Keywords

Thus far, this book has discussed digital family and its social relationships as something actively ‘done’ and shaped through, and in interaction with, digital media and communication technologies. In addition to other consequences already sketched out above, such an everyday-life approach to the use of new technologies in the family context has implications also from the point of view of sociological theories of family generations. In this chapter, the dynamics of intergenerational relationships in digital families are considered in the light of a post-Mannheimian approach to generations as outlined in Taipale, Wilska and Gilleard’s Digital Technologies and Generational Identity: ICT Usage Across the Life Course (2018). The basic components of this new theoretical framework are identified, suggesting that ‘generationing’—the process whereby the social identity of a generation is produced—is by its nature nonlinear and intertwines with human life stages and important life transition points that may, in turn, activate or inactivate the use of certain technological tools and application in digital families. Before doing that, however, it is imperative to understand the strengths and limitations of the established generational concepts and their related approaches.

Social Generations

To many, the concept of ‘generation’ is closely associated with Karl Mannheim’s seminal work on the theory of generations (Mannheim, 1952). Mannheim’s fundamental observation was that there was a gap between the values young people learnt from their parents and the reality that they themselves lived through and experienced. In examining the kind of generational differences making up this gap, Mannheim came up with his well-known distinction between generation as location and as actuality. A generation’s location in time is naturally defined by its members’ year of birth. Being born and living their formative years of youth during the same period of time enables individuals, at least potentially, to acquire a common understanding of who they are. For Mannheim, namely, to belong to a certain generation is also to occupy a social location, as that location may shape a person’s self-consciousness the same way a class position or culture can. Thus, when a group of individuals of similar ages collectively lives through certain historical key events and experiences them in the same way, it can develop a generational consciousness, implying that its generational potential is actualized.

In Manheim’s thinking, youth is then the main formative period when a collective generational consciousness is or can be produced. In later years of adolescence, young people process their surroundings with their peers and for themselves, contrasting their observations with those of their parents. This process of generationing may then result in a distinct generational consciousness. The shared social location can translate into new and creative reactions and adaptive strategies that help a generation to recognize its own position in contemporary society (Edmunds & Turner, 2002a; Elder, 1974). Sometimes, tangible changes in the political and social climate can trigger even quite fierce intergenerational conflicts between one generation and its parental generations (see, e.g. Edmunds & Turner, 2002b). While major events like a student uprising, civil rights protests or the conquest of space in the 1960–70s no doubt heavily contributed to the generational consciousness of the current post-war generation—the so-called baby boomers—it is less clear to what extents, for instance, new technological innovations such as personal computers and smartphones have influenced a ‘we’ sense for younger age cohorts who grew up experiencing the transformative power of digital technologies first hand in their youth.

Many sociologists have attempted to categorize successive generations based on both historical analysis and people’s own perceptions concerning their generational belongingness (e.g. Roos, 1987; Strauss & Howe, 1991). In the latter regard, empirical evidence from, for instance, Finland suggests that older people more readily than younger people identify themselves as belonging to the same generation with their same-age peers (such as the Baby Boomers; see, e.g. Sarpila, 2012). There are at least two explanations for why this should be so.

First of all, it takes time to build a shared understanding of who ‘we’ are. Older generations have an advantage here in that more time has passed since their formative years (Bolin, 2016). The more time passes by, the more one has a chance to commemorate the key events from those years and thus inculcate in one of their significance. Mass media, popular culture and historiography recurrently bring back into public discussion major historical events and phenomena that have shaped generational consciousness (e.g. the two World Wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Moon landing, major pop culture events like Woodstock, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc.), promoting processes of commemoration (see, e.g. Bennet, 2009; Bolin, 2016). Drawing upon survey data from Finland, Sarpila (2012) has, however, shown how young people, as they age, might end up also reconsidering their generational identity, beginning to identify with different generational labels. As she found, in 1999, 31% of the queried Finns aged 20–29 felt themselves belonging to the ‘IT generation’, while 10 years later, in 2009, no more than 11% of those in the same age group felt the same. In the latter year, it was, interestingly, again the (then) 20–29 year olds who thought of themselves as the ‘IT generation’. This finding is in line with the stereotypical notion that information technologies belong to youth. When people age and leave their youth behind them, they unavoidably come to face situations where they must reconsider what is or is not unique and special about just them as an IT generation, vis-à-vis the subsequent generations that are similarly, or even more, immersed in the digital world.

A second reason for why older people may more readily than young people identify generationally with their same-age peers has to do with the whole host of new, thematically overlapping generational labels that have emerged in the last few decades. Among these are, for just a few examples, denominations such as ‘Net Generation’ (Tapscott, 1998), ‘Digital Generation’ (Buckingham, 2006) and ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky, 2001). This great diversity of available designations that all cover temporally overlapping phenomena may, namely, complicate the formulation of a solid, shared generational consciousness among young people. This circumstance, combined with the individualized life trajectories, personal networks and personalized consumption of media that characterize our time, stands in the way of widely shared, overarching key experiences that might then stamp entire age cohorts, the same way that exposure to key mass media events and spectacles functioned for us in the past. As concerns their basis in scholarship, moreover, the criticism here has also been that many of the designations or labels resorted to are not based on any systematic research, that they are overly narrow in their scope, and that, as a result, they reflect commercial interests rather more than any even potentially shared generational identity, as in the case of, say, the ‘MTV Generation’ or the ‘Nintendo Generation’ (Guzdial & Soloway, 2002).

The majority of such technology-related, or technology-specific, generational labels are not, and cannot be, defined as related to any successive time periods since they clearly coexist in time and are thus hard for an entire age cohort to identify with. Indeed, as Burnett (2010) has noted about the temporal aspect of generations, they are a movable feast. While, traditionally, a generation has been considered to cover a time period of approximately 15–25 years (e.g. the ‘Lost Generations’ of 1883–1900, the ‘Baby Boomers’ of the mid-1940s to 1950s/early 1960s), the more recent generational categories only refer to a period of 10–15 years (e.g. the ‘Generation Y’, from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s or the ‘Generation Z’, from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s). The most recent trend in naming generations by marking them with consecutive alphabets only, as in Generation Z, Y and Z, makes it obvious how generations as currently labelled cannot provide a good basis for generational identification: alphabets as such do not tell anything about who ‘we’ are as a generation.

In order to better understand the ability of young age cohorts to collectively identify themselves with a particular generation, we might do well to go back and retrieve another term Mannheim coined: generation unit. Generational units are smaller groups, fragments of an actual generation that develop different reactions to the same cultural and historical events (Mannheim, 1952). Proceeding from this conceptualization, it might then be possible, for instance, that the ‘IT Generation’ and the ‘Digital Generation’ are actually smaller units of one and the same generation, describing two subgroups of it that simply experience different aspects of a digital society as significant to them. They consist of people for whom the same technology is experienced as ‘key’ albeit from different angles, serving as it might different purposes in their lives. For instance, to some in this overall generation it may be the common utilization of social media platforms that form the basis of their ‘we’ sense, while for others in it is digital gaming that provides a sense of unity with one’s coevals. This kind of internal fragmentation of larger cohorts seems to be one of the distinguishing features of our technology-rich and individualized contemporary cultures.

Family Generations

In addition to its Mannheimian definition as a cohort with a social-historical meaning, the concept of generation also has another distinct sense, involving kinship. In its classical sense, the notion of family generations underscores the meaning of blood relationships and marriage. Within the context of the family, a generational position is defined by a system of lineage and descent (see, e.g. Burnett, 2010). Traditionally, families have been seen as established by the marriage of two spouses, whose descendants then form the next familial generation. Given the actual diversity of families in terms of their shapes and forms, however, it seems obvious that this definition is insufficient and outdated, in Europe as elsewhere in other parts of the world. More and more often today, families are set up also between non-married partners—of either the same or different sex—and their children. New intergenerational family relationships are also created through series of divorces and remarriages, conjoining people from different family backgrounds in most varied manners.

Within families, it is the individual persons’ relationships to elder family members, one’s own siblings and children, and the possible partner(s) that are formative of their generational identity. A kinship system ensures that each new family member is immediately located in a network of family relationships, a family tree that fosters relatedness and belonging within the family. Concepts such as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ underscore the closeness of the relationship in question, while attributive adjectives like ‘great’ and ‘second’ in family terms (‘great-grandfather’, ‘second cousin’) signal not only generational connection but also a relative distance compared to closest family members (Burnett, 2010, pp. 23–24). The pluralization of family forms has its own bearings on the family terminology, introducing new labels such as stepfather, stepmother, stepsister and stepbrother, which all imply both familial affinity and difference. Also, all such application of family terminology then contributes to the ‘we’ sense, helping to circumscribe who belongs to the immediate family and who to the extended one.

The new family relationships created by separations and remarriages make it more complicated to draw clear-cut generational lines between the members of many families. The father’s new partner, the stepmother, might, for instance, on account of her age belong to the same age cohort as the family’s grown-up children. Similarly, when the eldest sibling in a family with significant age differences between children becomes a mother or a father for the first time, the newborn baby might be of the same age as her youngest aunt or uncle. What complicates the notion of family cohorts even further, however, is that a person’s generational position may be different in different family contexts. Being a member of two blended families such as when both of one’s parents have established a new family, may mean that the same person is the youngest sibling in one family and the oldest in the other.

Against this backdrop, it seems clear that the pluralization of family forms, resulting from short-lived marriages and the destandardization and individualization of the human life course, forces us to rethink family generations in terms of other than just blood and kinship-based categories. Widmer’s (2016) work on configurational families is helpful in this regard, underlining, instead of the traditional notion of family as a long-standing and coherent entity, the role of family ties that are cognitively and emotionally significant. As new family compositions emerge following divorces and remarriages, family ties become more variegated and diverse, challenging any notion of family generations as fixed categories. This does not, however, mean that family ties would become a matter of pure choice, or that generational distinctions and conflicts would become fully obsolete; it only implies that family generations have become more dynamic as categories subject to change and reconsideration across the entire human life course.

Given the significance of cognitive and emotional ties for the ‘sensing’ of the family, it is important to consider what kind of role new technologies may play in the maintenance of these ties. Studies have, for example, rather straightforwardly claimed family solidarity to have eroded particularly because family members are more individually networked via new media and communication technologies (e.g. Rainie & Wellman, 2012). Others, on the other hand, have proposed that, even though intergenerational family relationships on the whole are no longer governed by the normative ties of family solidarity the same way as in the past, digital technologies have introduced new means for enacting affectual and functional solidarity between those both near and afar Taipale, Petrovčič, & Dolničar, 2018). Dolničar and collaborators (2018), for instance, have shown how older people’s engagement in assisted (or proxy) Internet use may to a large extent depend on the functional help and solidarity provided by younger family members, especially grandchildren. Irrespective of whether there may be more or less solidarity than before binding the members of contemporary extended families together, however, what seems clear is that at least some degree of solidarity, as well as a certain level of conflicts and ambivalence, remains characteristic of intergenerational relationships in all kinds of families and at all times (cf. Bengtson & Roberts, 1991; Lüscher et al., 2015). For this reason, theories of family solidarity, conflicts and ambivalence are vital for understanding the life of digital families and the relationships between family generations in them.

Perhaps the best-known work on intergenerational solidarity is Bengtson and Roberts (1991), published almost three decades ago already. The model developed in the book, drawing upon socio-psychological theories of sentiments and interaction as well as theories of social organization that highlight the importance of group norms and functional independence in behaviour, consists of six dialectical dimensions of solidarity. Associational solidarity alludes to the modes of interactions connecting family members across generations, ranging in their effect from integration to isolation. These modes include both spontaneous and ritual forms of communication with a varying degree of formality. Affectual solidarity, producing degrees of intimacy or distance, refers to the exchange of emotions and sentiments such as warmth, compassion and trust in intergenerational family relationships. The dimension of functional solidarity, influencing the degree of dependence versus autonomy, includes activities from financial assistance to immaterial help where the common denominator is the exchange of help. Normative solidarity, promoting different degrees of familism or individualism, refers to the endorsement of familial obligations, while consensual solidarity points to the degree of agreement within family with regard to beliefs, values or life orientations ranging from complete agreement to dissent. Finally, structural solidarity, providing opportunities or barriers through what is also known as the opportunity structure, refers to the availability of family members, which is dependent, for instance, on their physical proximity and health condition (Bengtson, Giarrusso, Mabry, & Silverstein, 2002; Bengtson & Roberts, 1991; Hammarström, 2005).

The original model of Bengtson and Roberts was grounded on the idea of ‘idealistic’ family relationships based on consensuality (Bengtson & Roberts, 1991; Bengtson, Rosenthal, & Burton, 1996). The model was, however, met with scepticism by, for instance, Lüschner and Pillemer (1998), who, deploying the concept of intergenerational ambivalence, pointed to the existence of contradictions between parents and their children that were not always resolvable. Confronted with this criticism, Bengtson and his collaborators (2002) went on to later modify their model so that it recognized conflicts and feelings of ambivalence both between and within family generations (e.g. Bengtson, Rosenthal, & Burton, 1996; Bengtson et al., 2002; Silverstein and Bengtson, 1997). The ambivalence noted, however, was seen to stem from structural and institutional (e.g. policy, cultural, economic) features intersecting with family life, thus still representing separate domains in fact.

While various forms of intergenerational solidarity and conflict thus shape the relationships between family generations, digital technologies and media consumption provide a new technological infrastructure for this mode of ‘doing family’ in extended and geographically distributed families. The ways in which ‘our’ generation and ‘their’ generation use digital technologies, and the kind of media contents children, parents and grandparents consume are tangible markers of generational differences in family life. Related to this, also diverging opinions about the ‘right’ and ‘proper’ ways of using the new technology are a typical source of generational conflicts and ambivalence in families.

Compared with social generations, family generations have one great advantage that facilitates their internal coherence and the level of agreement among them: the members of the same family have experienced many key events together, even if at different ages, supplying them with shared memories. Possibilities to recall where one was and with whom when something important happened serve as potentially important building blocks of social coherence in a family. While, earlier, the family photo album served as perhaps the most central tool enabling commemoration in families, today family members’ Facebook timelines, Instagram accounts and smartphone photo galleries serve the same ends (see, e.g. Lohmeier & Böhling, 2017; van Dijck, 2008). Furthermore, given that, today, we often are part of more than one-family configuration, such personalizable and personalized online accounts have the additional benefit that they reflect any variations in the shared experience, not basing themselves on the assumption of one (homogenous) family the same way the family photo album most often does.

Individual Life Courses, Linked Lives

Due to the rapid pace of new digital technologies, building a solid generational consciousness around some single technology or application has become increasingly difficult. Generational experiences, such as of the arrival of radio and television that marked the landscape of domestic technology innovation for many years, have no longer been repeated in decades. The fast development of mobile communication technology is emblematic of this transformation. In the last 30 years, which equals just one-family generation, mobile phone networks have evolved from the first to their fifth generation. Over these years, the development and progress of mobile phones have come in both small steps and large strides, leading from simple feature phones to very complex multipurpose tools (see Taipale, Wilska, & Gilleard, 2018). While the arrival of the first personal mobile phones might have been a generational marker for young early adopters in the late 1990s, today the mere possession of a new smartphone model can hardly serve as the only, or sufficient, distinguishing factor for contemporary youth. The current generational markers in technology use more often have to do with differentiated contents, applications and ways of using personal communication technologies (Taipale, 2016).

In the family context, this constant influx of new communication tools and media equipment takes place according to family members’ life stages. In this regard, previous research has identified many milestones in the human life course at which new technologies may become part of one’s daily life. In many countries, parents typically buy their children their first mobile phones when they begin school or come of age. Similarly, the purchase of a laptop computer is often justified with reference to its potential educational benefits, and it is thus typically done for one’s child when this reaches a certain educational level (Fortunati & Taipale, 2017). In adulthood, new devices and applications are adopted either owing to work-related duties or to keep up with one’s children who use technologies increasingly independently while still needing some supervision (Ganito, 2018; Tammelin & Anttila, 2017). In later life, again, new digital technologies and applications may be acquired for recreational purposes when leisure time increases, to stay in touch with one’s children and grandchildren, or to alleviate one’s loneliness after retirement or loss of a partner (Ganito, 2018). In more advanced old age, monitoring and health technologies may be adopted for safety and security purposes or to prolong independent living at home.

Life-course studies, in general, have looked at the sequence of stages people live through as they grow older (e.g. Morgan & Kunkel, 2011). In social sciences, these stages centre on socially significant events that are formative for individual biographies such as changes in family roles and responsibilities (Shanahan & Macmillan, 2008). The different life stages are separated from one another by transitions, events such as entering and leaving school, gaining employment, getting married/divorced, moving abroad, retiring or widowing. Especially transitions specific to family life are of interest for family studies. Prior to the establishment of a new family, for instance, there is a courtship stage, followed by engagement and, finally, marriage or the beginning of cohabitation. Other major life-course markers in the family context are the birth of the first child, children’s starting school, as well as their departure from home, along with a possible end of marriage/partnership or death of one’s partner (Elder & Shanahan, 1997).

Unlike the rather fixed developmental life stages, the sequence of sociological life stages today is increasingly destandardized in its character. Instead of covering all people, life stages and transitions in our time involve constantly smaller and smaller parts of a population, or they are experienced at different ages and for varying durations (see, e.g. Brückner & Mayer, 2005). This destandardization of life-course patters has been explained by the transformation of our social and economical environments. After World War II, the project of rebuilding societies and stimulating economic growth favoured standardized life courses based on long-term or permanent employment contracts. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, major demographic changes accompanied by cultural revolutions (e.g. the student movement, women’s movement) paved a way for more heterogeneous family arrangements to emerge, altering the timing and sequencing of life-course stages. Latest by the 1990s, finally, economic uncertainties and high unemployment had begun to transform the structure of the labour markets, putting families under financial pressure and dissolving any remaining ideas of standard biographical trajectories of citizens (see, e.g. Zimmermann & Konietzka, 2017).

Although individual biographical trajectories have thereby become more diverse and variegated, one should nevertheless keep in mind that the lives of individual family members still today remain in many ways interlinked. The notion of linked lives, introduced by Elder (1994, 1998), implies that families are ‘age-integrated’: family members of varying ages, representing different birth cohorts, are joined together through their intermingling life trajectories. Such interconnectedness of lives is evident, for example, when one family member faces a major life transition. If a stay-at-home parent receives an employment offer from another city nearby, the decision to accept it will likely lead to the improvement of the family’s financial situation. At the same time, however, it also forces changes in other family members’ daily routines and care arrangements, in a most tangible manner. In order to succeed in surmounting such challenges, the interconnectedness of family members’ lives requires a certain amount of family solidarity from everyone involved. Yet, it is also easy to see how family members’ interdependence can also create more conflicts such as when the expectations of reciprocity or altruistic help provision within the family diverge (Blieszner, 2006). While some responsibilities in the families are passed on to the next generation(s) as people grow up, it seems likewise evident that certain family bonds based on kinship, affection and care are sustained throughout the life course: ageing parents keep caring also for their adult children, even when they no longer are responsible for the latter’s daily lives, health and well-being.

Post-Mannheimian Generational Identity

A post-Mannheimian approach to generational identity builds upon the above-developed argument that, to understand the formation of generational identity today, attention to mere social generations (cohorts) is not enough; also the intertwinement of life courses with it, including the significance of their key transition points, and the effects of family generationing need to be acknowledged (Taipale, Wilska, & Gilleard, 2018). As people age, the relationships of dependence, interdependence and independence change within the family, which may render certain communication technologies and media tools unnecessary or irrelevant and create a new need for others. In what follows, the main features of such an approach to generational identity, attempting to update Mannheim’s original conception of it, are briefly summarized.

To begin with, it is important that any work in this direction be premised on the observation that the technological identity of a generation does not emerge intrinsically with the passage of time (see, e.g. Buckingham, 2006). There is an active process of ‘doing’ behind the formation of every generation (McDaniel, 2007), involving continuous self-reflection and self-positioning in relation to other generations. While such efforts of ‘doing’ generation take place anywhere, at any time, the family is one of the main contexts for them. In families, similarities and differences between generations in technology adoption, technology use and the way individuals relate to technology occur naturally and are made visible. The family is also one of the few contexts in contemporary developed societies in which intergenerational interactions cannot be avoided. In it, generational differences in values, attitudes and digital technology usage patterns are constantly at issue and become thematized, leading to the boundary lines between generations to be defined and drawn.

Second, a post-Mannheimian approach to generational identity stresses the way a generational identity is defined by the members and non-members of a given generation. The characteristics of, and the criteria for, generational membership are defined by members sharing the same technology-related experiences who adopt and use the technologies in question in like ways. Although people’s experiences may not be completely identical and their adoption and use patterns usually show some variation, their membership in the same cohort generation forms a major reference point for their own and others’ generational self-positioning (Hepp, Berg, & Roitsch, 2017). However, the characteristics of a generation are also influenced by non-members—those who are either too young or too old to share the same generational experience. Perhaps the most tangible example of this pertains to the practices of labelling (other) generations. Quite often, adults (parents, but also researchers, marketing professional, media personalities) lapse to ‘othering’ new technologies and young people’s practices of using technology, presenting these as unprecedented and transformational. In doing so, they reveal what seems to prevail in society even more broadly: an apparent discrepancy between adult perspectives and youth experiences. Consequently, many of the generational labels attached to young people as technology users (‘Digital Natives’, ‘Nintendo Generation’, etc.) tend to reflect adults’ prejudices and stereotypes more than young people’s own experiences or their own generational identity (see also Herring, 2008). Especially, in the family context, the unrealistic expectations of one generation regarding another one’s technical skills and know-how may then lead to intergenerational disagreement and conflicts.

Third, the approach is suspicious of any static concepts of societal and family generations, viewing generationing as a life-course-long process, one in which certain periods, life transition points and single significant events are more formative than others. In this respect, the post-Mannheimian approach proposed here resembles Hepp, Berg, and Roitsch’s (2017) processual conceptualization of media generations, which assumes the idea that generations evolve over time. This, however, does not mean that Mannheim’s argument about youth as the key transformative period in generation building would somehow be discounted. Rather, it simply means that the years after youth are becoming increasingly more important as determinants of the technological identity of a generation. Due to the rapid digitalization of our contemporary societies, it is becoming increasingly difficult to age without engaging with new digital technology, services and applications. By extension, people’s ability to adopt and independently use digital technologies in later life is increasingly more considered as a sign of their successful ageing. The extent and patterns of using digital technologies are more and more what determines one’s generational position in relation to other generations, be these of the same age, younger or older.

A fourth and final reason for promoting a more dynamic approach to generational identity has to do with family configurations. As a consequence of divorces and remarriages, an individual’s relative position in the family tree of generations may change. When belonging to several families at once, a person may be considered as a member of a digitally skilled generation in one family and as a digital latecomer in another. In a post-Mannheimian approach to generational identity in later life, major life turning points such as divorces, marriages, retirement, having one’s first child or grandchild and other events of similar magnitude provide the formative events needed for generationing. They supply the need and reasons for the uptake or rejection of new technologies, and prompt specific practices and uses connected to these technologies. For instance, retirement may cause one to give up one’s landline telephone and reduce the need for regular telephone calls, while the increased free time after it may motivate one to keep in touch with one’s grandchildren via instant messaging or Skype, or engage in genealogical research on the Internet. Faced with such reconfigurations, a post-Mannheimian approach to generational identity can highlight the significance of life transition points and family life fractures, although not as factors for generational gaps, but as circumstances fostering ‘for-the-family’ and ‘with-the-family’ use of digital technologies (Taipale, Wilska & Gilleard, 2018) .

To conclude, a post-Mannheimian approach to the concept of generations helps us to understand the significance of life turning points after adolescence and in later life as formative elements of generational identity in the digital age. While the seeds of generational identity are planted while still young, each cohort generation has no choice but to over and over again reassess its technological self-understanding and reconsider its relative position vis-à-vis other generations, as new digital tools, applications and services are constantly being introduced that soon become prerequisites for a well-functioning independent life. For such a dynamic approach to generation studies to emerge, however, we first need to do away with stark generational oppositions (e.g. digital natives versus digital immigrants) along with any dualistic distinctions between right and wrong ways of using digital technologies not supported by empirical evidence (cf. Helsper & Eynon, 2010; Rosales & Fernández-Ardèvol, 2016). Only that way can we open up a perspective from which to rethink generational identity as malleable contract, one that can be adjusted, revised or refined throughout the entire course of life.