Salon.com: The first time Samantha R. went to Burning Man, it was on a whim. She hadn’t read much about it and had no idea what to expect. She received a free ticket from someone she met at a Grateful Dead event and had little time to prepare. She didn’t bring goggles or even a big coat to survive the cold, dusty nights. Despite the spontaneity and haphazardness of it all, which contributed to a rough burn, the 22-year-old returned on two more occasions — including this year.
3 comments:
This is really interesting to me from an entertainment perspective. I resonate with what some of the gen Z interviewees were saying about aligning with the ideas of burning man but not its execution. It makes me wonder how many other entertainment ventures are being ignored due to a mismatch in execution. Opera, for example, may be enjoyed by young people but in its current execution is prohibitively expensive and marketed primarily to older people. In a different execution it has the potential to draw in younger crowds. It also begs the question of what will happen to these festivals that are currently going through an aging in their target demographic, when they run out of people? Eventually the current attendees will be too old to attend and if they do not recenter onto younger crowds they will be left with no people. I think many aspects of entertainment can learn from this, that we need to recenter our ideas to align with the youth.
My opinion of Burning man is summed up pretty perfectly by the comment made by the 24 year old Canadian at the end of the article, and that is I would not go to Burning man even if it was free. I personally do not love being in overly hot environments, so the setting for burning man is just a place I would not want to go to for an expended period of time. My limit at burning man would probably only be a few hours, and that just would not be worth it for the price of admission. On top of that every time I see an article about burning man it is never positive, and it is only filled with more things that have gone wrong at the event. I am a little surprised to read though that the age range of 20-29 is less than ten percent of attendees, but I would not want to go so it appears that I am not an outlier for my age range at this event.
Nothing good lasts forever, and I think that social media has really only sped up the downfall of Burning Man. It is super true that most of what I hear and see about Burning Man is influencers going for clicks and stuff. I think that the other piece of it that I didn’t see any of the Gen Z interviewees mention is that Burning Man isn’t really exciting and interesting to go to because it’s not new and exciting to our generation. It’s not really a cultural revolution if it’s just been a thing that’s been happening once a year for twice the length of our entire lives. The demographic that is most of Burning Man came into it when it was a newer and more interesting thing. I’ve spent a lot of time camping at Black Rock Desert, and it does kind of suck. During the day, it’s too hot to do anything besides sit still in the shade and try to stay hydrated, and during the night, it’s cold. And from around 8:00 AM to 2:00 AM, it is incredibly windy, and everything tries to blow away. Existing in that environment to participate in a cultural revolution that isn’t really new or revolutionary doesn’t sound super appealing.
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