Generation
Related: zeitgeist
Instances: Lost Generation - Beat generation
The question of ancestry in culture is spurious. Every new manifestation in culture rewrites its past, changes old maudits into new heroes, old heroes into those who should have never been born. New actors scavenge the past for ancestors, because ancestry is legitimacy and novelty is doubt—but in all times forgotten actors emerge from the past not as ancestors but as familiars. In the 1920s in literary America it was Herman Melville; in the rock 'n' roll 1960s it was Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson of the 1930s; in the entropic Western 1970s it was the carefully absolutist German critic Walter Benjamin of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1976 and 1977, and in the years to follow, as symbollically remade by the Sex Pistols, it was perhaps dadaists, lettrists, situationists, and various medieval heretics. --Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambride, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 21.
Definition
Generation, also known as procreation, is the act of producing offspring. It can also refer to the act of creating something inanimate such as electrical generation or cryptographic code generation. A generation can also be a stage or degree in a succession of natural descent as a grandfather, a father, and the father's son comprise three generations or stages of successive improvement in the development of a technology, such as computers, automobiles, or microprocessors
A generation can also represent all the people born at about the same time, sometimes called a generational cohort in demographics. Historians hold differing opinions regarding to what extent dividing history into generations is a useful analytical tool or an improper over-generalization.
William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations, list the generations of Anglo-America. Their definition of "generation" is given as: A cohort-group, which are all persons born in a limited span of consecutive years, whose length approximates the span of a phase of life given to be approximately 22 years, and whose boundaries are fixed by peer personality. Peer personality generational persona recognized and determined by common age location, common beliefs and behavior, and perceived membership in a common generation.
In biology, the process by which populations of organisms acquire and pass on novel traits from generation to generation is known as the theory of evolution. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation [Mar 2006]
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