From Post & Riposte: "'Circumstance' is indeed a better word (than 'galvanizing event') to describe the influence of the digital culture. It's an environment rather than an occurrence.... The notion of a galvanizing event *for an entire generation* is largely a product of media and self-regard. Other generations have had galvanizing events; my parents were children during the Depression and WWII and it's obvious that the experience affected them strongly. But they would not call it a 'galvanizing experience' without external prompting. The experience of war is often looked back upon as galvanizing, but usually by those who participated. I am repeatedly astonished by the tendency of Boomers to claim Vietnam as a watershed in their lives -- even those who were in no danger of going. I can only attribute this to the mythic self-conception of the boomer generation, strengthened for the first time in history by the immediate and powerful images on television. I don't think we Xers have had a galvanizing event, partly because we aren't focused enough on the narrative of our own lives to claim one. As an example, I find this whole debate over the collective identity of my generation not very interesting. I think I'll read the news on the earthquake in Turkey and go study pattern classifiers." --Andrew Klingler, "Round Two of 'My So-Called Generation'" (08/24) What do you think? Join the conversation.

But then the tune changes: In response to my critique, Halstead goes on to say that he never intended to argue that Xers actually favor a composite position like balanced-budget populism. Rather this synthesis was simply his own proposal for an agenda that "could eventually galvanize Xers."

That's not the way I remembered Halstead explaining it in his article, so I checked again. And (for once) my memory served me right: after positing that "many Xers ... support ... balanced budgets" and that "the majority believe that the state should do more to help Americans get ahead," Halstead draws the unsubstantiated conclusion that Xers are "calling for a new economic synthesis" between left and right. (He even describes this as the "Generation X economic agenda.") That sounds a lot more descriptive than normative. And the description isn't supported by fact.

I wouldn't usually make a big stink about what could well be a small mistake made in good faith. But in this case I think it's warranted because the error points to the problem with Halstead's Gen X project itself. As I said before, trying to understand politics along generational lines may cause us, even unintentionally, to make tenuous and forced claims. A good example appears to be Halstead's claim that Xers are uniquely supportive of a left-right economic synthesis.

Meanwhile, I'm beginning to think that generational analysis may only make sense when there is a truly horrible event, like a war or a depression, which shapes the experience of an age group. This is true of almost every "generation" we've mentioned during this roundtable: the generation that dealt with slavery and the Civil War, the Lost Generation of World War I, the generation that struggled through the Great Depression, the generation that fought World War II, and the Vietnam generation.

These cohorts are not "generations" in the strict demographic sense of some fixed number of years passing between them. Rather they are generations defined by relatively random periods of extreme hardship. In this sense, the defining experience of the folks we call Boomers was probably less the prosperity of the 1950s than the social and political turmoil of the Vietnam War (and perhaps the civil-rights struggle).

In the last round I argued that new technology such as the Internet will likely define our generation, and I still believe history will judge this to be true. But I doubt that technological change will galvanize our generation politically unless something related to that change really goes awry, whether it's the unethical use of biotechnology, the depleting effect of e-commerce on local economies, the rise of demagogic Internet-based direct democracy, or some form of biowarfare or cyberterrorism. Only in the event of such an occurrence -- or some other catastrophe -- will our generation be shaken, challenged, and forced to coalesce in a meaningful way.

Scott Stossel perceptively asks whether generations only congeal politically "when things go bad." If so, let's hope that our generation remains relatively indistinguishable from those who are older and younger. Then we can return to the task of defining a politics for everyone, rather than just a politics for the elusive Generation X.

Next page: Scott Stossel

Andrew Shapiro is the author most recently of The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know. A contributing editor at The Nation, he has written for diverse publications including The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Yale Law Journal, Wired, and Spin.