Above all else, Twentynothing is a experiment. There has been a lot excitement recently about interactivity, and interactive media. Unfortunately, all this excitement has preceded anything that is really worth getting excited about.
Almost all of what is billed as ``electronic publishing'' fits into one of two categories: the utilitarian and the effete. Any number of companies provide compendiums of market research, medical research, legal research, newspaper articles or financial information by means of on-line service or CD-ROM. While all these databases are crucial to the way our economy now functions, I think fall they just a little bit short of the creative potential of electronic media.
At the other the extreme is the multimedia production, combining text, graphics, sound, animation and video into a single creative work. These productions too often place a greater value on flash than content, but their major flaw is far simpler. Very few people have access to computers powerful enough to play them.
So what is Twentynothing? It's an experiment in collecting originally written articles on subjects of general interest into an electronic magazine that can be read on a large number of computers.
Something else: As might be inferred from the magazine's title, all the people who have participated in the creation of the first issue of Twentynothing are younger than 25.
I believe that our age cohort -- the twentysomethings, or perhaps the twentynothings -- will have some interesting things to say. The world which we were born into was essentially a static one. There were two superpowers, two political parties and three television networks. The Fortune 500 companies held the real economic power, and if you went to college you would never be unemployed for very long.
Then, in the space between 1982 and 1992, all these assumptions became not only wrong, but also absurd. Everything we had believed, no longer was. As a recent graduate in International Relations said, ``I've just spent three years studying throw weights [of nuclear missiles]. Who cares about throw weights anymore?''
Ultimately, the organizations that bestrode the world in 1970 -- the Soviet Union, the Pentagon and General Motors -- all worshiped the same god: Frederick Taylor. Scientific Management, which came to be the Taylorite religion, said that sharp managers -- or planners, take your pick -- could crunch the numbers and sub-divide any process into discrete tasks which a simpleton could perform. As they said in the army, things should be ``designed by geniuses to be used by idiots.''
All those institutions -- with their managers and their planners -- don't work anymore. Hence, the world our generation expected to inherit, it will not inherit. In its place, we will have a world without the Cold War, General Motors and other certainties of the twentieth century.
I guess this is the condition I would use to describe our generation. We are coming of age just as all the structures of the twentieth century -- both benevolent and malign -- are falling apart. In one sense, this is liberating, in another terrifying.
Our era will be a dynamic one of uncertainty and shifting boundaries. Our generation will be offered significant opportunity surrounded by extreme confusion. We'd like to write about it.
An electronic magazine -- aside from being rather cheap to produce -- offers, I think, the appropriate format for a generation that was the first to grow up with and be enchanted by computers.
In this inaugural issue, Natasha Fried examines the job angst of our era in ``Notes On The Busted Generation,'' Curtis Yarvin explodes a few myths about benevolent government regulation in ``The Great Open Space Con Job,'' and Lorin Wertheimer tries to fathom romance in the post-modern age in ``Romance Isn't Dead, Just Silly.''
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Sincerely, James Kaplan Editor & Publisher