It was strange to see a seminar on “Generation X: Media Myth or New Reality?” listed in the catalog for this year’s Folio: Midwest show, a cracklingly dry four-day conference at the Sheraton that purports to teach magazine professionals how to run magazines. In light of the seminar’s description–“It’s 41 billion [sic] strong and spending over $200 billion annually. Here’s how to get your share of the 18-28 Generation X market”–it was stranger still to see the Baffler’s Tom Frank listed as a panelist. The Baffler has become known for its unsparing denunciation of attempts to define and market to young people. Was Frank about to do a bizarre about-face and speak, in the catalog’s words, on “how to better appeal to this lucrative demographic?” Or maybe he was planning some sort of subvert-from-within scheme, a plot to take on the evil marketers where they lived.
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If Generation X is a group at all, it consists, paradoxically, of the people most obsessed with denying they’re in it–those who insist, in chorus, that they have no exploitable commonalities. As they try to keep in touch with this quirky readership, Gen X magazines (none of which describe themselves as such) undergo a constant and clandestine struggle for self-definition. Though they never stop trying to figure out who their audience is, they can’t let on to this–it smacks of “market research and unpalatable parallels with the thinking that lay behind Fruitopia. They must be eclectic, rough-hewn, and abstruse enough to seem like authentic voices and yet still offer something that at least a few people–and hopefully a lot of people–want to read.
Spiegler says he was shocked when he saw how his panel was portrayed in the catalog. “We wanted to talk about some general concepts–how ludicrous the whole idea of Generation X is and whether a generation that has watched more TV and read fewer newspapers has a different approach to information,” he says. “We put some marketing stuff in our proposal, but they just included that in the catalog and cut out everything else.”
“People in our generation tend to demand a certain level of authenticity in what we read,” Spiegler said. “We don’t want to feel like a bunch of execs sat down in a board meeting and said, ‘Hey, what do the kids want?’”
He was right. As each panelist started on an anti-Swing rant, he unconsciously fingered the cover and then almost compulsively paged through to scan the fat headlines and glossy photos inside. Eventually an audience member asked that it be passed around the room. Despite the panelists’ protestations to the contrary, most of the audience probably left thinking that Swing was the Gen X book to watch.
