Quarterlife Questionnaire

Feb 15, 2008

[i]Someone sent me a message here on Quarterlife asking if she could interview me about the show and the site as research for an article she's writing for a student newspaper. I found that answering the questions allowed me to articulate some thoughts a little more succinctly than is usual for me, so I asked her if she would mind if I also posted my answers in my blog. She said that would be fine, so here they are.[/i]

[b]1. What is it like to be a twenty-something in 2008? How does the Internet influence it?[/b]

It's different for everyone, of course. Actually, that very diversity of experience might be something peculiar to our times as opposed to, say, a hundred years ago. What's expected of a twentysomething today is not as strict and standardized as it once was, but that can be said about people of any age I suppose. On the other hand, there are some things that have become more standard expectations, for instance that twentysomethings are expected to go to college, and when they don't do so it's seen as a failure or an unfortunate occurrence; this is a relatively recent change in society, as it used to be accepted that many people went straight to work and that college was not a universal experience. So the twentysomething experience today on the one hand appears more flexible and yet is more constricted in certain key aspects.

As for the internet, twentysomethings now are the last generation that didn't grow up with the internet; it came to most of us in our teens. We've adopted it as a way of being hyperinformed, as we can look up anything we want to know and communicate with people outside our immediate geographic location. What’s surprising is how little society has changed as a result of our having access to so much information and so many diverse perspectives. It’s telling of our society that such a powerful tool has had so little affect. So I would say the internet influences our lives surprisingly little.


[b]2. What has been your biggest "quarterlife" issue?[/b]

If this refers to the “quarterlife crisis”, I don’t think I’ve had one. If the question is simply what’s the biggest issue I’ve faced as a twentysomething, I think for me it’s an experience that is not new for people my age, which is having ideals and aspirations that are not accommodated by the society I live in, so that I have to go out and get a job I don’t enjoy and spend my time doing meaningless work in order to eat and pay rent while waiting around and trying to figure out how to use the little time I have left to me to create a situation for myself in which I can pursue the lifestyle I would like to be pursuing, which may never happen.


[b]3. I'm curious how you feel about the show, because I like it as a female, but what is the appeal for you as a male?[/b]

I don’t think my experience of the show is affected by my gender. We’re living in a time in which gender roles are receding. What’s important to me is whether I engage and empathize with the characters, and whether I can identify with their emotional experience to an extent that the show moves me in a way that is relevant to my life. The gender of the characters is irrelevant; what matters is the quality and realism and relevance of the writing, and then the production value of the show (how well the character experiences with which I’m empathizing are realized in the acting, the cinematography, and everything else that goes into realizing a story in film or television.)


[b]4. Does the show feel real to you in addressing the issues of "quarterlifers"?[/b]

This is a relative question, as it feels far more real than most shows on network television, and yet less real than the previous work of these creators, whose past work I’ve been a fan of. So if I hold the show to the standard I would expect from the creative team behind it, it doesn’t feel as real as I would have liked or expected. But there has been a lot of discussion about this on the forums of the site and it seems I’m in the minority on this, at least among those expressing their opinions about it on the forums (though this isn’t necessarily a very large group of people and includes many people who are not in their twenties.) But for me personally, the characters don’t speak and behave like today’s twentysomethings according to my personal experience, which I find unfortunate. But again, it does better than most if not all other television shows about this age group; it just isn’t up to the standard of its creators’ previous work.


[b]5. Why is 20-30 such an important stage in life?[/b]

Well, in our society this is the first decade of adulthood. Although, more and more it seems to be the last decade of adolescence, or a sort of transition from adolescence to adulthood in which society has no longer prepared people to make such a transition, or perhaps no longer demands it of them. This might be the reason that some people are talking about a “quarterlife crisis,” though I have to say that I never heard that term before this show and website came about, and the creators of the show have said that the title is not directly based on that concept. Still, others seem to associate the word “quarterlife” with that concept, indicating that there are some twentysomethings who do apparently experience a quarterlife crisis. But this is much different from the midlife crisis, which is the point at which a person faces that they have aged to a point that certain youthful experiences are simply no longer available to them. The quarterlife crisis seems to arise from living in a society in which no transition to adulthood is imposed, with the knowledge that this has not always been the case. It’s as if people reach their twenties and realize that society isn’t going to impose adulthood on them from the outside the way it used to, and they have to figure out how they feel about that.


[b]6. The articles on the site about how to be a successful quarterlifer, do you get anything out of those?[/b]

I don’t, personally. But I’m not your typical young upwardly mobile college graduate either. Looking at the characters on the show and the content on the site, I think there is an emphasis on upper middle class college graduates. I would like to see the project embrace a wider range of experience. I think the current emphasis in unconscious on the part of the creators, and that they’re not deliberately trying to exclude anyone. But the articles seem geared toward a pretty mainstream experience, and they’re not of much use to me personally.


[b]7. What is the appeal of quarterlife compared to Facebook/MySpace? Do you think it'll lead you to access to creative professionals like it claims?[/b]

Compared to those two sites, obviously there is a heavier emphasis on displaying one’s creative work, even if that creative work is only mental work in the form of writing or blogging. I think the blog is integrated and emphasized better than on Myspace. But this isn’t the first social-networking site with an emphasis on uploading art. If it’s going to be successful, it should reach further than previous sites of this kind have done. As for access to professionals, that is yet to be seen. Can the people running the site bring the professionals to us? An example of such a service that they could provide it to have a writer who has experience with writing workshops lead an online writing workshop on the site, in which users on the site can participate for free. If the site is going to give young creative people access to greater opportunities, that’s something that those running the site need to deliberately make happen. At the very least they need to figure out how to attract those professionals to the site.


[b]8. Do we need TV shows about our age group to help us deal with or solve our issues?[/b]

Absolutely. For centuries art has played a very important role in society; it’s where we sort of collectively work out how we feel about our own society. For a long time novels and drama did this and then there was film and then television, and it’s well established that film and television are very prominent in contemporary western society, playing the role that novels used to play. And yet, much of film and television is not produced with serious artistic intentions, but merely as a consumer product according to marketing formulas, and so there is a deficiency of film and television playing the role that art used to play in society. Therefore, any time you have a serious film or television series about what life is actually like in our society, it’s a good thing. The potential of the television medium has mostly been squandered for over fifty years now. So certainly we need more shows created for the purpose of exploring how we feel about society and less shows created according to marketing formula.


[b]9. Anything you want to add about your experience with the show or the site, or as a twenty-something?[/b]

Nothing in particular comes to mind. I think the show has great potential and opportunity because of the age group it’s about and some of the subject matter it has at least shown a willingness to deal with, and because the people writing and producing the show have a proven record of doing great things with such material. But I think the show is so far unaware of its own potential and doesn’t seem to know what its focus should be. It hasn’t yet come together the way it ought to. On the one hand the nature of the show indicates that the producers are aware of the wealth of potential in the material that no one has taken advantage of before, but on the other hand we’re several episodes into the show and almost none of that potential has been realized, and instead the show has focused on pretty typical scenarios that have been seen plenty of times before, on all sorts of shows. So the question is whether the show will find its way to a place where it can access its own internal potential, which for the first five episodes has been all but squandered, despite the overall quality of the show relative to other shows.