millennials

The Chilling Effect of Fear at America’s Colleges

Multiple possible explanations exist, of course, including the hypothesis that parents have coddled a generation of youngsters to the point where students feel that they should not be exposed to anything harmful to their psyches or beliefs. Whether or not these psychological narratives are valid, there are, I believe, additional cultural, institutional, and societal explanations for what is going on. And the overarching theme is that today’s youngsters, beginning in preschool, are responding to living in a contrived culture of fear and distrust.

.. Counterintuitively, liberal students are more likely than conservative students to say the First Amendment is outdated.

.. Indeed, the distortion of fear pervades today’s students’ thinking—they tend to overestimate, for example, the probability of a terrorist attack affecting them. When this fear is combined with the rapid expansion of social media and the prevalence of government surveillance, students often dismiss concepts like “privacy” as old-fashioned values that are irrelevant to them

.. many students believe that the very idea of privacy is obsolete; most of my students don’t seem to mind this loss when it’s weighed against uncovering potential terrorists.

.. Many of the young adults at highly selective colleges and universities have been forced to follow a straight and narrow path, never deviating from it because of a passion unrelated to school work, and have not been allowed, therefore, to live what many would consider a normal childhood—to play, to learn by doing, to challenge their teachers, to make mistakes. Their families and their network of friends and social peers have placed extreme pressure on them to achieve, or win in a zero-sum game with their own friends.

.. While some educators and policymakers see college primarily as a place where students develop skills for high-demand jobs, the goal of a college education is for students to learn to think independently and skeptically and to learn how to make and defend their point of view. It is not to suppress ideas that they find opprobrious.

.. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.

The Future Of Customer Experience: How To Adapt For Millennials, Gen Z, And Beyond

Defined as having been born in the 1980s or 1990s and also known as Generation Y, millennials grew up in a culture of internet and mobile, demanding constant online access, owning multiple connected gadgets, and are likely to choose to spend time with friends online instead of in person.

Millennials, not renowned for their rigid attention spans, switch between laptops, smartphones, tablets, and TV more than 27 times an hour (Pew Research) , and the vast majority use two or more devices simultaneously while watching TV.

.. In much the same way that web browsers can store passwords, preferences, searches, and browsing histories of a given user, today’s consumers expect to be identified and their case histories recognized by customer care agents without having to deliver a lengthy history of every previous encounter.

.. The various platforms are making it easier than ever to engage privately – for example Twitter has removed the character limit from its direct messaging feature, gearing it specifically for private consumer and brand conversations.

Donald Trump, Über-American

In this post, though, I want to focus on a particular aspect of the study: the thorough emotivism of that generation.

Smith et al. found that most of the emerging adults (EAs) they studied have no way to think through moral and ethical dilemmas. None. They go with their gut. They are terrified of proclaiming moral rules that everyone should follow, lest they seem judgmental. Broadly speaking, they believe that if an action makes you happy, then it is good, for you — even if they themselves could not imagine doing the same thing. “Moral individualism” is the rock upon which their inner lives are built, with “moral relativism” a significant additional source for many of them. If they feel something is true or right, then it must be so.

This is emotivism, and it is impossible to reason with. As MacIntyre has said, you cannot have a cohesive society built around emotivism. Public rationality and deliberation become impossible.

.. Trump knows psychology. He knows facts don’t matter. He knows people are irrational. So while his opponents are losing sleep trying to memorize the names of foreign leaders – in case someone asks – Trump knows that is a waste of time. No one ever voted for a president based on his or her ability to name heads of state. People vote based on emotion. Period.

.. Trump is the Uber-American, a man of his time. When you look at him, America, you see yourself in the mirror. We made him. He is us. Crass, passion-driven, materialistic, vain — this is who we have become.