Our latest round-up of Class of 2017 Mindset List mockery:
The A.V. Club (Milwaukee edition) reports that “Beloit College releases lame Mindset List, wonders what’s up with kids and their Nintendos or whatever“:
The 2013 Mindset List—which examines the born-in-1995 class of 2017—is equally lame and random. For 18-year-olds, according to Nief and McBride, “a tablet is no longer something you take in the morning” (get it?), and “PayPal has replaced a pen pal as a best friend on line.” Incisive cultural analysis or a collection of Jay Leno-worthy groaners that betray a desperate “Old Man Yells At Cloud” fear of technology and youth? You decide.
Happily, the list has been drawing a fair amount of local and national criticism.
Bloggers at Unqualified Offerings and Orange Crate Art both offer some item-by-item criticism. The latter (Michael Leddy) links to his more in-depth critique from 2010:
What bothers me about the Beloit list involves some unspoken assumptions about reality and young adults. The list reads like a nightmare-version of the proposition that begins Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” “The world is all that is the case” — all that is the case, that is, in the life-experience of a hypothetical eighteen-year-old American student.…
The Beloit list seems to suggest that if it hasn’t happened during your lifetime, well, it can’t really be real (witness the weirdly Orwellian statement that “Czechoslovakia has never existed”), or, at best, that you cannot be expected to know or care about it.…
An interviewer once asked the poet David Shapiro to name his favorite living poet. Wallace Stevens, he said. “But Stevens is dead,” the interviewer objected. “But not for me!” Shapiro replied.… I suspect that among this year’s incoming freshmen are some for whom Wallace Stevens (or Emily Dickinson, or E.E. Cummings, or Langston Hughes) is still living, for whom a pocket notebook and pen or pencil are tools of thought and introspection, and for whom Czechoslovakia is as real as it gets.
Finally, Hudson Hongo at Thought Catalog offers “The Real Mindset List for the Class of 2017” with entries such as these:
1. For this generation of entering college students, born in 1995, ALF, Ricky Martin and Queen Victoria have always been dead.
5. Thanks to global warming, they have zero words for snow.
6. “Eminem” has always been a scowling white man and if presented with an actual M&M an 18-year-old would die of shock.
7. They have never seen a squirrel.
12. “Sexting” has always been something you do with a phone, not a sextant.
19. College professors have always been able to trick lazy news editors into posting academically-flavored linkbait.
Come on, spoilers. Free speech is free speech. If you don’t like the Mindset List, criticize it, make fun of it, write about it, but there is no need to try to destroy things you don’t like or agree with. Your own mindless foolishness is ripe for criticism, as you seem more jealous and petulant than somehow representative of intellectual purity in America.
This list is not intended to be academic or any kind of valid assessment of contemporary life. As a demographer who has written and published extensively on generational communication, I see this list as s a very effective and valid way to help make the point that our life experiences lead to very different understandings of the world we all inhabit.
To assume that we all understand things in the same way is foolish and short-sighted. I would suggest that Mindless and others who are so critical devote their time to activities that are more likely to make a difference in something that is important in the world instead of trying to destroy something that is harmless, good-natured, amusing and enjoyable for a lot of people.
“Free speech is free speech. If you don’t like the Mindset List, criticize it, make fun of it, write about it, but there is no need to try to destroy things you don’t like or agree with.”
Trying to destroy something through criticizing it, making fun of it and writing about it is free speech.
“This list is not intended to be academic or any kind of valid assessment of contemporary life.”
If that were the case, then it wouldn’t be worth bothering with, but the list has become famous in part because of its academic affiliation and the claims of its creators about its value and validity.
“As a demographer who has written and published extensively on generational communication, I see this list as s a very effective and valid way to help make the point that our life experiences lead to very different understandings of the world we all inhabit.”
You seem to be of two minds as to whether the list is “valid,” but using a standard scientific definition of validity—meaning that the findings correspond well to something in the world—then it is clearly not valid.
The primary criticism of our campaign against the Mindset List is that it’s just some silly thing that people enjoy reading and that nobody really takes seriously. But that’s not how its creators (and Beloit College) present it and it’s not how it is often reported in the media.