A Baby, who is under twenty five, has a perfect understanding of the  globalization of the world and its economy, of the new family, sexual, and love order, of the cultures and peoples blending, as well as of the environmental and organic emergency.  He plays with new technologies, and benefits from the improved access to knowledge via the Internet. A Baby's ability to access, process, and store data and all kind of information is immense, unimaginable. Almost all the human knowledge is one click away from any teenager's room. For the first time in the history of mankind, a Baby learns how to read and write out of school and family, with the Microsoft's software Word that influenced his peer's way of learning and processing information. A Baby communicates in writing through new media: social networking website, text messages, chats.

    He invented a new language where familiar forms of adress are the rule, they also invented new words, new characters. He downloads, illegally and for free most of the time, movies, music, images. He doesn't share the same sense of ownership with the previous generation. The latter thought that copying is theft, whereas for the new generation, copying is pasting :-). A Baby's room is a real showroom dedicated to new technologies: MP3 readers, computers, touchpads, multifunctions printers, DVD readers, digital cameras, webcams, playstations, wired TV...

    The use of landline phones is progressively disappearing from homes, in favor of mobile phones, which will also be used as a mean of remote payment and identification.

The Baby is part of the very first generation that was born with a virtual thread attached to them. His access to the new world represents a irreducible annual budget of 60 euros that did not exist just ten years ago.

A Baby's favorite websites are all around “You / Me” : YouTube, YouPorn, Facebook, Meetic, etc. You will always find Me, Me, Me, in these domain names. A Baby celebrates, and stages himself on these websites, and often appears alone on photos and videos that were captured with his arm outstretched, on his mobile phone or digital camera. The apparent narcissism of the Baby, his fascination for celebrities and their social success partially explain the frenzy about these websites. Brands that want to attract them adopt the same formats for their websites than those you find on the social networking websites: an abundance of regularly updated visual content and short videos (1 to 3 minutes) AND humour :-).

Today would rather see a celeb occupying  the “unknown soldier grave", a famous Parisian monument.

    Son of a VIP/ The gap between two generations has never looked so wide. The split has never been so visible, and yet ascent and passing on the next generations have never been so crucial. Whether in the world of cinema, music, litterature, fashion, politics, industry?? A Baby is rich and above all, he is rich famous from father to son. The new generation of  daughters and sons celebrities, famous or not, that got rid of way too branded and of the bling-bling speech of their parents, benefit from their names and their networks. They know about the dangers of overmediatization and move around with covered faces.

/ Slash Génération. Slash (n .m) : comes from the verb to slash. A punctuation sign meaning and/or. Used to refer to a multiplicity of meanings and references. More broadly, a slash refers to a multi-faceted action.

It is the lifestyle of the new generation that is not able to/doesn't want to follow only one path, live only one life. The economists brand the crises as /, //, V, W. The life lived by the young generation a child of the financial crisis, embodies these, its breakings-off, its multiplicities.

    Being a slasher is a lifestyle, a means of economic survival, an artistic expression. A multi-faceted life / exercising various professions over the course of one life, of one day, converting to two or three religions, joining rival political camps, knowing many loves.

    Among fashionistas, the blogger Garance Doré and her companion Scott Schuman better known as The Sartorialist, now based in New York, have been for the past four years the most important couple of the blogosphere. Bloggers' opinions sometimes have more influence than those of many experienced journalists belonging to landmark newspapers and who wouldn't be present on the Internet on a personal basis. Buyers of big American shops and journalists rush in order to confirm their selections  from big houses such as the discovering of a Babybrand. They paved the way to French bloggers, such as Kenza Sadoun-El-Glaoui, the most talented one of her generation, who by a singe tweet can make the sales of a fashion accessory, a bike, or a new mobile phone take off, and fill or empty hype restaurants.

    Luxury as a model / fashion and its mecanisms play a decisive role in the Babies education, and their integration in the society. Super-informed, super-connected, the under 15 have their own star blogger (Tavi Gevinson, 15 years), star fashionista, Suri Cruise, 8, ranked 21st most stylish women in the world by Glamour UK. Teenagers are about becoming the new fashion gurus. They match their H&M/Zara outfit with loads of thrift and customization. Including of their BlackBerry. They end up sharing their cupboard with their moms who approve their outfits. The 12/18 years are the new trendsetters. The influence they have on their parents keeps increasing. During electoral periods, polling institutes don't forget about them and ask them about their voting intentions. They are revolutionizing the rules and imposing their own vision of the world to their parents. They are worried, and fantasy fans, “zombie apocalypse” is the third most searched word on Google. A sign of the times, with the emergence of Asia, the Baby generation loves K-pop, the South Korean singer “Psy” is buzzing on the Internet with more than two hundred million views on Youtube.

    If you want to know what will the mother look like, just take a look at her daughter.

    For ever young /  Following MP3 and smartphones, our grandparents camera has come roaring back, full of state of the art technology and necessarily carried over the shoulder.

Directly connected to the Internet, it embodies the new youth who is connected to networking websites. It's the final touch of fashionista's outfit who are looking for eternal youth. All these prostheses, rapidly overtaken by more efficient technologies, become as obsolete as quickly as a it bag or a pair of shoes do. Ownership and mastering of these new technological desire devices have become an external sign of youth and competitivity.

Next chapter

 

Parents could by worried, but they're rather amused. :-)