was another monumental change, a cul-
tural seismic shift, whatever you will—in our sensibilities as we moved
from modernism to postmodernism. This shift is reflected in the works of
writers, artists, architects and other creative people; in addition, this
change has also impacted on just about every aspect of our culture and
society. It affects everything from the buildings we live in and the films and
television shows we see to our sense of identity. It also led, eventually, to
the development of a Millennial generation.
Mark L. Taylor has written an article, “Generation NeXt: Today’s
Postmodern Student—Meeting, Teaching, Serving,” in which he suggests:
Generations NeXt is the product of changing social influences that have been
described as postmodern. Opinion and consumer interest have tended to have
more impact on value formation and day-to-day decision making than tradi-
tional values, including religious values and science…. According to Vaclav
Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, “We live in the Postmodern
world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain” (Havel
1992). Most higher education is based on modern values, with its roots in the
Enlightenment and the values of optimism, discoverable truth, reason, and
science. Postmodernism tends to be more pessimistic, sees “truth” as indi-
vidually created, values opinion and preference over truth and experience over
science or reason, and fosters a delegitimation of authority…. https://www.
mum.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/199_Generation_NeXt_
profile_and_teaching.pdf
Vol. 2: Becoming a Learning Focused Organization: The Learning
Environment
Chap. 4: New Types of Learners/99
Consumer lust and freedom in personal choice have risen in importance

since the end of World War II and might be considered now among
America’s core values.
While premodern influences of religion and traditional beliefs and the
modern values of science and reason coexist in the culture with postmod-
ern influences, there is ample evidence of the power of the postmodern,
especially as manifested in extreme consumerism. In educational settings,
as in every other area of life, the producer-to-consumer model has become
most important, both in student goals and in the student’s relationship
with the school. As with most producer-to-consumer relationships today,
students seek instant gratification, look for the best deal, want to negoti-
ate, and might become litigious if disappointed.
It is this delegitimation of authority (“truth is individually created”)
and extreme consumerism that explain why Millennials can be seen as
postmodern. Postmodernism is also associated with an attachment to
media, which is another characteristic of Millennials.
90 A.A. BERGER
Postmodernism, Marketing and Consumer Behavior

Michael Solomon, Gary Bamossy and Soren Askegaard write, in their
book, Consumer Behavior: A European Perspective, 2002, Financial Times/
Prentice Hall, about the relationship between postmodernism and con-
sumer behavior. They describe certain features of postmodernism relative
to consumer behavior, and what they write about, I suggest, also reflects
Millennial consumption patterns:
Fragmentation. The splitting up of what used to be simpler and more
mass-oriented, exemplified by the ever-growing product ranges and brand
extensions in more and more specialized variations. Even within the retail-
ing environment we experience the proliferation of outlets within the con-
centration of bigger outlets (shopping malls). Such specialized and stylized
outlets often carry an in-depth assortment of a very narrow product range,
such as teas or ties.
Differentiation. Postmodernists are interested in the blurring of dis-
tinctions between hierarchies such as “high and low culture,” or politics
and show business. Examples would be the use of artistic works in adver-
tising and the celebration of advertising as artistic works. Companies such
as Coca-Cola, Nike and Guinness have their own museums.
Hyperreality. The spreading of simulations and the loss of the sense of
the “real” and the “authentic,” as in the cases of re-engineered environ-
ments … or in shopping centres simulating ancient Rome (The Forum in
Las Vegas) or a Parisian street (West Edmonton Mall, Canada). Finally,
products can be hyperreal to the extent that they simulate something else;
for instance, sugarless sugar, fat-free-fat (olestra) or the butter replacement
brand “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” In fact, it has been argued that
marketing may be the most important contributor to the creation of hyper-
reality, since the essence of marketing and particularly advertising is to create
simulated reality by resignifying words, situations and brands.Solomon and
his colleagues also write about the search many consumers have for authen-
ticity in their purchases, about the way consumers mix many categories and
styles and about the self-referentiality of many advertisements in which they
play upon the fact that they are advertisements instead of trying to hide it.
I am suggesting that the generation raised in the sixties was postmod-
ern and so are their children, the Millennials. However, the way Millennials
were raised has led to profound differences between themselves and their
parents, matters which I’ve dealt with in my chapter on the Millennial

psyche and in other places in this book. In postmodernist societies, the
media play an important role, and we find that the Millennials are very
involved with the media and with social networking sites such as Facebook
and Twitter, which they generally access on their mobiles.
Around 1960, scholars started using the term “postmodernism” more
and more. Thus, we find Bernard Rosenberg, a sociologist, mentioning the
term in an introduction he wrote to Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America. He writes (1957:4), “First besieged with commodities, postmod-
ern man himself becomes an interchangeable part in the whole cultural pro-
cess.” Rosenberg ties postmodernism to the mass media and the rise of
consumer culture, a relationship that other postmodernist theorists have
also dealt with and expanded upon. He saw the media and postmodernism
as leading to a kind of worldwide cultural homogenization, which is at odds
with the contemporary view that postmodernism involves a kind hyper-dif-
ferentiation in people—with each Millennial doing his or her “own thing,”
to use a phrase once-popular but now seldom heard. In some ways,
Rosenberg’s description of postmodernist “man” resembles the descriptions
of the media-obsessed Millennials that I’ve offered in this book, though
there are many different subcategories of Millennials to be considered.
Fig. 8.2 Fredric Jameson

92 A.A. BERGER
Fredric Jameson, in his book on postmodernism, argues that in the

postmodern era, pastiche—works of art that combine many bits and pieces
of this and that—proliferates due to an “unavailability of personal style.”
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s critique of subjectivity and Jean Baudrillard’s
notion of the death of the subject through an enslavement to mass media,
Jameson argues that postmodern pastiche signifies that individualism, as
defined during modernism, is dead. As he asserts (1991:15),
“Postmodern[ism] … signals … the end of the bourgeois ego [and] the
end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the
end of the distinctive individual brushstroke.”
He believes that in a climate of media-enslaved, uncritical minds inca-
pable of empowering subjectivity, pastiche thrives; postmodern uses of
pastiche reflect the extent to which culture and the individual have become
media-dominated. Jameson further rationalizes that postmodern usage of
pastiche also derives from a “sense in which the artists and writers of the
present will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds—they’ve
already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possi-
ble; the most unique ones have been thought of already.” Thus art
becomes really artifice, an endless recycling of the past, or “Modernist
styles … become postmodernist codes….”
In this way Jameson explains an expanded market for nostalgia and an
obsessive reinterpretation of the past in postmodern fiction, film, video,
art, and architecture. According to Jameson, consumer capitalism and the
resultant commodification of culture have destroyed the ability of contem-
porary culture to produce original statements.
We can suggest that Millennials are the most quintessential postmodern
generation, having been raised when postmodernism was the cultural
dominant. Members of Generation X, their parents, were raised when
there were lingering elements of modernism in American society, but by
the time the Millennials were born and were growing up, postmodernism
was all-powerful and dominated American culture and society. If Millennials
tend to be like one another, we can explain this sameness thanks to Frederic
Jameson. He wrote his book, Postmodernism: or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism in 1991, before the advent of the Millennials, but his ideas
help us understand something important about them: they are exemplars
of what we might call the postmodernist perspective on life. Jameson
argues that what we call postmodernism is really a new form of multina-
tional capitalism, which would explain why Millennials are so caught up in
pop culture and contemporary consumer culture.
If we describe Millennials as having been born between 1980 and 2000

(roughly speaking), that means in 2016 the youngest Millennials are six-
teen years old and the oldest are thirty-six years old. Obviously, as I’ve
pointed out earlier, there are major differences between the youngest
Millennials and the oldest ones. The youngest ones are in high school and
the oldest ones are, most likely, working and quite possibly married with
children. But what unites both poles of this spectrum is their use of new
technologies, especially smartphones, and their facility with computers and
all kinds of other digital devices. The world these Millennials live in, a word
where simulations are important, where consumer culture is dominant,
and where the old absolutes are no longer accepted, is quite different from
the world and worldview that the parents of the Millennials inhabited.
However, the way the Millennials were raised has led to profound dif-
ferences between themselves and their parents, matters which I’ve dealt
with in my chapter on the Millennial psyche and in other places in this
book. Below I’ve used paired opposites to compare modernism and post-
modernism because, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, that’s the way
we make sense of concepts. As he explained in his Course in General
Linguistics (1966:117) “concepts are purely differential and defined not
by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other
terms of the system,” and “the most precise characteristic” of concepts “is
in being what the others are not.”
Modernism and Postmodernism Contrasted

Modernism Postmodernism
After Dec. 10, 1910 After 1960 (more or less)

Metanarratives Incredulity toward metanarratives
Unified, coherent self Fragmented, decentered self
Seriousness Playfulness
Robert Musil Thomas Pynchon
Pablo Picasso Andy Warhol
Sexual boundaries strong Sexual boundaries weak
Family unit strong Family unit weak
Marriage The “affair,” ”hooking up”
Print culture Electronic culture
Encyclopedia Britannica Wikipedia
Books Cell phones, tablets
New York architecture Las Vegas architecture
Mies Van der Rohe Philip Johnson (AT&T skyscraper)
Unitary works of art The pastiche
(continued )
94 A.A. BERGER
(continued)
Modernism Postmodernism
High culture vs. pop culture De-differentiation: high culture/pop

Production society (make) Consumer cultures (buy)
Reality Hyperreality
America Disneyland
This chart provides a good overview of some of the main differences between the two periods. You can
see that there is a considerable difference between the two eras, with the postmodern period being hyper-
mediated, electronic, digital and living more in hyperreality than reality
The “post” in postmodernism means “coming after,” but it can also

mean “moving beyond” or “the opposite of.” I investigated modernism
and postmodernism on Google and looked for the number of books on
each topic at the Amazon.com book site on February 1, 2017 and got the
following results.
Google Search
Topic Number of results
Modernism 25,900,000
Postmodernism 8,500,000
Postmodernism Definition 681,000
Postmodernism Literature 689,000
Postmodernism Art 16,100,000
Postmodernism and Millennials 57,700
We see that there is a considerable amount of interest in postmodern-

ism, even in postmodernism and Millennials. I looked up postmodernism
on Amazon.com books and found the following:
Amazon.com Books
Topic Number
Modernism 13,000
Postmodernism 6600
Postmodernism and Millennials 6
Postmodernism and Culture 281
Millennials and Society 147
Millennials 4300
(Accessed Feb. 1, 2017)

So there’s a lot of interest in postmodernism and in Millennials, and even

six books on postmodernism and Millennials.
An article by Walt Mueller, “Meet the Millennials” (2004, the Center
for Parent/Youth Understanding), offers some insights into the relation-
ship between Millennials’ worldview and postmodernism. Mueller lists
some of the main attributes of Millennials:
The Millennial kids are also known as “Remote Control Kids” (they face
unprecedented and constant change), the “Salad Bowl Generation” (marked
by racial, experiential, and attitudinal diversity), “The 14th Generation (the
14th generation born after the American Revolution), and “Bridgers”
(bridging the millennia). They seem confident and comfortable because
they’ve been born into a time of peace and economic prosperity.
Consequently, they have been lulled into a false sense of security. They are
the first generation raised in the new “postmodern” world with the accom-
panying postmodern world view. For them, feelings take precedence over
reason, truth is relative, and everyone believes what’s “right” for them.
Consequently, they are feeling-driven, pluralistic, spontaneous, and without
a transcendent moral compass…. Fully 1/4–1/3 of the kids born between
1989 and 1994 were born to unmarried women. https://cpyu.org/
resource/meet-the-millennials/
Mueller points out that having been raised in a postmodern age, Millennials
have adopted a postmodern perspective on things and believe that their
feelings are more important than reason and that truth is relative. And, it
would seem, that many of them were raised without strong father
figures.
There are no absolutes or metanarratives that shape their thinking and
behavior. His statistics on the number of births outside of marriage also
suggests that many Millennials were raised in less-than-ideal families where
they might not have received love and support. This kind of nurturing
may help explain the mindset of many Millennials.
There are countless other lists like Mueller’s that deal with various
aspects of Millennial belief and many studies by marketers who wish to
find ways to reach them and sell products and services to them.
Postmodernism is also associated with consumer culture so Millennials, as
the largest cohort in contemporary American culture (until very recently,
that is), are an ideal target audience for advertising agencies and marketing
companies.
96 A.A. BERGER
Jack Solomon discusses the relationship between postmodernism and

youth culture in his book The Signs of Our Times. He writes (1988:227–229):
In the postmodern worldview, there is no such thing as an essential “me,”

no centering self-identity, no inborn character. There are only roles, images
we take up in imitation of other images. The careers of such postmodern
pop celebrities as Madonna, David Bowie, and Michael Jackson are paradig-
matic. Madonna began by playing the role of a “punk” rock star in her “Like
a Virgin” phase and then redefined herself in the image of an even more
potent TV-age icon, Marilyn Monroe. David Bowie has played every role
from Ziggy Stardust to the title role in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Michael Jackson has gone from Motown to sadomasochistic black leather,
allegedly altering his hair, facial features, and skin color in the process.
You can see it all happening every day on MTV, where the fetishized
image reaches its pop cultural apotheosis. In an MTV video, the look is
everything: character, the spirit that lives beneath the skin, is nothing.
Images are put on and taken off at will, each new role unencumbered by the
need for a coherent plot…. For all its ironic mockery of the iconography of
mass culture, however, postmodernism has proven to be a profitable ally of
corporate America. MTV videos, after all, sell records…. Coca-Cola com-
mercials often resemble rock videos, creating a dizzying montage of celeb-
rity and noncelebrity images, that fosters an illusion of intimacy between the
ad viewers—who can see themselves in the noncelebrity frames….
His discussion of the identity problems of postmodern youth—the ones

who watch MTV—explains a great deal about the Millennials. He wrote
this book in 1988, when the Millennial period had just begun and his
comments about the postmodern worldview help us understand the
Millennial perspective on things, on the importance of media in their lives,
and their not having an “essential me.”
The Impostor Archetype

I have suggested in an academic mystery novel I wrote that many people
now can be seen as “impostors.” I had a character I created, Sigfried
DuerfKlein, explain this in my academic mystery Mistake in Identity. He is
talking with a detective, Solomon Hunter (2005:110–111):
“Antonia, I believe, said you were a very distinguished scholar,” added

Hunter. “And someone, I can’t recall who, mentioned that you have a fas-
cinating theory about identity—namely that we’re all impostors, or some-
thing like that.”
Duerfklein laughed. “Yes, impostors! That’s the word. My theories

really bother my colleagues because they tend to look at human beings in
aggregates, as members of society or some class or culture or sub-culture.
So they can talk about things like behavior in crowds or American iden-
tity—whatever that might be—or various ideological positions, that still
deal with large groups of people—women, gays, people of color, the pro-
letariat. You name it. My focus, since I have a psychoanalytic approach to
things, deals with individuals and how they achieve their identities. Or
don’t achieve them, since many people, as my theory suggests, are pre-
tenders to an identity.”
“I don’t understand how that can happen?” said Hunter. “Jean-Marie
said that in postmodern societies people often change their identities to suit
their whims, but that doesn’t seem to me to be the same thing as pretending
to have an identity or being an impostor.”
Duerfklein smiled, knowingly. “You must remember that the term ‘per-
sonality’ is based on the Latin root ‘persona’ which means mask. So our
personalities are, it can be said, masks that we create to deal with others in
social situations. You might contrast one’s personality with what might be
called one’s character or ‘self,’ one’s true being. What I argue, based on my
work with numerous patients, is that many people never grow up, never cast
off immature notions and fantasies of what it means to be an adult, never
achieve coherence and continuity in their sense of themselves, so what you
get, ultimately, is a fake person, a simulation, a fraud. And these people can’t
help themselves because they don’t even recognize that they are impostors.
They’ve devoted all their energy to fooling others and they end up also fool-
ing themselves.”
“What did Socrates tell people to do? ‘Know thyself,’ he said. It isn’t easy
to do. Also, these impostors suffer from a kind of amnesia, especially about
their childhoods when many of the foundations for their identities were
established and their adolescent periods, when they were searching desper-
ately for acceptable identities. They forget who they were, so they are
condemned to continually creating new characters for themselves. It’s rather
sad.”
Recently I attended a lecture in which a rabbi, who is a recovered alco-

holic, used the term “impostor” about himself. He described how, out-
wardly, he was by every standards a success. He was married, had three
children, two cars, a beautiful house with a large swimming pool, a good
salary, and so on, but for some reason he felt he was an “imposter” and so
started relying on alcohol to deal with his unhappiness. He became an
alcoholic but, after a number of years, rediscovered God and that helped
him escape from his affliction. He now is a rabbi at a synagogue for people
suffering from alcoholism, drug addiction and similar problems. He also
98 A.A. BERGER
talked about the way people learn to market themselves, which is part of
the syndrome connected to being an impostor. He had to learn to forget
about having a great resume (“I looked great on paper,” he said) and
learning how to think about himself in non-marketing terms.
I would argue that many Millennials suffer from feeling they are impos-
tors and this shapes much of their behavior. They may deal with their sense
of being an impostor in other ways—in consumption, in immersion in
media, in playing around with their false identities, but underneath all of
this is the sense that they are impostors.
Peggy Bloomer of Quinnipac University makes some good points
about postmodernism and Millennials in her article, “The Remediation of
Epic Mythology in Digital Narratives.” She writes about the way capital-
ism uses television to promote a consumer society to children and make
them aware, at an early age, of brands and the need to upgrade their pos-
sessions as a way of fulfilling themselves.
She adds:
Knowledge is power. In this world of post-modernism, it is universally

accepted that to get ahead, one needs to gain knowledge and infor-
mation. While ignorance is portrayed to youths in cartoons, these
characters are always at a disadvantage. They are frequently portrayed
as emotionally and socially stunted and general losers in this world.
Entertainment is all about the image and spectacle. More passive
literary forms have lost a position of dominance and the image is the
predominant means of narrative, branding and consumerism.
Evidence of an increase global homogeneity with an irreverence of
authority, traditions, and forms combined with a sense of play.
In fact, many storylines combine characters and location from various
cultures creating a broad and ill-defined, mythic tradition that tran-
scends geographic boundaries.
What we find, then, is a strong linkage between the postmodern values

that were dominant when many Millennials were growing up and the life-
styles of contemporary Millennials, which involves, among other things,
an acceptance of contemporary consumer culture. We see this in the chart
below, published on July 2, 2016, which shows how Millennials use their
smartphones to conduct transactions.
Frequency with Which Millennial Smartphone Users

in North America and the UK Conduct Transactions*
via Mobile Devices, Aug 2016
% of respondents
Multiple times per day 15%

Once a day 10%
A few times per week 29%
Once or twice per month 20%
6% About once a month
9% A few times per year
Never 10%
3% I’m not sure
Note: ages 18–34; numbers may not add up to 100% due to rounding;
includes purchases
Source: Mitek, “The Millennial Influence: How Their Love of Mobile Shapes
Commerce” conducted by Osterman Research, Nov 9, 2016
Fig. 8.3 Millennials as Smartphone Users
These transactions are commercial and the smartphone is the umbilical

cord that links Millennials in the UK and the USA (and other countries as
well, no doubt) to consumer culture.
References
Berger, Arthur Asa. 2005. Mistake in Identity. Latham: MD. Rowman & Littlefield.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Joseph, Sarah. 1998. Interrogating Culture: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary
Social Theory. New Delhi: Sage.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mueller, Walt. 2004. Meet the Millennials. Center for Parent/Youth Understanding.
Rosenberg, Bernard, and David Manning White, eds. 1957. Mass Culture: The
Popular Arts in America. New York: The Free Press.
100 A.A. BERGER
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. A Course in General Linguistics. New York:

McGraw-Hill.
Solomon, Jack. 1988. The Signs of Our Times. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Solomon, Michael, et al. 2002. Consumer Behavior: A European Perspective. 2nd
ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Woolf, Virginia. 1924. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Meeting of the Heretics Club
at Cambridge University.
CHAPTER 9
Politics and Millennials
Abstract In this chapter, we find statistics showing that Millennials are

either moderate (39%) or liberal (31%) in their politics, with relatively few
(26%) describing themselves as conservative. The significance of these fig-
ures is obvious, as far as politics is concerned, but there is the question of
how often Millennials vote in elections. There is also material about high
school students now identifying as conservative, compared with earlier
years. The statistics about liberal and conservative Millennials suggest we
now have a politically polarized society. Statistics from a Los Angeles Times
poll shows that there is a correlation between the amount of education
people have and their liberalism. It shows that almost fifty percent of peo-
ple with high school or less education supported Trump while only 36.4%
of those with college degrees or higher supported him. An article by
Daniel J. Arbess that appeared in The Wall Street Journal dealt with the
question of why Millennials who supported Trump voted against their
own interests? He suggested that they do not recognize the impact of
their voting. This leads to a discussion of the Sanders’ campaign and spec-
ulations about why he was so popular with young people. This is followed
by a discussion of Millennial voting patterns and statistics from a poll
showing that 44% of Millennials saying they would vote either for the
Green Party or a libertarian. Other statistics show that fifty percent of
Millennials describe themselves as Independents. Though Millennials
voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, they didn’t vote for her in large enough

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_9
102 A.A. BERGER
numbers to help her win. The chapter concludes with a discussion of

Millennials in Britain, who voted in large numbers against the Prime
Minister.
Keywords Liberals • Conservatives • Independents • Trump
I begin with some information about Millennials and their ideas about
politics taken from an article by Michelle Diggles:
1. Millennials are more likely to be political Independents than

any other generation.
Despite voting for President Obama by double-digits in 2008 and
2012, 50% of Millennials are self-described Independents.
2. Millennials are open to government solutions.
Millennials support a bigger government providing more services
over a smaller government providing fewer services by 53% to 38%.
3. Millennials are the most racially and ethnically diverse
generation.
Approximately 40% of Millennials are non-white or Hispanic.
4. Millennials are the most moderate of any generation.
A plurality of Millennials (39%) are moderates, with another 31%
describing their political views as liberal, and 26% as conservative.
5. Millennial views on abortion are nearly identical to their elders.
While 56% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or
most cases, 54% of Millennials agree.
MichelleDiggles.http://republic3-0.com/7-things-know-millennials-
politics/
The article by Diggles, a senior policy analyst at Third Way, offers us an

overview of the political beliefs of Millennials. She adds that seventy per-
cent of Millennials are either moderate (39%) or liberal (31%) while only
26% are conservative. This suggests that their impact on politics—espe-
cially since they believe that the role of government in fixing things is posi-
tive—will eventually be profound. If only twenty-six percent of Millennials
are conservative, we can imagine that American politics in the future will
be considerably different than it has been. If the Millennials vote, that is.
There are the same number of Millennials in Florida as residents there
who are sixty-five and older. So if the Millennials of voting age (which
POLITICS AND MILLENNIALS 103
means most of them) are active politically, they could have a major impact
on the local, state and presidential elections. It turns out they did not have
a major impact on the election in Florida, which suggests that they weren’t
as politically active as they could have been.
CNN published an article by Jacqueline Howard on September 7,
2016 titled “Millennials: more conservative than you think.” It was based,
in part, on an essay by Jean Twenge, the lead author, in the Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin, which showed the Millennials are more
polarized now than they’ve been for almost fifty years. The article also
quotes Twenge, author of Generation Me, who suggests that Millennials
are now more likely to identify themselves as conservative than Generation
Xers or Baby Boomers did when they were the same age as Millennials are
now. As she explains:
High school seniors are more likely to identify as political conservatives now
compared to ten years ago. Most surprising, more identify as conservatives
now compared to the 1980s…. That goes against the common view of mil-
lennials as very liberal. So the current view of millennials as liberals might be
due to their age—young people are more likely to be liberal. But if you
compare young people now to young people in previous decades, those now
are more conservative.… The researchers discovered that overall twice as
many adults had “extreme” political identifications in the 2010s compared
to in the 1970s. For instance, 1.6% of Americans identified as “extremely
liberal” in 1972 compared to 3.7% in 2014. About 2.4% of Americans iden-
tified as “extremely conservative” in 1972 compared to 4.2% in 2014,
according to the new paper.
Thus, we find larger percentages of Americans identifying themselves as

extremely liberal or extremely conservative nowadays when compared to
the seventies. This may be the result of the extreme polarization that has
taken place in American politics at the national level.
There is also the matter of the age of the Millennials who take surveys.
Younger Millennials, with only a high school education, may trend more
conservative than Millennials with a college education. There is generally
a correlation between the amount of education and political and social
liberalism. That explains why so many Trump supporters are blue-collar
whites with only a high school education. Millennials are now the largest
living generation and the largest voting generation, so their input will be
critical. A large percentage of Millennials describe themselves as indepen-
dents, but the fact that they are open to government solutions to problems
104 A.A. BERGER
and accept the value of immigrants suggests that there is a likelihood that
they won’t be, in large measure, ultraconservatives.
We see that there is a conflict between the picture of Millennials shown
in the epigraph and that discussed in the CNN report. There is also a lack
of agreement about exactly when Millennials were born: in 1980? or in
1984? And there’s no agreement about when the Millennial generation
ended, so it is difficult to characterize them with any certainty. In the
CNN report by Jacqueline Howard we read that the Millennials are the
most polarized generation in American politics. But this polarization may
not take the form it has taken with previous generations, since Millennials
now come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
A political science professor from Columbia University, Andrew
Gelman, who was not involved in the paper discussed in the CNN article,
points out that Millennial voters may be influenced by the era in which
they were born. As he explains:
If you look at the cohort of young voters who came of age during George
W. Bush’s presidency, they’re mostly Democrats, which makes sense as
Bush was a highly unpopular Republican. The young voters who came of
age during Obama’s presidency are more split, which makes sense because
Obama is neither popular nor unpopular; he has an approval of about
50%.” Political and partisan polarization in the United States has increased
a lot in recent decades; this is well known and there are many explanations
for it but no single story…. The parties are more ideological than they used
to be. www.cnn.com/2016/09/07/health/millennials-conservative-
generations
We can conclude from this that those Millennials who grew up when Bush
was president reacted to him by becoming Democrats, while older
Millennials who grew up during Obama’s presidency split between identi-
fying with the Democratic party and the Republican party. And the ideo-
logical extremes found in the Millennials is a reflection of the ideological
extremes found in American politics, in general.
An article in the Los Angeles Times by Armand Emandjomeh and David
Lauter, “Where the presidential race stands today,” published on August
4, 2016 on the Internet, quotes some statistics from the USC Dornsife/Los
Angeles Times “Daybreak” poll of some 3000 eligible voters. It offers
some interesting statistics about level of education and political prefer-
ences of American voters:
High school or less Some college College grad and up
Trump 49.3 Trump 47.8 Trump 36.4

Clinton 42.4 Clinton 38.5 Clinton 51.5
http://graphics.latimes.com/usc-presidential-poll-dashboard/
We see that the amount of education people have impacts upon their
choice for president. And it takes enough time in college to learn some-
thing about the nature of American society and culture before college
students turn more liberal and back candidates like Hillary Clinton.
Most polling experts believed that the USC poll, the only one which
predicted that Trump would win, had made mistakes in getting its data.
The night before the election, I looked at a roundup of polls and many
had Clinton ahead by two percent or more. One political commentator
suggested she might even win 350 electoral votes, though most were
more guarded about her prospects.
The 2016 Election and Millennials

Kipp Jarecke-Cheng, a columnist for MediaPost’s EngageMillennials,
writes in her column of October 28, 2016, “It’s President Nasty Woman
For Millennials and Younger,” that Millennials are more engaged in the
2016 election than many journalists and others writing about the cam-
paign thought they were. A survey by the Institute of Politics at Harvard
University revealed that Hillary Clinton had a remarkable twenty-eight
point advantage over Donald J. Trump among eighteen to twenty-nine
year olds. There was other bad news for Donald Trump, coming from a
mock election that was held in fifty states. Clinton received three-hundred
and sixty-five electoral votes to Trump’s one hundred and seventy-three.
This mock election has been successful in predicting the outcome of our
presidential elections since 1992, so it is very meaningful. More than two-
hundred million Americans registered to vote, which is much higher than
recent elections. As Jarecke-Cheng explains:
Two recent polls shed light on where the young’uns’ heads are at and vic-
tory appears increasingly less likely for the GOP presidential candidate—at
least among Generations Y through Z. A survey from Harvard University’s
Institute of Politics found the former Secretary of State leading the former
106 A.A. BERGER
proprietor of the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City by 28% among 18–29-year-olds.

That’s good news for the potential first female POTUS, who has struggled
to connect with Millennials, many of whom felt the Bern, but weren’t quite
ready to be with her. Meanwhile, in a mock election conducted by Channel
One News of more than 300,000 students in grades 4 through 12 across all
50 states, the erstwhile first lady handily trounced the erstwhile Drumpf,
with the former garnering 365 electoral votes compared to the latter’s small
handful of 173 electoral votes. The olds might be asking, “Why should we
care how 10 year olds vote in a phony presidential election?” The answer
would be that the results of Channel One News’ OneVote campaign has
accurately predicted the outcomes of the past six elections since the program
started in 1992, so, you know, precedence.
Young voters historically have been less engaged with politics and the
political process than older voters, yet a tremendous amount of attention
is paid to them every four years because they serve as bellwethers for
where the country’s political and cultural tides are turning. Although 69%
of respondents in the Harvard IOP survey said they don’t consider them-
selves to be politically engaged or politically active, 74% said they are
registered to vote. Nationally, 58.5% of 18–24-year-olds and 66.4% of
25–34-year-olds are registered to vote, compared to 76.6% of voters ages
55–64 and 78.1% of voters ages 65–74, according to data from the
U.S. Census Bureau.
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the American electorate

has been obsessed with the 2016 election and followed the rise of Donald
J. Trump with split emotions: horror on the part of liberal Democrats
(and some Republicans) and delight on the part of angry working class
white males with only high school educations, though to the surprise of
pollsters, others with college educations.
Daniel J. Arbess, who is a cofounder of No Labels, an organization
promoting political bipartisanship, had an article in The Wall Street Journal
in which he speculated about the fact that Democratic Millennials flocked
to Bernie Sanders and Republican Millennials favored Trump. He asked
“Why are young people voting against their own interests?” As he explains
(Feb. 20–21, 2016):
These young voters seem not to realize that the economic policies they find
so resonant are the least likely to promote the growth and the social mobility
they desire. They deserve to be led from the discredited backwater of
equalizing incomes.
Grandfather Bernie and the Oedipus Complex

Democratic Millennials were overwhelmingly supporters of Bernie Sanders
and attended his rallies in great numbers. But it seems they didn’t actually
go out and vote for him in very large numbers, which makes one wonder
whether their attendance at his rallies was seen as “fun” and the Sanders
rallies were, in a sense, seen as the political equivalence of rock concerts.
The basic motivation seems to have been “fun” and entertainment, not a
sense of political purpose, which would have led the Bernie Sanders
Millennials to vote for him.
This would suggest that the Bernie Sanders rallies were essentially an id
activity, not an ego or superego activity. If the rallies were superego activi-
ties, Millennials would have voted in large numbers, driven by a sense of
responsibility or guilt. It’s hard to determine what unconscious impera-
tives were operating in Millennials that led them to attend the Bernie
Sanders rallies. They may have been motivated by a sense that he stood for
many of the values they believed in, or by a feeling that they should be
“hip” and go to the rallies, where there would be many other Millennials
(who might be available later as sexual partners) and they would be seen
by others. Attending the rallies would be an indicator of engagement, but
not serious engagement that would lead to actual voting.
Bernie Sanders is seventy-four years old, which means he is the same
age as the grandfathers of the typical Millennial. Many people are curious
about why Millennials might be attracted to a political figure like Bernie
Sanders. My answer is that, in their unconscious, they see him as a benefi-
cent grandfather, who like most grandfathers spoils his grandchildren: he
brings them promises of free tuition at state universities and other good-
ies. His promise to “break up the banks” is an attack on institutions that
represent their parents—institutions that have power and influence on the
country the way their parents once had power over them. It is generally
understood that children inherit the superegos of their grandparents, not
their parents. Bernie Sanders’ rallies, then, can be seen as a means by which
Millennials assert their independence from their parents and help resolve
their Oedipal conflicts. All of this, I should add, is done at the unconscious
level. Adopting a psychoanalytic perspective on human behavior implies
that people are not aware of most of what goes on in their psyches and
have the illusions that all their decisions are based on rationality and logic.
Most political commentators have suggested that the Millennials held
the key to the 2016 presidential election. They are the largest generation
108 A.A. BERGER
in terms of numbers in the United States. Large numbers of them don’t

seem to like Hillary Clinton, a grandmother figure (and an actual grand-
mother now, who often makes reference to that status). Bernie Sanders
and other Millennial political heroes and heroines, such as Elizabeth
Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, are doing everything they can to
motivate Millennials to vote and to avoid “throwing their votes away” on
third party candidates. Although Millennials backed Clinton by very large
margins, those margins were not enough to elect her, and Donald Trump,
in what was one of the biggest upsets in American politics, won the
presidency.
Phillip Rucker, in The Washington Post, offers us an insight into how
Millennials feel about the election. He writes in his article “For Millennials
the Clinton vs. Trump Choice Feels Like a Joke” (August 13, 2016):
The message coming from America’s rising generation is ominous, and it

carries ramifications after the November election. No matter who wins, they
don’t think the next president will address their concerns or even have an
impact on their lives. They have grim expectations for their government and
have stopped looking to Washington for solutions. Why? Because they see it
as too gridlocked—and its leaders too corrupted. These voters were embar-
rassed and ashamed that Clinton and Trump are the best the country has to
offer. Of the more than 70 millennials interviewed by The Washington Post,
only a small fraction sounded genuinely enthusiastic about a candidate.
Though a few people voiced admiration for Clinton, most talked about both
her and Trump in searing, caustic words: Super villain. Evil. Chameleon.
Racist. Criminal. Egomaniac. Narcissist. Sociopath. Liar.
The failure by the Millennials to differentiate between Trump and Clinton

is disturbing. Since Rucker wrote his article, there has been a presidential
debate and that may have clarified the differences between the candidates
for many Millennials.
A Millennial journalist, Kate Aronoff, explains Millennials’ point of
view on the election. As she writes in The Guardian:
Hillary Clinton is having a harder time beating Donald Trump than she
bargained for. According to a recent poll, a staggering 44% of millennials
say they’ll be voting for either Green party candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian
Gary Johnson. The chief reason for Clinton’s dip in these polls is not—as
Barack Obama claimed on Sunday—that she’s a woman (though sexism does
have a lot to answer for). It’s because Clinton has assumed a third of the
electorate—millennials—would vote for her out of fear of her opponent.

Simply put, we want more. Millennials are the generation that has occupied
Wall Street, shut down bridges for black lives and chained ourselves to the White
House fence to stop the Keystone XL pipeline … What Clinton can do now
is prove that she’s listening. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis-
free/2016/sep/20/clinton-hasnt-won-millennials-sexism-isnt-to-blame
Aronoff is a Millennial and her comments on the Clinton campaign make

sense. The Clinton campaign can be faulted for spending too much time
attacking Donald Trump, even though Clinton has an agenda and has
spoken about it often. The Millennials wanted “more,” as Aronoff put it.
But what the Millennials have to remember is that politics is the “art of the
possible,” and things aren’t as simple in politics as in other realms.
Gillian Flaccus, Tamara Lush and Martha Irvine (The Associated Press,
August 21, 2016) offer some other insights into the enigmatic beliefs and
behavior of Millennials when it comes to politics in their article “Millennial’s
values and politics are a mixed bag”:
Millennials’ disdain for traditional party affiliation means that half describe
themselves as independents, according to a 2014 Pew Research report—a
near-record level of political disaffiliation. They tend to be liberal on social
questions such as gay marriage, abortion and marijuana legalization. Yet
they skew slightly conservative on fiscal policy and are more in line with
other generations on gun control and foreign affairs. Trip Nistico, a recent
Colorado law school graduate, is a gun rights advocate who visits shooting
ranges—but also supports same-sex marriage. He backed President Barack
Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. The 26-year-old is voting for
Trump this year. Still, Trump remains unpopular among millennials and
nearly two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 believe the
Republican nominee is racist, according to GenForward’s poll. https://
www.reviewjournal.com/uncategorized/millennials-values-and-
politics-are-a-mixed-bag/
So the Millennials were a conundrum for political scientists and jour-

nalists covering politics. How they voted in the 2016 presidential election
most likely determined who won. It seems likely that many Millennials
voted for third party candidates and not enough of them voted for Clinton,
which allowed Trump to win. An article by William A. Galston and Clara
Hendrickson, “How Millennials voted this election,” offers the following
statistics:
110 A.A. BERGER
While many expected the low favorability ratings of the two candidates
and the divisiveness of this election year to keep young voters home,
2016 saw similar rates of young adult turnout as 2012. On election day,
Hillary Clinton won the youth vote (55 percent) while Donald Trump
only garnered the support of 37 percent of the millennial electorate.
Comparatively, in 2012, young adults voted for Barack Obama over Mitt
Romney by 60 percent to 37 percent. https://www.brookings.edu/
blog/fixgov/2016/11/21/how-millennials-voted/012
That five percent difference may have had an important effect and may
have led to Trump’s victory. These statistics also suggest that Trump had
more Millennial votes than many commentators thought he would have
and that not all Millennials are liberal.
In the British snap election, things were different. In an article by John
B. Judis, “The Millennials Are Moving Left,” he discusses the role of
Millennials in the British elections involving Theresa May. He writes (New
Republic, June 9, 2017):
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s bid to consolidate power has back-
fired. Her Conservative Party lost its governing majority in Thursday’s snap-
election, forcing it to form a minority government with the Democratic
Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which
gained 31 net seats while Conservatives lost 12, appeared to get its boost
from young voters. That assessment, if accurate, confirms a trend in
American and Western European politics toward a radical turn among
young voters that could over the next decade further undermine the politi-
cal center.
Judis suggests that economic factors are behind the high turnout by
Millennials in Britain and that the same factors will shape elections in most
Western societies. Turnout among British Millennials was twenty percent
higher than it was in the election in 2014. Many young college graduates
are underemployed or jobless. Or they have part-time jobs with few ben-
efits. And, in the United States, Millennials have a great deal of debt
because of the cost of their educations. In Britain, among the Millennials,
Labour candidates won sixty-three percent of the voters and the Tories
only twenty-seven percent. There are also a number of “post-materialist”
factors like support of gay marriage, immigrants and anxiety about climate-
change that help explain the leftward drift of Millennials in Britain and, it
must be assumed, in American and other Western countries in the future.
References
Abbess, Daniel J. 2016. Why Are Young People Voting Against Their Interests?
The Wall Street Journal, February 20–21.
Rucker, Phillip. 2016. For Millennials the Clinton vs. Trump Choice Feels Like a
Joke. The Washington Post, August 13.
CHAPTER 10
Sexual Identity, Gender and the Millennials
Abstract The chapter starts with a discussion of the notion that gender is
socially constructed and open to choice. It discusses the ideas of Judith
Butler who sees gender as a kind of performance that can be changed
according to the desires of individuals. This leads to a discussion of gender
roles in society and the notion that they are not universal and not merely
natural. It is estimated that there are around seven million LGBTQ
Millennials in America. Millennials, it is suggested, are much more sup-
portive of gay marriage than the general population, and this is having an
effect on society. The chapter concludes with a discussion of gender trans-
formations, which have been taking place for many years.
Keywords Gender • Performance • LGBTQ
In this chapter I deal with the complicated matter of how Millennials think
about gender. I begin with an article by Eileen M. Trauth and a number
of colleagues about shifting attitudes in Millennials about gender and
sexuality.
Until the last third of the twentieth century it was typical to classify indi-
viduals into fixed groupings by sex—male and female—and gender—mascu-
line and feminine—and to reinforce these by the imposition of gender
stereotypes…. However, the emergence of second wave feminism, sexuality

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_10
114 A.A. BERGER
studies and masculinity studies in the 1970s signaled the deconstruction of

a gender binary in which sex is conflated with gender…. The implications
for the study of gender and ICT are significant. Lie…. argues that “men and
women are changing their practices and entering new relationships with
each other and their environments, and the understanding of the concepts
of masculine and feminine are just as unstable as men’s and women’s looks,
activities and practices. One challenge is … to construct methodological
approaches to study change and variation in ICT-gender relationships.”
[“Millennials and Masculinity: A Shifting Tide of Gender Typing of
ICT?” Eileen M. Trauth, K.D. Joshi, Lynette Kvasny, Jing Chong,
Sadan Kulturel, Jan Mahar]
Gender, many social scientists and other researchers now suggest, is

socially constructed, which means our gender is now a matter of choice.
As the quotation above suggests, the old dichotomies, sex: male and
female, and gender: masculine and feminine, no longer have the wide-
spread acceptance they once had. Many scholars now maintain that if sex
is defined by our bodies, gender is a matter of choice, and increasingly
people are changing their genders—often through surgery of one kind or
another and other medical procedures.
Fig. 10.1 Judith Butler

SEXUAL IDENTITY, GENDER AND THE MILLENNIALS 115
In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler discusses the relationship

between sex and gender. She writes (1990:9–10):
Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the dis-

tinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biologi-
cal intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence,
gender is neither the casual result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex…. If
gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then gender
cannot be said to follow from sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit,
the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed
bodies and culturally constructed gender.
So gender is socially or culturally constructed and thus can be changed. For

Butler, gender can be seen as a kind of performance, which means that the
performers can change their gender roles. Children learn gender roles based
on their sex, which play an important role in socializing them and helping
them fit into society. But some children, at an early age, do not accept the
gender roles of their sex and adopt the gender roles of members of a differ-
ent sex: little girls like to play with trucks and little boys like to wear dresses.
An Internet source, Boundless, offers the following information about
the impact of gender roles in society:
Gender role theory posits that boys and girls learn to perform one’s biologi-
cally assigned gender through particular behaviors and attitudes. Gender role
theory emphasizes the environmental causes of gender roles and the impact of
socialization, or the process of transferring norms, values, beliefs, and behav-
iors to group members, in learning how to behave as a male or a female. Social
role theory proposes that the social structure is the underlying force in distin-
guishing genders and that sex-differentiated behavior is driven by the division
of labor between two sexes within a society. The division of labor creates gen-
der roles, which in turn, lead to gendered social behavior. With the populariza-
tion of social constructionist theories of gender roles, it is paramount that one
recognize that all assertions about gender roles are culturally and historically
contingent. Source: Boundless. “Gender Roles in the U.S.” Boundless
Sociology Boundless, 08 Aug. 2016. Retrieved 16 Jan. 2017 from
https://www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/boundless-sociol-
ogy-textbook/gender-stratification-and-inequality-11/gender-and-
socialization-86/gender-roles-in-the-u-s-498-7851/
If gender roles are not universal and not natural, it means that some
people, who are not happy with the gender roles that their sexes have, can
change their genders. It is estimated that there are approximately ten
116 A.A. BERGER
million Americans who are members of the LGBTQ (Q is for “queer”)

community. According to the American Psychological Association:
LGBT is shorthand for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. The “LGB”
in this term refers to sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is defined as an
often enduring pattern of emotional, romantic and/or sexual attractions of
men to women or women to men (heterosexual), of women to women or
men to men (homosexual), or by men or women to both sexes (bisexual). It
also refers to an individual’s sense of personal and social identity based on
those attractions, related behaviors and membership in a community of oth-
ers who share those attractions and behaviors. Some people who have same-
sex attractions or relationships may identify as “queer,” or, for a range of
personal, social or political reasons, may choose not to self-identify with
these or any labels. http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/
If the LGBTQ Millennials are present in the same proportion as in the

general community, it means there are around seven million LGBTQ
Millennials who marketers must find a way to reach. It turns out there are
considerable differences between sexes the consumption practices of
Millennials. An article by Mary Leigh Bliss in the Friday, January 13, 2017
editions of MediaPost’s Engage Millennials discusses this matter. She
writes in “3 Things Millennial Women Do More Than Millennial Men”
and writes:
About 42% of 13–33-year-olds consider themselves foodies, but females are

more likely to try healthy trends like quinoa and spiralized veggies, while
young males are more likely to try the craft beers and beer bar trends. We
dipped into more of our monthly survey data to find three more things that
Millennial females are doing more than Millennial males:
1. Worry about money. In our recent look at young consumers’ per-

sonal finances, we asked how 13–33-year-olds feel when they think
about money, and females were far more likely to have negative emo-
tions: 37% said they feel worried about money, compared to 18% of
males, 39% said they feel overwhelmed compared to 20% of males,
and 32% say they feel nervous, compared to 26% of males. Females
were also less likely than males to say they feel knowledgeable and
confident. Their more negative views are likely due to their higher
debt and lower wages: The Wall Street Journal reports that the gender
wage gap is a real savings limitation for Millennial women: the median
personal income for men was $10,300 higher than their female coun-
SEXUAL IDENTITY, GENDER AND THE MILLENNIALS 117
terparts, and 54% of Millennial women report having to live paycheck-

to-paycheck, compared to 43% of men.
2. Use an iPhone. Millennials and iPhones go together like bread and
butter, right? Well, while over half of 13–33-year-olds overall say they
currently have an iPhone, females are the leaders in iPhone owner-
ship: 57% say they own an iPhone, compared to 49% of males. In fact,
males’ phone ownership is split nearly 50/50 between Android and
iPhone. Millennial females’ prioritization of tech aesthetics could be
behind the disparity.
. Get tattoos. Like iPhones, tattoos fit right into the stereotypical pic-
3
ture of Millennials—we found that 20% of 18–33-year-olds (28% of
30–33-year-olds) are currently inked. But interestingly, females are
more likely to be sporting body art: 26% say they currently have a tat-
too, compared to 14% of males. Millennial females without a tattoo
are also more likely than males to say they are interested in getting
one, and that they think there is less of a stigma towards tattoos than
there used to be.
The statistics about the number of Millennials living from paycheck-to-

paycheck is alarming. Female Millennials, we find, are twice as worried
about their finances as male Millennials, in part because female Millennials
earn around $10,000 less than males do. If thirty-seven percent of female
Millennials live from paycheck-to-paycheck, they must be experiencing a
great deal of anxiety and stress. We must assume, here, the same level of
education for both men and women for the earnings figures to meaning-
ful. And yet, some fifty-seven percent of female Millennials have iPhones.
This could be because of what the author calls “tech aesthetics,” but it also
could be because having an iPhone is a “safe” choice and has high status.
Then there is the matter of tattoos. About twice as many women have tat-
toos as men. There may be less stigma connected to getting tattoos nowa-
days, but the increase in women getting tattooed may be connected to it
being a fad and the “everyone’s doing it” mindset. Possibly it reflects an
attitude toward beauty and turning one’s body into a “work of art.”
A Pew Report on “The Whys and Hows of Generations Research”
offers some insights into why Millennials have the attitudes they have
about same-sex marriage.
Millennials and Gen Xers came into the population more supportive of
allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally than older generations, and those
greater levels of support have persisted over time. As a result, some of the
118 A.A. BERGER
explanation for an overall shift in attitudes about same-sex marriage is attrib-

utable to a “generational replacement” as members of older, less supportive
generations pass away, they are “replaced” in the adult population by mem-
bers of younger, more supportive generations entering adulthood. www.
people-press.org/…/03/the-whys-and-hows-of-generations-research
So generations do make a difference and the experiences of Millennials as

they grew up in a certain time period play a role in shaping their attitudes
and beliefs. And the fact that they are “replacing” previous generations
means their impact will be significant—until they are replaced by the next
generation, that is. Millennials have little trouble accepting gay marriage
and gender alterations and their acceptance has played an important role
in legitimizing gay marriage and gender transformations.
Some kinds of gender transformations have been with us for many
years. We find transvestites in many countries and the British seemed to
think it was hilarious having men dressed like women: sometimes the
transvestism was obvious and played for comic effect but sometimes it
wasn’t. And there have been serious plays involving transvestites that have
been very popular. So having men dressed like women and women dressed
like men—think of Marlene Dietrich in a tux—have been with us for a
long time and are signifiers that gender identity and confusion about gen-
der identity have been a matter of interest for a long time.
References
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge.
CHAPTER 11
Coda
Abstract In this chapter, we find a quotation from the novelist Robert

Musil about people’s life trajectories. He suggests that people often find
themselves stuck like flies on what we might call the “flypaper of life,” with
little chance of changing themselves. This notion contrasts with the
American notion that we can always change ourselves and have a sense of
infinite possibility. The chapter explores the impact that the eighty million
Millennials have on American society and culture. It considers the curious
fact that Millennials do not feel guilty about viewing pirated copies of
films. Why is this the case? This leads to a discussion of the ideas of Michel
Foucault about how social change occurs. He argues that social change
occurs when the codes that have traditionally shaped our behavior come
into conflict with scientific and other theories, which leads to modifica-
tions and changes in the basic codes. The chapter concludes with a discus-
sion of how Millennials, with their different codes from other generations,
will shape American culture.
Keywords Musil • Codes • Foucault • Piracy
This final chapter deals with the fact that our age is one of the most impor-
tant predictors of our behaviors and attitudes. As a Pew Report on “The
Whys and Hows of Generations Research” explains:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0_11
120 A.A. BERGER
An individual’s age is one of the most common predictors of differences in

attitudes and behaviors. On issues ranging from foreign affairs to social pol-
icy, age differences in attitudes can be some of the widest and most illumi-
nating. Age denotes two important characteristics about an individual: their
place in the life cycle—whether a young adult, middle-aged parent or
retiree—and their membership in a cohort of individuals who were born at
a similar time. The nature of age as a variable allows researchers to employ
an approach known as cohort analysis to track a group of people over the
course of their lives. Age cohorts give researchers a tool to analyze changes
in views over time; they can provide a way to understand how different for-
mative experiences interact with the life-cycle and aging process to shape
people’s view of the world. While younger and older adults may differ in
their views at a given moment, age cohorts allow researchers to go further
and examine how today’s older adults felt about a given issue when they
themselves were young, as well as to describe how the trajectory of views
might differ across age cohorts. www.people-press.org/…/03/
the-whys-and-hows-of-generations-research
It’s not unusual for people, at various times in their lives, to think about
their identities and wonder how they arrived at themselves. Millennials are
not different from members of other generations in this respect.
Fig. 11.1 Robert Musil

CODA 121
Robert Musil, the great modernist novelist, deals with people’s life tra-
jectories in his book The Man Without Qualities. He writes (1965:151):
At this moment he wished to be a man without qualities. But this is probably

not so different from what other people sometimes feel too. After all, by the
time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey few people remem-
ber how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements,
their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they
cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change any more. It might even
be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any
sufficient reason for everything’s having come about as it has. It might just
as well have turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all,
only to the least degree originated in them, having generally depended on all
sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different
people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying
towards them—Something has had its way with them like a flypaper with a
fly; it has caught them fast, here catching a little hair, there hampering their
movements, and has gradually enveloped them, until they lie, buried under a
thick coating that has only the remotest resemblance to their original shape.
When we reach middle age, Musil suggests, we suddenly recognize that

our lives probably aren’t going to change very much. He is pessimistic
about our possibilities, in the best angst-ridden European tradition. In
America, people believe that they can continually reinvent themselves but
eventually, if Musil is right, they recognize that once they reach middle
age most likely not much is going to change.
That may explain the so-called mid-life crisis that men (and women as
well) are supposed to experience. For Millennials, middle-age represents
the recognition that they’ve probably gone about as far as they are going
to go with their jobs and dealing with the stress-filled catastrophe of rais-
ing teenagers. For Millennials, who were raised with a sense of infinite
possibility, their post-Millennials years will be very difficult. Not everyone
would agree with Musil and many Americans still believe that they can
continually and endlessly reinvent themselves.
The Pew Report points out that generations differ and that generations
really matter. There are a number of things that affect our lives in addition
to our generation. Where we are born (our nationality), our siblings (if we
have any), where we grow up, our race, our religion, our sex, our gender,
the socioeconomic status of our parents, the kind of parents we have
(single parent, two women, two men, or a man and a woman), who is
122 A.A. BERGER
president, events that happen in the world when we are young (think of
the impact of 9/11 on American society), our intelligence, our bodies,
our dispositions, the role of chance in our lives, who we marry (if we
marry) or live with, and so on.
There are many other factors that affect us such as: our birth order, our
parents (and how they raise us), the streets we live on, our neighbor-
hoods, our cities, our states, our regions (New England, the Deep South,
the Pacific Northwest, and so on) and our countries. All of these play a
role in our development. But our age and our generation are of central
importance, regardless of all the other variables, because our age is the
most common predictor of our attitudes and our behaviors. We may be
different in many ways, but we are all the same in terms of our genera-
tions—a period of roughly twenty years when we grow up that plays a role
in our lives that we generally don’t think about very much. When new
generations begin and what we should call them is a matter of some
debate, but there is a general consensus that children who came of age
during the millennium should be called Millennials (though some insist
on Generation Y).
There are (depending on how you define Millennials) approximately
eighty million Millennials and their distinctive set of attitudes and behav-
iors play an important role in our economy and our culture. Approximately
one out of every five Americans is a Millennial. We have seen in this book
that Millennials are different from other generations. They spend more
time on the Internet than members of other generations, and they have
different and distinctive attitudes towards religion, sex, gender, money,
politics, food and many other things. They are different because they have
had different possibilities: they grew up with the Internt and other new
technologies that helped shape their behavior. They also grew up when
attitudes in the United States about law, marriage, religion, sex and gen-
der were changing, and so they have a different take on life than members
of earlier generations.
In Greg Carson’s Media Post column, “The M Word: We Aren’t Who
You Think We Are,” published on June 19, 2017, we have an important
assessment on Millennials.
The word I am talking about is Millennials—and while we tend to see

them as digital natives, intrepid travelers and adventure seekers, they are
actually the most risk-averse generation since the Great Depression. Let
CODA 123
me throw a couple of surprising facts at you. The majority of Millennials

still lean on their parents for financial assistance, and in 2014—for the
first time in 130 years—adults ages 28–34 were more likely to live with
parents than with a spouse or partner. Considering the rise of Silicon
Valley and sites like Kickstarter and Etsy, one of the most unexpected
statistics is that Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial
generation in history. In fact, while they greatly admire entrepreneurs,
they are proving conservative in their career choices and choose climb-
ing the corporate ladder over being their own boss. It’s easy for us to
make fun of Millennials, what with their avocado toast and selfie sticks,
but after growing up in the 2008 financial crisis, high levels of student
debt, a tanked-to-recovering job market and the burgeoning landscape
of social media in which they must constantly compare themselves to
others, they’ve grown to be a self-conscious generation where self-
image, peer approval and heavy reliance on crowdsourced opinions have
become a part of their decision-making process and shape how they view
themselves.
The Traveling Millennial

Travel and adventure-seeking have a new, greater importance in the
Millennial lifestyle. They are taking more vacations than ever, with 70%
reporting the desire to visit every continent. They place a premium on
authentic travel experience: cultural appreciation, living like a local, and
off-the-beaten-track experiences are more sought after than partying and
other “traditional” tourist activities. I think this is awesome. It’s a wonder-
ful trend that inspires tourists to go further, learn more and become more
aware of their world. However, research shows that while Millennials do
indeed desire new and adventurous experiences, they also rely heavily on
their peers, seek verified authenticity and have safety concerns. The “risk”
of having a bad time is quite a literal one. Ideas are vetted through social
platforms, and untested travel is not particularly attractive. While their
parents (and grandparents) relied on guide books and travel agents, 76%
of Millennials say their vacation is influenced by friends’ recommenda-
tions, social media and a much broader definition of peers such as review-
ers, bloggers and forums. Click-bait headlines like “15 Must-See Places
Before You Die” or a shared YouTube video can create a chain reaction for
the thoughtful vacation planner. Their next step may very well be a post
that says “Planning my next adventure. Who’s been to Cuba?” Whether or
not they decide to go further may very well be revealed in the comments
section.
124 A.A. BERGER
The picture we get of Millennials suggests that they are still influenced
in great measure by peer pressure and lack the individualism and sense of
possibility that earlier generations demonstrated.
There’s a curious thing about Millennials’ ethical beliefs. A report by
Alison McCarthy in eMarketer (January 25, 2017) finds that many more
than half of Millennials do not feel guilty about viewing pirated copies of
films, and they watch them regularly:
That’s the finding of a new survey from digital security concern Irdeto.
Given the wide array of legal video and music options available, the results
of the survey are sobering, if not entirely surprising. The survey found
that many millennials don’t feel guilty about viewing pirated content. It
asked the respondents how they felt about pirated material, given that
watching it could cause studios and content producers to lose money.
About 44% of the millennials who view pirated content said that this
would have no effect on their habits. Indeed, 10% of those ages 18–24
and 14% of those ages 25–34 said it that only whetted their appetite even
more.
We might ask ourselves why is it that Millennials feel the way they do
about what amounts to property theft. It may be because it doesn’t seem
like theft to Millennials and others who view pirated material, and it may
be because the Millennials have a distinctive and some might suggest a
questionable view of what is ethical and moral.
Fig. 11.2 Michel Foucault

CODA 125
Social change is an enigmatic topic. The French philosopher and cul-

tural theorist Michel Foucault (1926–1984) offers some perceptive
insights that may help us understand how social change occurs. Earlier I
discussed the work of the French psychoanalyst and marketer Clotaire
Rapaille. He wrote that when we are raised in a country, up to the age of
seven, we are imprinted with certain codes that shape our behavior in later
years. If we think of cultures as collection of codes that we learn as we
grow up, Foucault’s notion is that the codes that shape our behavior
undergo changes over the years for reason that he explains below in his
book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1973:xx):
The fundamental codes of a culture—those governing its language, its sche-

mas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchies of
its practices—establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical
orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.
At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the
philosophical expectations which explain why order exists in general, what
universal order it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this par-
ticular order has been established and now some other. But between these
two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though
its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental: it is more
confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyze. It is here that a
culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it
by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them
to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible
powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not
the only possible ones or the best ones…. It is on the basis of this newly
perceived order that the codes of language, perception and practice are criti-
cized and rendered partially invalid.
Foucault’s books are not very easy to read because his writing is often
abstruse and difficult to follow, and his thinking is very complicated.
What’s important about this passage is that it suggests how social change
comes about, as the tension between the basic codes which create order in
a culture come into a subtle conflict with scientific theories and
philosophical thought, and an area between these two perspectives then
arises that suggests the possibility of modifying and even changing a cul-
ture’s fundamental codes.
126 A.A. BERGER
In Ellis Cashmore and Chris Rojek, (eds.) Dictionary of Cultural

Theorists, Nicholas Gane offers an assessment of Foucault’s contribution
(1999:157):
Foucault’s work has had a vast impact on the philosophy and practice of
cultural theory. The Order of Things, a best-seller within months of publica-
tion, charts the development of intellectual culture from the sixteenth cen-
tury onwards, linking profound changes in the historical foundations of
knowledge … to the emergence of new forms of thought and cultural
classification.
It would seem that for one reason or another, the codes of ethics that
shape the behavior of Millennials have changed from the codes of earlier
generations—at least as far as using pirated material on the Internet is
concerned. How the Millennials adopted their pattern of beliefs and val-
ues is hard to determine. It may be that there were different possibilities
for them to choose from—such as having the Internet and growing up
when traditional marriage arrangements were falling apart. It may be that
there was some kind of national calamity or some kind of national cultural
change, such as postmodernism. But Millennial behavior is distinctive and
Millennials are a unique generation of Americans who are different in
important ways from members of other generations in America.
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Millennials Upend Traditional Madison Avenue Advertising Practices. Center for
Media Research, October 20, 2016.
Mueller, Walt. 2004. Meet the Millennials. Center for Parent/Youth Understanding.
Murphy, Tim. 2016. Millennials Love Radio. Wait. What? MediaPost’s Engage
Millennials, August 3.
National Chamber Foundation Research Review of Millennials.
Patai, Raphael. 1972. Myth and Modern Man. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Petit, Frederic Charles. 2016. Millennials: Wanderers or Trailblazers. MediaPost’s
Engage Millennials, October 25.
Pew Report. n.d. Millennials and the Digital Media. Pew Research Center Fact
Tank.
Rapaille, Clotaire. 2006. The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why
People Around the World Buy and Live as They Do. New York: Broadway Books.
Robert, Musil. 1965. The Man Without Qualities. New York: Capricorn Books.
Rosenberg, Bernard, and David Manning White, eds. 1957. Mass Culture: The
Popular Arts in America. New York: The Free Press.
Roy, Jojo. 2017. Millennials Driving Digital Togetherness in the Physical World.
MediaPost’s Engage Millennials, January 10.
Rucker, Phillip. 2016. For Millennials the Clinton vs. Trump Choice Feels Like a
Joke. The Washington Post, August 13.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. A Course in General Linguistics. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Solomon, Jack. 1988. The Signs of Our Times. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Solomon, Michael, et al. 2002. Consumer Behavior: A European Perspective. 2nd
ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Shulman, Bob. 2016a. MediaPost’s Engage Affluents, September 7.
———. 2016b. MediaPost’s Engage Millennials, October 5.
Taylor, Mark L. n.d. Generation NeXt: Today’s Postmodern Student—Meeting,
Teaching, Serving. http://www.taylorprograms.com/images/Gen_NeXt_article_
HLC_05.pdf
Thompson, Michael, et al. 1990. Culture Theory. Boulder, CO: Westview.
130 References
Urban, Jeff. 2016. Understand a Demographic: Multicultural Millennials.

MediaPost’s Engage Millennials, November 18.
Wamke, Melissa Bachelor. 2016. The Millennial Generation as an Insider Threat:
High Risk or Overhyped? Los Angeles Times, August 3.
Weekly Time Spent Online by US Affluent Internet Users by Generation. July
2016. Chart. eMarketer.
Wiesen, Shlomo. 2016. Three Thematic Strategies for Engaging Millennials.
MediaPost’s Engage Millennials, June 29.
Wikipedia. n.d. Millennials.
Williams, David, et al. 2012. The Use of Social Media: An Exploratory Study of
Usage Among Digital Natives. March 6. Wiley Online Library.
Woolf, Virginia. 1924. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Meeting of the Heretics Club
at Cambridge University.
Young Internet Users Say They Are Addicted to Their Devices. eMarketer, August
5, 2016.
Zaltman, Gerald. 2003. How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of
the Market. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Index
NUMBERS & SYMBOLS Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen, 20

“3 Things Millennials Women Do Aronoff, Kate, 108
More Than Millennial Men,” 116 Askegaard, Soren, 90
“15 Must-See Places Before You Die,” Associated Press, 109
123 Australasian Psychiatry, 49
A B
Accenture.com, 75, 76 Baby Boomers, 2
Adweek, 67 Baby Einstein, 23
Airbnb, 59 Bailey, Maria, 25
Alberta Brain and Cognitive Bamossy, Gary, 90
Development Lab, 53 Barthes, Roland, 41
Amazon.com, 66, 80, 94 Baudrillard, Jean, 92
American Psychological Association, Bergman, Jacqueline Z., 50
116 Bergman, Shawn M., 50
American Psychologist, 60 Beyond Laughter, 17, 43
Apple Corporation, 45 Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My
Apple Watch, 44 Encounter with Marx and Freud,
Arbess, Daniel J., 106 45
Archives of Sexual Behavior, 12 Bliss, Mary Leigh, 80
Aristotle, 13 Bloomberg Businessweek, 79

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69685-0
132 INDEX
Bloomer, Peggy, 98 Millennials to Make a ‘Real’

Boundless Internet Source, 115 Commitment,” 77
Bourdieu, Pierre, 29 Dictionary of Cultural Theorists, 88,
Bowie, David, 96 126
Brandweek, 77 Dietrich, Marlene, 118
Brown, Stephen T., 54 Diggles, Michelle, 102
Brunwell, David, 51 Donnelly, Christopher, 75
Bush, George W., 104 Douglas, Mary, 70
Butler, Judith, 115 Dreyfus, Herbert L., 59
BuzzFeed, 81 Durvasala, Ramani, 19
Buzz Marketing Group, 68
E
C Ebersman, David, 48
Cashmore, Ellis, 88, 126 Eileen M. Trauth, 113
Chadra, Rahul, 4 An Elementary Textbook of
Chase, 64 Psychoanalysis, 16
Cicero, 39 Ellis, Richard, 71
Claritas, vii, 33–36 Emandjomeh, Armand, 104
Clark University, 20 eMarketer, vii, 57, 124
Clinton, Hillary, 36, 105, 108, Etsy, 123
110 Experian Marketing Services, 48
Coca-Cola, 96 “Express Wal-Marts,” 80
Consumer Behavior: A European
Perspective, 90
Consumer Reports, 78 F
Coupofy, 59 Facebook, 50, 52, 66, 91
Course in General Linguistics, 93 darkness, 50
Cratylus, 40 grandiosity, 50
Crittenden, Victoria, 57 impulsivity, 50
Cronus, 42, 43 narcissism, 50
Crowd, 19, 30 regression, 50
Culture Code, 30 Fearrington, Matthew E., 50
Culture Theory, 71 Fisher, David J., 11
Flaccus, Gillian, 109
Fleiss, Wilhelm, 17, 43
D “For Millennials the Clinton vs.
Daily Beast, 25 Trump Choice Feels Like a
Danesi, Marcel, 41 Joke,” 108
Davenport, Shaun W., 50 Foster, Brooke Lea, 20
“The Diamond Industry’s First Foucault, Michel, 92, 125
Campaign in 5 Years Encourages Fox network, 81
INDEX
133
Freud, Aliza, 78 H
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 17, 18, 43 Hamlet, 17, 44
Fromm, Erich, 45 Hargrav, Sean, 65
Harvard Business School, 14
Harvard University, 105
G Havel, Vaclav, 89
Gallup, 64 Hendrickson, Clara, 109
Galston, William A., 109 Hesiod, 42
Gazdik, Tanya, 48 Hikikomori, 54–56, 60
Gelman, Andrew, 104 social disease of nearly epidemic
Gender proportions, 55
a matter of choice, 114 social withdrawal of reclusive youth,
socially constructed, 114 54
“Gender Roles in the U.S.,” 115 widespread social disorder in Japan, 54
Gender Trouble, 115 Hoshino, Tomoyuki, 56
“Generation Me,” 26, 103 Howard, Jacqueline, 103, 104
“Generation NeXt: Today’s How Customers Think: Essential
Postmodern Student— Insights into the Mind of The
Meeting, Teaching, Serving,” Market, 15
89 Howe, Neil, 12
Generations, 6–8 “How Millennials voted this
age is one of the most important election,” 109
predictors of our behaviors and http://www.claritas.com, 34
attitudes, 119 Huffington Post, 82
Baby boom generation, 7
Baby boomers, 6
Generation X, 6 I
Generation Z, 6, 7 Ideology and Utopia, 32
GI generation, 7 Impostor Archetype, 96–99
millennials, 6 “In Defence of Shopping,” 71
silent generation, 7 Instagram, 66
traditionalis, 6 Internet, 3, 59
Getting to 30: A Parent’s Guide to the “Internet Paradox: A Social
Twentysomething Years, 20 Technology that Reduces Social
Gillespie, Nick, 23 Involvement and Psychological
Google, 3, 83, 94 Well-Being,” 59–60
Grid-group theory Interrogating Culture: Critical
few or many rules, 70 Perspectives on Contemporary
weak or strong borders, 70 Society Theory, 86
Grotjahn, Martin, 17, 43 iPhones, 82
Groupon, 79 Ipsos Connect, 61
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Irvine, Martha, 109
Ego, 17 “It’s President Nasty Woman For
Guardian, 108 Millennials and Younger,” 105
134 INDEX
J Man Without Qualities, 121

Jackson, Michael, 96 Mannheim, Karl, 32
Jameson, Fredric, 92 Mariko, Fujiwara, 55
Japanese culture, 56 Marin Independent Journal, 19
conformist culture, 55 Marketing Daily, 48
distinctive culture, 56 Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
hikikomori, 55 America, 91
“lost generation,” 55 Mateen, Omar, 24–25
Jarecke-Cheng, Kipp, 105 closeted homosexual, 25
Jargon, Julie, 77 a very religious Muslim, 25
Jean-François Lyotard, 86 May, Theresa, 110
Johnson, Gary, 108 McCarthy, Alisa, 4
Joseph, Sarah, 86 McCarthy, Alison, 124
Journal of Personality, 20 McCarty, Paulette, 57
Judis, John B., 110 “McDonald’s is Losing the Burger
War,” 77
“Mcommerce Leaders Double Up and
K Pull Ahead—Have You Left It
Kairo, 54 Too Late?,” 65
Kats, Rimma, 4 ME, 56
Keo, Teeda, 57 Media, Myth and Society, 21
Kickstarter, 123 MediaPost, vii, 3, 8, 37, 64–66, 68,
Kiyoshi, Kurosawa, 54 79, 116
Kraut, R., 59 “Meet the Millennials,” 95
Millennial females, 116
get tattoos, 117
L use an iPhone., 117
Lauter, David, 104 worry about money, 116
Le Bon, Gustav, 18, 19, 32, 36 Millennials
Lee, Don, 26 Digital Natives, 52–53
LGBT, 116 Don’t Want to Pay for News, 80–81
lesbian, gay, bisexual and Generation C, 57–60
transgender, 116 Generation Me, 51
LGBTQ (Q is for “queer”) Like to Clip Coupons, 78–79
community, 116 love of radio, 51
LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, media use, 52
Transgender, Queer), 24 Millennium Fathers, 25–27
Los Angeles Times, 104 Name Brands, 82–83
Lush, Tamara, 109 Oedipal conflicts, 107
political Independents, 102
politics, 101–110
M Remote Control Kids, 95
Madonna, 96 in Search of Community, 52–53
Man Who Fell to Earth, 96 travel and adventure-seeking, 123
INDEX
135
Virtual Communities, 53–54 as false or unfounded beliefs, 40

“Millennials’ And Teens’ Top 20 News Hercules, 41
Sources,” 80 myth defined, 40
“The Millennials Are Moving Left,” myth model, 44–45
110 Prometheu, 41
“Millennials aren’t big spenders or risk psyches of Millennials and, 43
takers, and that’s going to reshape Superman, 41
the economy,” 26 Zeus, 43
“Millennials come of age,” 48
“Millennials Driving Digital
Togetherness in the Physical N
World,” 53 Narcissistic Personality Inventory Test,
“Millennials Love Radio. Wait. 20
What?,” 51 Narcissus, 21
“Millennials Moms (And Dads) National Chamber Foundation, 7
Bringing Back the Art of National Institutes of Health, 20
Couponing,” 78 National Public Radio, 54
“Millennials Most Digitally Connected Naval Postgraduate School, 11
Generation,” 48 The New York Times, 81
“Millennials, narcissism, and social “Night of the Living Dead,” 56
networking: What narcissists do No Labels, 106
on social networking sites and
why,” 50
“Millennial’s values and politics are a O
mixed bag,” 109 Obama, Barack, 102, 104, 108–110
Millennium, 41, 44 Oedipus, 17
Mistake in Identity, 96 Oedipus Complex, 107–110
Modernism, 94 Oedipus Rex, 17, 43, 44
Monroe, Marilyn, 96 On Narcissism, 21
MTV, 96 On the Internet, 59
Mueller, Walt, 95 Order of Things, 126
Murphy, Meg, 2 Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
“The M Word: We Aren’t Who You Human Sciences, 125
Think We Are,” 122
Myth and Modern Man, 40
Mythologies, 41 P
Myths Pandora, 9
Adam and Eve, 45 Patai, Raphael, 40
Cronus, 42 “The Persistent Myth of the
defined, 40 Narcissistic Millennial,” 20
defined as a traditional religious Personality and Individual Differences,
charter, 40 50
136 INDEX
Personality and Social Psychology “Research Brief” of the Center for

Bulletin, 103 Media Research, “Millennials
Petit, Frederic Charles, 8 Upend Traditional Madison
Pew Report on Millennials, 76 Avenue Advertising Practices,” 72
Pew Research, 109 RetailMeNot, 79
Pew Research Center, 7 Riu, Murakami, 55
Plato, 40 Rojek, Chris, 88, 126
Plutarch, 39 Romney, Mitt, 109, 110
The Postmodern Condition: A Report Rosenberg, Bernard, 91
on Knowledge, 86 Roy, Jojo, 53
Postmodernism, 13, 94 Rucker, Phillip, 108
consumer culture, 95
differentiation, 90
fragmentation, 90 S
hyperreality, 90 Sacks, Sam, 56
incredulity toward metanarratives, Safdar, Khadeeja, 79
86 Safeway, 79
Modernism and Postmodernism Sanders, Bernie, 36, 106, 107
Contrasted, 93–94 San Diego State University, 20, 26
Postmodernism: or The Cultural Logic Saussure, Ferdinand de, 93
of Late Capitalism, 92 Scaff, Renato, 75
Psychoanalytic Theory Shakespeare, William, 44
consciousness, 14–16 Should I Stay or Should I Go? Surviving
darkness, 50 a Relationship with a Narcissist,
ego, 16 19
grandiosity, 50 Shulman, Bob, 37, 64
Helicopter Parents, 23–24 Signs of Our Times, 96
Iceberg Model of the Psyche, Smith, Shane, 81
15–16 Snapchat, 66
id, 16 Social media, 53
impulsivity, 50 Facebook, 48, 50, 51, 53
narcissism, 19–22, 50 Instagram, 48
Oedipus Complex, 17, 43 Net Effect, 50
preconscious, 14–16 Snapchat, 48
regression, 50 “social avatar,” 49
superego, 16 “Social Media, Social Avatars and the
Topographic Hypothesis, 14–16 Psyche: Is Facebook Good For
unconscious, 14–16 Us?,” 49
Sociology, 29–38
“aggregated” crowds, 36
R claritas consumer categories, 33
Rapaille, Clotaire, 30, 125 personal opinion, 29
The Remediation of Epic Mythology personal taste, 29
in Digital Narratives., 98 social origins of thought, 32
INDEX
137
Sociology in Question, 29 University of California in Berkeley,

Solomon, Jack, 96 59
Solomon, Michael, 90 USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times
Sophocles, 44 “Daybreak” poll, 104
Spotify, 9 U.S. Census Bureau, 5, 38, 76, 106
Stein, Jill, 108
Strauss, William, 12
W
Wall Street Journal, 56, 77, 79, 106
T Warnke, Melissa Bachelor, 12
Tamaki, Saito, 54 Warren, Elizabeth, 108
“Target Hopes Smaller Stores Will Washington Post, 19, 108
Bring in More Millennials,” 79 Wells, Tina, 68
Target store, 80 “What Happens When Narcissists
Taylor, Mark L., 89 Become Parents,” 19
Theogony, 42 Whole Foods, 80
Thompson, Michael, 71 “The Whys and Hows of Generations
“Three Thematic Strategies for Research,” 119
Engaging Millennials,” 66 Wiesen, Shlomo, 66
Time, 23 Wikipedia, 5
Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Wildavsky, Aaron, 70
Japanese Visual Culture, 54 Williams, David L., 57
Trader Joe’s, 80 Woolf, Virginia, 87
Trump, Donald J., 36, 37, 105, 106,
108, 110
Twenge, Jean, 20, 26, 103 Y
Twitter, 91 “Young Internet Users Say They are
Addicted to Their Devices,” 57
“Young Urban Japanese Singles,” 56
U YouTube, 9
Uber, 59
“Understand A Demographic:
Multicultural Millennials,” 68 Z
Understanding Media Semiotics, 41 Zaltman, Gerald, 14

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CULTURAL

Arthur Asa Berger

ISBN 978-3-319-69684-3 ISBN 978-3-319-69685-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017957224

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

2 The Mind and Psyche of Millennials 11

7 Millennials as Shoppers and Consumers 75

10 Sexual Identity, Gender and the Millennials 113

Arthur Asa Berger is professor emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic

Li’l Abner, 1970 (Twayne)

Fig. 1.1 Emulator 3

Keywords Millennials • Generations • Marketing • Trendsetters

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Millennials are saying no to traditional marriage in record numbers … and

Fig. 1.1 Emulator

As befits a book on Millennials, most of the sources used in this

African-American and Caucasian Millennials, and between Christian,

Share of Time Spent with Social Media Among US

Fig. 1.2 Time Spent with Social Media Among Generations

Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y,

Obviously, there’s a big difference between a Millennial aged thirty-five

Generation Dates born Age in 2015

Traditionalist 1922–1943 Over 70

What marketers and others who are interested in generations suggest is

The National Chamber Foundation offers a Research Review of

They call Generation Z “Today’s Generation” and refer to the

Fig. 1.3 Other Definitions

The Baby Boom Generation

The Silent Generation

The Greatest Generation

* No chronological end point has been set

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

We will consider Millennials to be persons (in 2015) who are between

Modern methods of marketing and advertising depend heavily on content

Data on American Millennials from a Variety

60% of Millennials are non-Hispanic white

Millennials touch their smartphones 43 times a day

The Mind and Psyche of Millennials

Abstract In this chapter I deal with the psychological makeup of Millennials.

Keywords Psyche • Unconscious • Narcissism • Oedipus complex •

© The Author(s) 2018 11

Fig. 2.2 Sigmund Freud

Freud’s Topographic Hypothesis: Consciousness,

 he Iceberg Model of the Mind

Fig. 2.3 Iceberg Model of the Psyche

 he Iceberg Model of the Psyche

Consciousness is crucial in daily life for many obvious reasons. However, an

Fig. 2.4 Id, Ego and Superego in Psyche

Freud’s Structural Hypothesis: The Id, the Ego and the Superego

The Greek myth seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes

We will find these psychoanalytic concepts of use in understanding the

 reud on Group Psychology

enormously important to him. Now in speaking of Social or Group

Fig. 2.6 Gustav Le Bon

He quotes the great French sociologist Gustav Le Bon, who writes in

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological group is the

Narcissistic personality traits seem to have risen as quickly as obesity in

Allard discusses the work of Ramani Durvasala, the author of a book

In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality, San Diego State

­ eightened sense of entitlement and praised endlessly by parents who

2 The Mind and Psyche of Millennials 11

7 Millennials as Shoppers and Consumers 75

10 Sexual Identity, Gender and the Millennials 113

Fig. 1.1 Emulator 3

he Iceberg Model of the Mind

he Iceberg Model of the Psyche

reud on Group Psychology

eightened sense of entitlement and praised endlessly by parents who

This quotation raises an important question. If Millennials are over-

isenchants, that it demobilizes people by taking away all their illusions….

Low-Rise Living: The most economically challenged urban segment, Low-

seventy-five to eighty million Millennials in the United States, and they