What? If not for the capitalist class, no one would distinguish between age groups? Although such age distinctions vary from culture to culture (for instance, many don't recognize adolescence), I suspect that the existence of distinctions based on age is a cultural universal. They comprise a cognitive short-cut too handy to abandon.
-- Luke
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I tried to address this in a long ago post. Here is a re-do. This particular use of age groups, say Boomers, is a mass media, mass culture creation that functions as a marketing tool in economic terms, and as a mythological entity which has been given its own animous in media. It functions as if it were a living thing that acts, reacts, and has a psyche---all of which is an invention.
In this mythological realm, these artifacts of mass culture have taken on a variety of functions and are now presented to us as active historical entities. In this regard, then they function to mask a more material and frankly leftist perspective. As predominately psychic entities, then they escape more materially determined configurations.
In fact, I don't remember the word Boomer being used until about the mid-Seventies and early Eighties with any common currency. If you look closely at the various events of the late Fifties and early Sixties you will see that actually the generation between about 1930-1945 comprised most of the active participants, so in the lexicon of popular culture the political, social, and cultural upheavals from say 1955-1970 were pushed by the Depression and War babies who were in their mid-twenties during the period.
What makes the age and generation of people important to me are the historical circumstance of their childhood and youth and how these formed (if in fact they did) their later political, social, and cultural milieu. The most serious problem with this form of thinking is that these circumstances varied widely across race, gender, and class and only superficially seem to cohere at the grossest and most simplistic level of mass culture. As such a crude formation, then terms like Depression, War, Post-war Boom, have little to offer a more comprehensive form of historical thinking, especially when applied to whole generations.
And additionally, the use of these terms brings with it a lot of manufactured propaganda that obscures and steers both analysis and experience. In the worst sense of the word, then these terms seek to commodity history and make claims that re-enforce an oppressive regime that trivializes human experience while it also fragments and then artificially re-assembles a manufactured collective experience. This manufactured collective is then presented as the historical entity of choice, about which we shape economic, social, political, and cultural polices.
Altogether, then this system erases concrete reality, replaces experience with its commodification, effaces the material and human dimensions of experience, and then moves on as if nothing ever happened to anyone who lived and breathed. Experience then appears as a kind of consumer product with limited intellectual utility and of absolutely no value to understanding life.
Chuck Grimes