Kimberly Turner

Intro to Rhetoric

Dr. Jeff Ringer

May 2, 2016

“You Got to Hold On:” A Study of Millennials, Social Media and Identity

Introduction

Perhaps every generation has its problem children. We do not have to reach terribly far

back in American history to come to grips with hippies, punks, and the latchkey kids of

Generation X. Hardly a new phenomenon is the idyllic youngsters irking their parents with their

new music, new clothes, and new slang; it is, rather, a trope with which Americans are intimately

familiar. As a Millennial, I have come face to face with the same type of criticism I am more

than certain my own parents faced. As an academic, though, I find Millennials and their culture

an intriguing area study.

At once the largest group of people on the planet1 and the world’s newest adults,

Millennials continually occupy a space in mainstream media. Their escalation to media fame

came fast – a meteoric rise in the wake of a faltering economy and the nearly ubiquitous

presence of social media. Yet, the majority of the articles published about Millennials reveal an

increasing anxiety among Baby Boomers and Gen Xers: who are these Millennials, and why

exactly aren’t they following suit?

Take, for example, Anne Tergesen’s “When Millennials Move Back Home” published

just last year in The Wall Street Journal. Tergesen warns of Millennials returning home to live

with their parents or never leaving home in the first place; this most recent generation of adults

has become financially dependent on their parents, and, even more forebodingly, she argues,

1 See Richard Fry’s “Millennials Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation.”

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they have yet to develop crucial financial management skills required of actual adults. While just

one of many articles, of course, Tergesen’s piece typifies the sort of mainstream articles Baby

Boomers and Gen Xers continue to produce regarding Millennials. Tergesen’s dire language

epitomizes the rhetoric which many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers have utilized to create a

narrative of Millennials which largely excludes Millennials from the discussion and ultimately

informs the stereotype of the lazy, apathetic Millennial2 which has begun to take hold in

America’s cultural imagination. If this stereotype is actually unfounded, as I argue, one

particularly important question then remains: why are Millennials so incredibly frustrating to

prior generations?

To investigate this question, I begin with Millennials using Princeton professor Kenda

Creasy Dean’s notion of the “Church of Benign Whatever-ism.”3 Dean, a Princeton religious

scholar, argues that emerging adults have become morally complacent, and this culture of

disproportionate tolerance, Dean argues, ultimately fosters moral relativism and social inaction.

Building from Dean, I also incorporate rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke’s concept of

identification and expand his reading using Richard Weaver’s notion of god and devil terms.

These readings are of particular import as I begin to examine the ways in which Millennials

produce and enact their identities in rhetorical spaces, most especially on social media platforms.

Finally, in addition to crafting a rhetorical foundation for this project, I also attempt to utilize a

queer discourse which focuses specifically on how Millennials disrupt America’s investment in

futurity politics. Drawing from queer scholar Lee Edelman, the queer discourse through which I

analyze Millennials rhetorics is particularly useful for me because I am especially interested in

examining the narratives created for Millennials, around Millennials, and by Millennials.

2 See Joel Stein’s “Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation.”3 Ringer, Jeffrey. Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse: The Religious Creativity of Evangelical Student Writers (New York: Routledge, 2016), 14.

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By utilizing these three frameworks in my analysis of two case studies of American

Millennials, I am marrying three conversations: sociological and psychological conversations

regarding the advent of a new life phase; rhetorical conversations of identity; and a queer

dialogue about America’s investment in futurity. With Dean’s theory of benign whatever-ism as

a foundation, in conjunction with Burke and Weaver, I examine the ways in which Millennials

enact particular “Millennnialims” on social media platforms, and I explore claims that

Millennials encourage a culture of tolerance, acceptance of cultural difference, and excessive

consumption which disrupts traditional American narratives. In particular, I use this meeting of

conversations as a way to interrogate the specifics of Millennial lived experience and answer

important questions about Millennial culture which have, as of yet, been ignored:

1. In what ways does Millennial “benign whatever-ism” undermine the Western

emphasis on the value of life and, by extension, the privileging of futurity?

2. Can we consider the enactment of particular “Millennnialims” on social media

platforms more radical rhetorical positions than those, like Dean, who argue

against whatever-ism?

3. Are Millennials creating more radical queer spaces – both virtually and in the

corporeal – by refusing to inhabit rhetorical positions invested in futurity?

In what follows, I discuss both the mass media and scholarly perspectives concerning Millennials

and their position in modern American culture.

Literature Review

Millennials in Main Stream American Media

Open Google on any given day, type the word “Millennials” in to the search bar, and

press enter. The news from any random week includes a number of articles that dissect, in great

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detail, the problems, challenges, and frustrations Millennials face. Take, for example, a quick

Google search in late March 2016; the results would yield one article from The Washington Post,

“Why Don’t Millennials Vote?,” one from Newsday, “Study: 5 Million Millennials Don’t Have a

Checking Account,” and one from The New York Post, “Millennials Need To Put Away the Juice

Boxes and Grow Up.” Though products of the mass media and not scholarly in their function,

these articles represent a greater trend: the intense need, particularly of Baby Boomers and

GenXers, to categorize and place Millennials within the framework of the American narrative. In

this future-oriented narrative, Millennials must vote, use checking accounts and grow up like

their forbearers, with little to no deviation.

The conversation surrounding Millennials, however, began long before 2016. In May

2013, Joel Stein published “Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation,” and whether he intended

to or not, Stein subsequently launched a firestorm of conversation about America’s newest

problem generation. In his article, Stein discusses the group which has become “the most

threatening and exciting generation since the baby boomers.” Stein points to the narcissism and

selfishness of the Millennial generation, which he claims is exceedingly exacerbated by the

ubiquitous presence of technology. Stein also examines Millennials’ feelings of entitlement,

calling Generation Y a group of people “convinced of their own greatness.” Stein further argues

that Millennials are developmentally “stunted” and lazy, which has given rise to a new stage of

life between adolescence and adulthood.

While much of his article centers on the perceived negative characteristics of Millennials,

Stein does mount a defense of Generation Y. He makes special mention of Millennials’ unique

brand of positivism and the fact that many Millennials have strong relationships with their

caregivers. Still, even as Stein ultimately decides to “believe in the children” in his seminal

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Millennial-making article, many of his fellow journalists refused to follow suit. The

overwhelming number of articles concerning Millennials – written largely, of course, by Baby

Boomers and Gen-Xers – deride Generation Y for their perceived entitlement, narcissism, and

laziness. The trend continues even in current news cycles, where one might find in New York

Magazine’s recent online issue Eve Peyser’s “Millennials Literally Too Lazy to Eat Cereal.”

Despite Stein’s effort to point to the ways in which Millennials have been unfairly

targeted by mass media, many Millennial respondents found Stein’s tongue-in-cheek delivery

and seeming belief in the negative traits he lists throughout “Me Me Me” frustrating. Rather

unsurprisingly, the response was immediate and visible. Stein’s article consequently gave rise to

a host of reaction articles, such as Fareed Zakaria’s “The Try-Hard Generation” (The Atlantic)

and Marc Tracy’s “Millennials in Our ‘Time’” (New Republic). The Millennial fervor even led

to the wildly popular satirical YouTube video, “Millennials: We Suck and We’re Sorry.”

Suddenly, Millennials were on the media map.

“Emerging Adults:” Millennials by Any Other Name

In the world of academia, however, the bulk of conversation about Millennials is thus far

grounded in the sociological or psychological community. In 2000, Jeffrey Arnett, then a

professor of psychology at of Clark University, identified “emerging adulthood” as a distinct

new phase of life for people in their late teens to their mid-to late 20s in his article “Emerging

Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties.”4 In the

article, Arnett proposes “emerging adulthood” as a new stage of development which

encompasses “the late teens through the twenties, with a focus on ages 18-25.”5 These in-

between years, Arnett argues, are distinct from both teenage experiences and the events of

4 See Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties.” American Psychologist 55.5 (2000).5Arnett, 469.

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adulthood; emerging adulthood is, in fact, its own, specific phase of life characterized by vast

“demographic variability.”6 Indeed, Arnett notes, the demographics of those ranging in ages 18-

25 become increasingly more difficult to calculate based solely on the knowledge of a person’s

age7. Additionally, those who inhabit this distinctly non-adult developmental stage are

subjectively aware of their positions; most emerging adults feel “that they have left adolescence

but have not yet completely entered adulthood,” Arnett contends.8

Since Arnett’s numerous publications on this new phase of life, many researchers in

fields as varied as cultural studies, psychology, and economics have begun to examine emerging

adulthood and its impact on various aspects of American life. Arnett’s “Emerging Adulthood”

thus represents one of – if not the – earliest attempts to identify the shift in developmental life

stages. As such, Arnett’s article remains a pivotal and oft cited work in the intersection of

generational studies and the developing field of Millennial studies. While Arnett’s article is, at

this point, dated, his study functions as a way in which to foreground the timeline of Millennial

studies and the theories developed from studying Generation Y.

Following Arnett’s foundational work on the phenomenon of emerging adulthood, a

number of scholars have also subsequently begun to consider the role of the twentysomething in

modern culture. As early as the year 2013, Manfred H. M. Van Dulmen, a professor at Kent State

University, established Emerging Adulthood, which acts as an “interdisciplinary and

international journal for advancements in theory, methodology, and empirical research on

development and adaptation during the late teens and twenties.”9 Still, despite all the talk of

emerging adulthood, I contend Millennials themselves continue to be overlooked by scholars.

6 Ibid., 471. 7 Ibid.8 Ibid. 9 “Emerging Adulthood.” Sage Journals. Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (2016).

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Though eager to discuss emerging adulthood as a budding new phase in American identity and

development, scholars such as Jeffrey Arnett and Christian Smith seem especially hesitant to

discuss the particulars of actual Millennial life despite the facts that Millennials are the first

generation of people to actually inhabit emerging adulthood as a phase of life. Millennials’ lived

bodies, their experiences, cultures, interests, literature, etc. have, as a result, largely been

relegated to representation by the aforementioned mass media news circuit and the pop

psychology I discuss in the following.

In an effort to understand emerging adults, some researchers, most notably Christian

Smith, have taken to categorizing and making meaning of the features of emerging adulthood in

an attempt to understand how Millennials can communicate with prior generations and how prior

generations can effectively communicate with them. In their 2009 Souls in Transition: The

Religious Lives of Emerging Adults in America, Christian Smith and researcher Patricia Smith

discuss the religious implications of this new developmental phase on Millennials. Perhaps the

most intriguing part of this text, though, remains Chapter 2, “The Cultural World of Emerging

Adults.” In this particular chapter, Smith and Snell list in great detail the various features of

emerging adults. Smith and Snell include characteristics such as constant transitioning and

financial hardship, but also focus more widely on the shared emotions and desire of many

emerging adults.10 These include the hope to one day be able to stand on one’s own, being

overwhelmed by life’s innumerable responsibilities, holding on to optimism for one’s own

future, and a lack of regrets.11

In his 2011 follow up, Smith again examines Millennials by focusing specifically on the

problems faced during their assent in adulthood. Smith ultimately concludes that “emerging adult

10 Smith, Christian, and Patricia Snell. “The Cultural World of Emerging Adults.” Souls in Transition: The Religious Lives of Emerging Adults in America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009). 11 Ibid.

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life in the United States today is beset with real problems, in some cases troubling and even

heartbreaking problems.”12 Whether this is a product of emerging adults’ thoughts and behaviors,

Smith is not as willing to say. He does, however, continue to examine the sense of moral

individualism and moral relativism extoled by a large number of emerging adults. Indeed, Smith

notes, “Six of ten (60 percent) of the emerging adults we interviewed expressed a highly

individualistic approach to morality. They said that morality is a personal choice, entirely a

matter of individual decision.”13 Smith, like Stein, argues that being raised under a “tolerance-

promoting, multicultural educational project” has, in the long run, done a disservice to emerging

adults.14 Instead of cultivating solid opinions of their own, he contends, emerging adults base

their opinions on “sloppy and indefensible moral reasoning” fed to them as children.15 Like

Stein, Smith shares in both Souls in Transition and Lost in Transition his concern that emerging

adults are becoming increasing tolerant – so tolerant, in fact, that they are reluctant to point to

rights and wrongs in other people’s behavior, claiming instead the human behavior is personally

relative.16 Smith attributes this change to Millennials’ belief that they are “imprisoned in their

own subjective selves, limited to their biased interpretations of their own sense perceptions,

unable to know the real truth of anything beyond themselves.”17

While Smith and his research teams have focused largely on categorizing emerging

adults’ beliefs and behaviors, a number of other writers and scholars seem more concerned with

the motionlessness of emerging adults. Indeed, a great deal of the current conversation refers to

Millennials as “stuck.” This conversation tends to take aim at the current trend of Millennials

who have left and returned home. Sally Koslow, in her 2012 book Slouching Toward Adulthood: 12 Smith, Christian, et. al. Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 3.13 Ibid., 21. 14 Ibid., 35. 15 Ibid. 16 Smith and Snell, “The Cultural World of Emerging Adults.”17 Ibid.

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Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest, observes, “The number of adolescents now living in

their parents’ homes looks like nothing less than a stampede.”18 Indeed, Koslow even includes a

number of statistics from 2010-11, when many Millennials where beginning to graduate college

after the massive economic downturn in 2008. Koslow says, “In the graduating class of 2011, it

was estimated that 85 percent of graduates moved back home,” and “according to census

estimates, by 2010, some 5.5 million people aged twenty-five to thirty-five were living at home,

an increase of more than 20 percent since the recession.”19 Koslow continues her investigation

into Millennials by focusing on the ways in which many parents of Millennials are now

financially supporting their adult-aged children; those Millennials who are not living at home,

she says, are largely or “adolescents without borders,” who travel to endlessly and particularly

relish living in the margins of American cultural life.20

Koslow is not alone in her observations of the complex Millennial. In their book

Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem So Stuck?, Baby Boomer mother Robin Henig

and her Millennial daughter Samantha Henig research twentysomethings – or emerging adults –

in order to determine if the Millennial “experience of the twenties” is in any way radically

different from that of previous generations.21 Throughout their study, the Henigs, like Koslow,

tackle issues effected by and effecting adulthood: education, choosing a career path, finding a

partner and deciding to marry, having children, etc. The Henigs ultimately conclude that

Millennials reflect their Baby Boomer parents in the most essential ways – the prolonging of

adulthood being the most common feature;22 however, they also argue that Millennials are

18 Koslow, Sally. Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest (New York: Viking, 2012), 65. 19 Ibid., 66. 20 Ibid., 12-35, 103-16. 21 Henig, Robin Marantz, and Samantha Henig. Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? (New York: Hudson Street, 2012), xvi.22 Ibid., 1-28.

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significantly different from their forbearers in one specific way. Millennials are, according to the

Henigs, “grappling, for the first time ever, with the inversion of the American Dream, the

realization that they probably won’t be as well off as their parents were….it’s a harsh realization

nonetheless, and the need to face it is something that’s new to this generation.”23 The realization

that the Henigs highlight thus extends the reading Koslow offers and provides a distinct

framework for thinking about the American narrative and its socioeconomic impact on

Millennials.

While much of the scholarly research concerning Millennials has been conflated with the

term “emerging adult,” the work in this field is still incredibly valuable to the study I have

undertaken. Arnett and Smith, in particular, have been useful as I have begun examining

Millennials and their distinct features; though they were markedy less sociological in their

approaches to Millennials, Koslow and the Henigs also advance the conversations grounded by

Arnett and Smith. Each of these scholars offers a layer of critical analysis which is beneficial as I

begin to examine the ways in which Millennials inhabit rhetorical spaces which push back

against the traditional Western narratives which mandate futurity through strong social stances,

marriage, and reproduction.

Burke, Weaver, and Identity: A Rhetorical Move

To understand American mass media and academics’ preoccupation with categorizing

Millennials and their determining characteristics, we must turn to rhetorical theory. In A Rhetoric

of Motives, formative rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burk distinguishes identification as a rhetorical

move distinct from persuasion and central to both being a human and interacting with humans.

According to Burke, people are innately separated by their lived experiences, and this separation

23 Ibid., 224.

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drive us to identify with other people.24 This, says Burke, leads to an “ambiguity of substance.”25

People, then, are “both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with

another.”26 Burke argues that this drive to identify ourselves, and identify with others, constantly

reinforces divisions, for which we feel innately guilty.27 We must identify ourselves “with

earnest” because of the separateness of human existence; indeed, Burke contends, “Identification

is compensatory to division.”28 Ultimately, Burke points to identification as a means through

which attempt to overcome divisions – and by extension, the guilt they feel because of the

separation. Humans intentionally seek out ways in which their lived experiences overlap with

others’ in their desire to be “cosubstantial” with other human beings.29

To extend Burke’s reading of identification, I rely on Richard Weaver’s categorization of

contemporary rhetorical terms in The Ethics of Rhetoric. Weaver most notably defines here god

terms and devil terms. According to Weaver, the god term is “that expression about which all

other expressions are ranked subordinate and serving dominations and powers.”30 Weaver argues

that a number of terms may function in a given culture and all of these terms fight for dominance

within a cultural framework.31 He also introduces devil terms, the inevitable foil of the god term.

If the god term signifies that which is valued, Weaver contends the function of the devil term is

to signify “repulsion.”32 However, Weaver notes, “One cannot explain how [devil terms]

generate their peculiar force of repudiation. One can only recognize them as publically-agreed-

upon devil terms.”33 Finally, Weaver brings us to what he calls charismatic terms, or those terms

24 Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkley: U of California P, 1969), 21. 25 Ibid., 21.26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 22. 28 Ibid.29 Ibid., 21. 30 Weaver, Richard M. The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1985), 212. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 222. 33 Ibid.

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which have “broken loose somehow and…operate independently of referential connections.”34

These terms, Weaver says, are compulsive, unbound to referents which hold a significant place

in our culture; instead, charismatic terms derive from “a popular that they shall mean

something.”35

While composed nearly simultaneously, Weaver’s rhetorical terms offer a way in which

to think of identification through terms which function to create hierarchies in our culture. Those

who align themselves with god terms which dominate a culture immediately engage in a process

of cultural identification; those who refute the god term, or align themselves instead with the

devil terms, essentially reject the process of identification which Burke argues is essential to

human communication. This process of identifying, aligning, and rejecting also provides

academics a way in which to interrogate cultural stereotyping which casts Millennials into the

role of the unruly teenager and denies them the right not only to express but also to have a hand

in their own identity formation.

Identity, Futurity, and Millennials

Like many other schools of academia, queer theory represents yet another area in which

Millennials have yet to be explored. I find this lack of conversation particularly interesting given

the ways in which a large portion of Millennials have co-opted their constant exposure to social

media and popular culture in an effort to craft their own identities. Keeping Dean, Burke, and

Weaver, Lee Edelman’s 2004 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive thus offers an

approach for rethinking “benign whateverism” as an identity marker and ultimately for re-

scripting Millennials as queer figures.

34 Ibid., 227. 35 Ibid.

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In his work, Edelman examines the role of queer theory and the queer figure in a culture

that remains highly invested in the concept of futurity. He argues that Western culture

systematically grafts the notion of futurity onto children in order to create for itself a sense of

accessible subjectivity. The Child, for Edelman, functions to create and sustain an “unmediated

access to Imaginary wholeness;” a subject becomes a subject through the Child and the Child’s

promise of the future36. Children, then, transform into what Edelman calls a culturally

constructed idea of the Child, a “telos of the social order”37. In this configuration, the Child

serves to validate the authority of heteronormative, marriage-normative culture. Of course,

because the Child figures so prominently in the construction and survival of the heteronormative

imagination, the Child exists in an entirely vulnerable, impressionable state and is subsequently

considered an innocent being always in need of protection. This focus on the Child, Edelman

contends, allows very little space to imagine alternative understandings of the future.38 This

acceptance of the Child – and the hetero-privileged cultural norms it entails – effectively negates

the goals of queerness.

Edelman then introduces the sinthome, who functions as the manifestation of queer

resistance to the reproductive futurity paradigm. Although he does not specifically point to

homosexuals or homosexual culture, Edelman does maintain that homosexuality has become

synonymous with sinthomosexuality for Western culture because it “figures the availability of an

unthinkable jouissance that would put an end to fantasy-and with it, futurity.”39 The sinthome

therefore operates as a figural remainder, an embodied death drive that heteronormativity cannot

acknowledge. For Edelman, this queer embodiment, this crucial incarnation, acts as the key to

36 Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 10. 37 Ibid., 11. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 39.

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undoing reproductive futurity and heteronormative privilege. The radical queerness of the

sinthome thus demonstrates the ways in which we create normativity and reveals where it can be

unraveled.

Ultimately, Edelman’s theory of the Child and America’s fixation on futurity enables a

conversation about the ways in which Millennials inhabit rhetorical positions, especially via their

much-used social media profiles. Social media, which includes the extensive use of hashtaging,

retweeting, and sharing, thus provides a critical medium through which to analyze the Millennial

as a queer subject occupying an increasingly radical space.

Methods

The Setting

I conducted two case studies in the spring of 2016 at the University of Tennessee

(Knoxville). Because both of the participants live outside of Tennessee, I interviewed each

participant from my own home using Skype. Skype was particularly useful as I collected data

because both participants were able to communicate with me at their leisure from their own

homes, in Florence, SC and Charlotte, NC respectively.

Participants

To begin my study, I personally recruited both participants, Amy and Ashley, through

text messages and asked them if they would be interested in assisting me with my research. I

have known both Amy and Ashley for a number of years, and I have maintained steady

friendships with each of them since our initial meetings. I have known Amy since 1999; we both

attended public schools in Florence, SC and met during our 7th grade term. We have remained

friends since this time, even after we both relocated outside of our hometown. I also came to

know Ashley through the public school system in Florence, SC. Ashley and I met as a freshman

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in high school in 2002. Ashley, an incoming student from North Carolina, and I were registered

in a number of the same courses throughout high school, and we eventually worked together in a

restaurant in our hometown. As a personal friend of both participants and an active user of social

media, I am a friend or follower of both participants on all three of the social media platforms I

examine in this study.

Here, it is important to note that I chose to examine Millennials as both a group of people

and a generational age range; I thus chose to follow the age range advanced by the Pew Research

Center. According to the Center, Millennials are those born between the years 1981-1996.40 Born

in 1988, both Amy and Ashley thus qualify as Millennials. Both participants are also unwed,

both are pet owners, both are currently in shared living spaces, and both work or have worked

multiple jobs in order to sustain themselves. These characteristics are particularly common to

emerging adults, which Smith and Snell41 document in great detail in their research on the

characteristics of emerging adults. Arnett, too, notes these characteristics of emerging adults,

referencing specifically their varied living circumstances and the unpredictability of the years

between 18-25 (469-71). Therefore, in light of Amy and Ashley’s ages, financial hardships, and

shared living locations, I was able to situate both squarely as Millennials as well as emerging

adults, rendering them ideal for study.

While they share many commonalities, however, Amy and Ashley do differ in significant

ways as well, including sexual preference, religious background, relationship status, and

education status. Amy identifies as bisexual and is currently “very single,” while Ashley

identifies as heterosexual and is currently engaged. Both participants were born into Christian

households, though Amy was raised as a Methodist and Ashley was raised as a Catholic. Both of 40 I must clarify here, though, that the Pew Research Center is careful to note that “no chronological end point has been set for this group yet” (Millennials 4).41 See Souls in Transition: The Religious Lives of Emerging Adults in America (2009) and Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood (2011).

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their fathers obtained Masters degrees, but their mothers varied in educational achievement.

Amy’s mother obtained a Bachelor’s degree, while Ashley’s mother obtained a high school

diploma.

Like their parents, Amy and Ashley also graduated high school, and both attended public

liberal arts universities in South Carolina in order to obtain bachelors’ degrees. Amy attained a

Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and now works as a Wardrobe Supervisor for Charlotte Ballet.

Ashley completed a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and is currently completing a master’s

program in order to become a Specialist in School Psychology.

Overall, I chose Amy and Ashley to participate in my research in order to examine the

ways in which two very similar Millennials from comparable backgrounds enact their identities

on social media platforms in order to answer pertinent questions about the role of Millennials in

American culture. Do Millennial undermine the Western emphasis on futurity? Are Millennials

creating radical queer spaces on social media?

Procedures

Millennials – or as the Pew Research Center has dubbed them, “digital natives” – have

become virtually inseparable from social media in the American imagination (Millennials 5).

Consequently, I decided to use social media to research the narratives Millennials create for

themselves in order to explore the ways in which “benign whateverism” operates as a radically

queer space in Millennial culture. In order to do this, I felt

To undertake this task, I focused specifically on three of the major social media platforms

available to Millennials users for free: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Each of these social

media sites exists as an app available for smart phone use, regardless of the type of operating

system the phone owner uses. Each social media platform also accessible from a browser login.

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Additionally, each of the three apps also provides users with ability to hashtag posts and search

existing posts marked with hashtags. Facebook and Twitter also allow sharing and retweeting,

which enables uses to disseminate other users’ posts as their own or even alter the posts to

include their own personal message. Instagram requires a third party app for re-gramming, but it

too can be done with relative ease. Lastly, all three of these platforms offer users the ability to

constantly check the trending – most used hashtag or posted about event – within a specific time

period. For my purposes, these three social media platforms thus offered the most credible look

in the ways in which Millennials are living “whateverism” on a live stage with well-rounded,

diverse audiences.

I asked Amy and Ashley to self-report their social media usage on Facebook, Instagram

and Twitter over the course of a two week period in March 2016. I asked both participants to

begin by keeping a log of the users they tagged in Instagram posts, regardless of whether the post

was their own or one from another account. I also asked the participants to log their own posts as

well as the posts they liked over the course of the two week period. I requested the same

information for Facebook and Twitter as well. Amy and Ashley recorded their Facebook posts,

status updates, shares, likes, and any post in which they were tagged over the two week period.

They also record their tweets, retweets, and likes on Twitter during the two weeks. At the end of

the two weeks, Amy and Ashley sent me the information by email. They both used their smart

phones to screen shot images of their social media use on Facebook and Twitter; they also sent

me screens shots of the individual Instagram posts.

When I received all the information from the participants, I then interviewed each of

them. Questions I included in my interview focused primarily on how they would personally

describe themselves to others, their daily social media activity, and how they use each social

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media platform (Appendix A). Before the interview, I also instructed Amy and Ashley to select

five posts from any of the three social media sites which they felt best represented them. I did not

provide any more information to them except to say that this instruction was open for their

interpretation. Both women reported these five images to me before the interview commenced,

and I asked each woman respectively to contextualize the images during the initial interview.

After transcribing and coding the data, I then administered a follow-up email interview,

during which I asked the participants basic demographic questions. I also showed each

participant a transcribed portion of the interview in which they described themselves. During the

follow up interview, I asked the participants why they had chosen to describe themselves in this

particular way. The participants were given a week to return the information.

Data Analysis

In order to analyze the data I collected, I utilized an emergent coding method after

recording and transcribing both interviews. I began coding simply by searching for instances in

which Amy and Ashley used keywords such as social media, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

As I coded for these words, though, I also specifically examined the data for words or phrases

which might function as god or devil terms, and I found a pattern which appeared over the course

of the interviews. Both Ashley and Amy spoke frequently of two themes: work and audience. I

realized from here that work began to function in the interviews as a god term, so I then coded

the transcripts again for this theme. I also paid special attention to mentions of audience since

this particular theme remained central in both Amy and Ashley’s process of identification.

Using this same coding method, I also analyzed the social media posts that Amy and

Ashley self-reported over the two week period. I specifically examined their own personal

postings on the three social media sites in search of instances where they discussed themes of

Turner 19

work. I then repeated this process using the five items Amy and Ashley selected to best represent

them.

Results

Several themes emerged as a result of this research. Principal among these themes was

that each social media site has a specific function in these Millennial women’s lives. When asked

which of the three social media platforms they used most frequently, both women answered that

they used Facebook most often. Both agreed that, because they had had Facebook accounts for

the longest amount of time, the feed

tended to be more varied and stimulating.

Indeed, Ashley said, “I have more

Facebook friends than I do on Instagram.

My Instagram is more limited as to who I

follow, where I’ve had Facebook for way

longer so there’s more people and things

to look at.” Amy agreed, saying, “I’ve

been on it the longest and these days

there’s – it’s the most interesting.”

Both women also echoed one another when I asked what types of things they look at on

Facebook. Amy and Ashley both agreed that their primary purpose in scrolling through

Facebook was to read news articles and see status updates from those with whom they are

friends. ““Facebook is more like news and articles or like cool things,” Amy said. “Like I share

mostly on Facebook. Lot of sharing that happens like of other things that I see.” This is evident

in Amy’s multiple shares of articles from The Huffington Post and a number of blog articles

Fig. 1: A sample of Amy’s Facebook activity.

Turner 20

written by other people in the theatre and wardrobe community (See Fig. 1). Ashley’s answer to

this question was a near mirror image: “I’ll scroll through the newsfeed and look at, ya know,

people’s statuses and stuff and if there’s a news article or a link or something or, that interests

me then I’ll click on that and that’ll bring me to another website.” While both women shared

news articles they found interesting, Ashley was also much more likely to share a Facebook

memory which included her past life experiences or a life experience in which she was included.

Facebook’s primary purpose, then, seemed to function like a virtual water cooler; both Amy and

Ashley expressed their interest in Facebook initially as a site for gathering information about a

number of “interesting” aspects shaping their lives, whether these elements were local or global

in scale.

Amy and Ashley were also intensely aware of the audience of each specific platform.

When I asked each of them how they used each social media platform, they again began to echo

one another. Ashley, in particular, was extremely conscious of what she posted on which

platform:

I use Twitter as, my grandmother doesn’t follow me on this so I can post whatever I want

to. Umm, I think that Twitter I post – I think I’m hilarious but I guess I use Twitter more

for like, umm, sarcastic things, maybe things are, like, stereotypes I find that are

funny that maybe I shouldn’t post on Facebook or Instagram because it would offend someone.

Umm, so I guess it’s more of like a humor slash I don’t care if I offend you sort of thing

on Twitter.

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Several of Ashley’s posts on Twitter demonstrate

her desire to use Twitter as a source of humor

without offending personal friends or family. Her

tweet in Fig. 2, in which she references a hangover,

represents a status she would not post on Facebook for fear of reproach.

Amy, too, expressed that audience played a major factor in her decision to use Twitter.

Twitter is, she said, “for venting sometimes.” This, she says, is because she doesn’t have “as

many people on there that follow me.” Amy did, however, agree with Ashley that Twitter was

largely a space to “retweet funny stuff.” Twitter, for both Ashley and Amy, thus became a

purging site of sorts – a place where the audience was likely to matter simply because it was less

personal.

Both women also suggested that Instagram functioned as a place in which to showcase

the ins and outs of their daily lives. According to Ashley, “Instagram is more – even though it’s

linked to my Facebook, I post on Instagram more, ‘Hey, this is my life.’” Curiously, though,

neither Ashley nor Amy posted much of their own content during the two week period. In fact,

Amy posted only two pictures: one of her pet and one photograph42 of a Tampon dispenser which

doubled as an ironic political statement43; Ashley also posted very little of her own content.

However, both Ashley and Amy liked quite a few pictures and actively participated in

tagging people in posts which reflected elements of their personal lives. Amy, for one, seemed

relatively surprised about the amount of pictures she liked on Instagram: “I don’t post that much

myself on Instagram but I like a lot on Instagram, which your stupid project made me find out. I

was like, ‘Oh I have two posts. Hmm, a hundred likes.’ Cause it’s so easy to scroll through and

42 Evans, Amy. “An Instagram Post of Sleeping Dog.” Amy Evans. 30 Mar. 2016. Photograph. 30 Mar. 2016.43 Ibid., “An Instagram Post of a Tampon Dispenser.” Amy Evans, 30 Mar. 2016. Photograph. 30 Mar. 2016.

Fig. 2: One of Ashley’s personal tweets

Turner 22

like stuff on there.” Both, however, agreed that they use

Instagram largely to interact with their closest friends through a

process of tagging their friends in the comment section of a

picture or sending the picture to a friend through the direct

message feature. Indeed, Ashley noted that she interacts most

often with her two closest friends and her fiancé: “We will tag

each other in lots of like funny memes or pictures or something

like that, umm, that is relatable to us.” Amy replied with virtually the same answer: “On

Instagram I interact mostly with you. It’s mostly me tagging you in comments on things.” Given

the amount social tagging Amy and Ashley engage in on Instagram, their audience tends to be

much smaller but incredibly personal. Instagram, then, functions much like Twitter for these two

women; while their content is public, their embodied audience is quite small and thus the ability

to express oneself is enhanced.

Another significant theme which emerged during the

course of this research was the notion of work. When I asked

each participant how she would describe herself to other, both

contextualized themselves in terms of work. Amy described

herself as “a 27 year old female from South Carolina that

lives in Charlotte that does costumes for a living…for a ballet,

currently.” Ashley first described herself by her work ethic

and then by the jobs she held: “Hard working. Umm….an

Fig. 3: An Instagram post in which Ashley tagged her fiancé.

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individual who likes to stand out in the crowd and be different. Uh…a graduate student, a server,

a nanny. And that’s pretty much it.”

During our follow-up email interviews, I asked each woman to explain a bit further why

she had described herself the way she did. Amy suggested that her age and occupation were the

“basic facts” one would “need” to know about her. Ashley’s description, however, was a bit

more involved. She explained her description of herself by stating:

I average 50 hours a week at work while going part time to graduate school. I

have two classes and 50 hours of practicum this semester, not including studying and

homework. I've never been able to rely on my parents for financial support, so I have

often times worked 2 jobs and gone to school or worked 3 jobs while not in school….

Graduate student, server and nanny describe what takes up the majority of my

time. I probably should have added fiancé to that, but I actually spend the least amount of

time in regards to my relationship since everything else takes up so much time. (Which is

very unfortunate)

Here, Ashley intricately ties herself to the various jobs which she feels mandate a large majority

of her time. Ashley notes also that she considers her time in her graduate program as a source of

work.

Both women also included work in the five items they chose to represent themselves.

Two of Ashley’s five items represented her work like; one was a Facebook post she shared in

which a friend defended the hard work of those in the service industry44 and one was her own

Instagram post of her co-workers at the restaurant where she is currently employed45. As part of

44 Wallace, Ashley. “A Facebook Share of Caroline Allred’s Post.” Ashley Wallace, 4 Apr. 2016. Photograph. 4 Apr. 2016.45 ----. “An Instagram Post of Muscovy’s Coworkers.” Ashley Wallace, 4 Apr. 2016. Photograph. 4 Apr. 2016.

Turner 24

her five items, Amy included a picture of her sleeping dog, with a caption reading, “After

working somewhere north of 250 hours in the last month, I’m super thankful to have a coworkers

who take on extra tasks so Lillian & I can spend a day doing this…#wardrobelife

#costumingfordance #lazydog #lazymonday #dayoff.”

Finally, both women were acutely aware of social media’s purpose in daily their lives as

well. They both describe social media as an activity to undertake when bored. When I asked

Ashley to describe a day in her social media life, she began by detailing how she begins the day

with social media as a way in which to wake up. She then quickly moved from this to discussing

how she uses social media during the ins and outs of her day: “Really anytime, anytime when I

have nothing going on…so in between work and school or just if I’m uh just trying to avoid

anything. Procrastination – I use it as a procrastination tool for sure.” Amy, too, began by

situating social media as a tool she used in order to begin her day. Like Ashley, she then

launched into a detailed description of how social media functions in her work like:

So this past week has been a slow week. We don’t really have anything we’re

working on. We’re just in the calm before the storm. So I spend a lot of time on social

media. There’s a lot of Facebook that happens and it’s just cause I’m frickin bored. And

procrastinating working on anything and not wanting to clean the shop, so. And I’m on

Facebook mostly and then Instagram sometimes….

When we actually get in to the running of the show, umm, if it’s a slow show and

we don’t have much to do, then I’m on it like – not as much in the mornings when I wake

up cause I usually have early calls. When I’m sitting there on a laundry call I’ll be on it or

during the show if I don’t have like much to do I’ll be on it…just as a time filler mostly.

Turner 25

Interestingly, both women described social media as an interruption from the work which they

position as a central to their lives.

Discussion

As I began the interviews with Ashley and Amy, I fully expected each of these Millennial

women to describe social media – particularly Instagram and Twitter – as a place to engage in

Millennialism (i.e. YOLO, do you, sorrynotsorry) which have come to dominate Millennial

discourse. However, to my surprise, both Ashley and Amy position social media within their

lives largely as tools, ways to invoke community, and as places to craft separate rhetorical

identities depending largely on audience. To examine this phenomena, I turn back to the

aforementioned queer and rhetorical theory.

In many of the mainstream media articles one can find with a quick Google search,

Millennials are figured as children. Indeed, much of the anxiety Baby Boomers and Gen Xers

express regarding Millennials is their apparent inability to “put away the juice boxes and grow

up.” Millennial resistance to adulthood seems, in large part, to unsettle prior generations, and we

must ask here why this is so. Using Edelman’s theory of the Child, I contend that this anxiety

springs from the need for Millennials to fulfill their role as children in this very American

futurity narrative. As the Child, Millennials must constantly be fretted over, worried over, and

protected, but the ultimate obligation of the Millennial is to become an adult who will then

produce more children for American society to then figure as the Child. Thus, by perpetuating

and reproducing the identity category “Millennial” in mainstream media, Baby Boomers and

Gen Xers attempt to create orders of identification in order to reaffirm futurity narratives which

have – and continue to – inform American culture.

Turner 26

However, the difficulty seems to lie in Millennials resistance to this Burkean process of

identification. When I asked Amy if she considered herself a Millennial, she answered quite

forcefully that she did not, in fact, consider herself a Millennial at all. Asked to explain, Amy

replied, “I don’t fit with Millennials. That actually doesn’t have much to do with the [way] of

Millennials at all.” I then asked if the term Millennial bothered her, or if she instead felt a

resistance to the notion of Millennials. She told me that “Millennials are definitely a thing,” but

continued by saying, “I just don’t relate to the…stereotypes that are applied to them.” As it turns

out, Amy was not alone in her dissatisfaction with the terminology. I asked Ashley, too, if she

considered herself a Millennial, to which she emphatically replied, “No. I do not consider myself

any of those things….It just sounds like I wanna hit, punch all those people in the face for feeling

that way. Like, it upsets me to know that there are people out there who carry on that way.”

Note, here, that both women do not deny that they are a part of a separate generation from their

parents and grandparents. The resistance to Millennial, for Ashley and Amy, comes from the

rhetorical figuring of their identities – a figuring in which they feel they had no role.

It seems fairly obvious, then, the force driving the friction between Millennials and their

predecessors is not nearly as simple as a division in culture or age. Instead, Millennials reject the

identity figured for them – as both the Child and the Millennial, as evidenced through Amy and

Ashley’s denial of the term. Amy and Ashley’s move to distance themselves from Millennial as

an identity functions, then, as a process of rhetorical dissociation – or a move to “reduce tension

generated by contradictions and inconsistencies in our belief or in our experience of the world.”46

By employing this move, Millennials essentially separate “the source of the tension” into the

irreconcilable, profoundly oppositional categories of appearance and reality and consequently

46 Jasinski, James. “Dissociation.” Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 176.

Turner 27

reshape Millennials’ lived experiences.47 They thus apply “negative feelings” to their concept of

appearance and “positive feelings” to their notion of reality.48 For rhetoricians, this move is

considered inherently problematic,49 but I argue here that this problem-making, this process of

unsettling is essential to rethinking American futurity narratives. For Millennials to dissociate

from the identity Millennial – or more accurately, Baby Boomers and Gen Xers’ attempts to

bridge the separation and assuage their own guilt through a prescribed rhetorical figuring – is to

reaffirm the division between lived, corporeal experiences and produce a rhetorical community

in which Baby Boomers and Gen Xers have no access.

Nowhere is this dissociative move more obvious than in Amy and Ashley’s discussions

of their work and social media lives. Work has, for Millennials, obviously become an area of

extreme frustration. A large portion of Millennials, including Amy and Ashley, came into and

continue to come into the work force after the 2008 economic crash. The recession obviously had

a devastating impact for many people, most notably for Millennials attempting to foreground

careers. For example, in the 1st quarter of 2016, the median weekly earnings of female full-time

wage and salary workers 25 years and over was $779.50 Adjusted for inflation, the median

weekly earnings of female full-time wage and salary workers 25 years and over was $328; this

was just five dollars higher than the 1st quarter of 2015.51 Given the downturn, many Millennials

have expressed sentiments of disenfranchisement, seen most recently in their avid support for

Bernie Sanders and his promised economic reforms.

Echoing these concerns, Amy and Ashley continually gravitated back to discussions of

work during their interviews. Both women immediately identified themselves by their 47 Ibid.48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 U.S. Department of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers First Quarter 2016. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Division of Labor Force Statistics (19 Apr. 2016). 51 Ibid.

Turner 28

occupations, and, when asked to clarify this description, felt that their jobs comprised an integral

part of their identity. Ashley especially felt intricately tied to work. When I asked her why she

refused the term Millennial, she responded, “Because I am hardworking, and I don’t consider

myself to be a selfish person. I’m gonna give as much as I can…to help anyone or anything out.”

For Ashley and Amy, then, work begins to act as a Burkean master trope – a metonymic device.

According to Burke, metonymy corresponds to the human effort “to convey some in-corporeal or

intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible. E.g., to speak of ‘the heart’ rather than ‘the

emotions.’”52 Burke adds that metonymy is the opposite of the scientific reduction or correlation;

metonymy, instead, functions as it would in the poetic sense in its attempt to capture the

intangible with the perceptible.53 Work, for Ashley and Amy, is thus a metonymic way in which

to negate the stereotypes and feelings of disenfranchisement which they experience under the

identifier Millennial. Work is the tangible, and Millennial the identity is the intangible.

Ultimately, Ashley and Amy reflect their metonymic use of work in the ways they

describe their social media use. Both Ashley and Amy were apt to share statuses from their

respective work places on Facebook or promote their place of employment through status

updates. Ashley suggested this is because Facebook serves her as a “promotional tool” through

which she can “promote work, promote things that I believe in.” Of course, this technique is only

effective because, as both posited before, they have large follower bases on Facebook and can

thus reach a wider audience. It is also worth noting here that Ashley and Amy actively seek to

advance themselves as workers on their social media platform with the largest, most diverse

audience. This is particularly important given the way in which Millennials have been

constructed in social narratives thus far as lazy and entitled. This would fail miserably on a

52 “Four Master Tropes.” The Kenyon Review 3.4 (1941), 422.53 Ibid.

Turner 29

platform, Ashley says, “because I don’t think that I have enough followers who care on Twitter.”

For these Millennial women, then, audience plays a crucial role in the way they construct their

identities on social media. The most successful way these Millennials have managed to negotiate

the process of identity formation on social media is to present their work as their identities.

Unlike Twitter, which Ashley actively admits she uses largely “to offend people – or to not

offend people,” Ashley and Amy consciously consider their audience – and audience comprised

in part of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers – as they position work as the crux of their identity on

Facebook and Instagram.

To locate work as the center of their identities also suggests that for these two

Millennials – and perhaps Millennials at large – work has begun to function as a god term.

Instead of positioning family, marriage, or children as their cornerstones of their lives, Ashley

and Amy both focused specifically on their employment and how they figure their identities on

social media through work. I find this phenomena especially interesting, particularly because

Ashley is, among other things, a fiancé. Amy’s position as a bisexual in many ways already casts

her as a queer figure which destabilizes American futurity narratives – a sinthome, according to

Edelman – but Ashley’s emphasis on work above all other markers is truly curious. Perhaps, as I

argue, Millennials have begun using work as god term in an effort aimed at displacing futurity

narratives which survive only if Millennials agree to the social imperatives of family, marriage,

and children. These futurity narrative are especially significant for Ashley and Amy, both of

whom are women of prime reproductive age whose role in American futurity narratives is to act

as the vessel for the Child. I suggest here that Ashley and Amy, perhaps unknowingly, utilize

work as an identity on social media in part to destabilize normative social expectations for

women. We must thus ask ourselves: what happens if Millennial women refuse to aid in figuring

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the child? What happens if work, as a god term, takes the place of family, marriage, and

children?

Conclusion

Through the course of interviewing Amy and Ashley and studying their social media

activity, I found myself at one central conclusion: Millennials, through a complex interplay of

association with the god term work and disassociation from the identity Millennial, occupy an

increasingly radical space in American culture. Perhaps, from this, scholars can begin to examine

Millennials not only as a generation marked by selfies and hashtags, but as a group of people

who seek to reconsider their own role in a world which insists upon utilizing them to reproduce

narrow, heteronormative futurity narratives. As this research suggest, it is incumbent upon

academics to think about Millennials in terms more expansive than emerging adults; instead,

Millennials must be a part of a conversation which affords them an identity in which they had a

hand in creating. In order to undertake this task in any meaningful way, scholars and non-

scholars alike must be willing to dispense with hand-wringing and actually begin to examine

their own roles in graphing the Millennial identity onto Millennials.

Additionally, academia must also begin to reckon with the ways in which social media

and audience act in conjunction to shape Millennial identities. We must ask ourselves what the

implications of this type of association are. Does any particular group benefit from Millennial

identity construction by way of social media? Are certain groups excluded from this process?

Does this process impact different genders, races, and socioeconomic class differently? These

questions are all vital as we move forward and begin to examine Millennial culture not only as a

popular phenomenon but also a legitimate source of insight into American society. Perhaps most

Turner 31

importantly, though, we must also ask ourselves how we, as scholars, can encourage Millennials

to utilize this knowledge in rhetorically effective ways.

Appendix: Interview Questions

1. How would you describe yourself to others?

Probe: Would you consider yourself a Millennial?

Why? Tell me more.

Tell me more about that resistance/acceptance.

2. Describe a typical day in your social media life.

Probe: When? Why that order?

Tell me more.

3. Which social media account (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter) do you find yourself using the

most often? Please explain why.

Probe: How do you use each platform?

Who do you interact with most often on these social media platforms?

4. What function do you use these social media platforms to do?

Probe: Do you think you feel more comfortable using one of these social media platforms over

the others?

5. Tell me the story behind that interesting item you have.

Probe: What made you choose this item?

Describe how this item represents you.

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