However, these labels are always going to persist because they make certain things easier to communicate.
Should these things be so easy to communicate, though? AISIMHBMT, in the 2000's before the term Millennials was coined and after terms like Xer died down, there was some discourse about young people, but it was muted partly because it was hard to condense into a single topic / brainvirus. And perhaps that difficulty is appropriate to the actual complexity, and if institutions don't give the brainviruses oxygen, the discourse will be crimped, but in a good way. People would have more trouble talking about "Kids these days" without sounding like Abe Simpson; they'd have to define their terms in some more objective way, and often they couldn't.
I thought it was because the group in between GenX and Millenials (ie, me) has always been nondescript and ignore-able.
I think both the post and Heebie's response are right: they're pseudo-science and have no place in serious research, but humans love psuedo-science and this is certainly more meaningful than Zodiac sign or Myers-Briggs.
Where exactly is the "everyone younger than this hates Republicans" line fall? It's slightly older than the Gen X/Millennial line, I think? That might be a meaningful boundary the same way that Boomers are scientifically meaningful.
Cohorts are fine! Just base the cohort on something real and don't call it a generation.
I think that line is my age (now 49). I remember being told in 2016 that I was at the age where Dems switched from Clinton to Sanders.
I'm not gonna wade deep into defining generations, but I do think that people who came of age with internet in the house are different from the people before them, and people who come of age with phones are different yet again.
Looks like it's not quite a jump. Born after 1980 hates Republicans without much change by age within, born before 1970 likes them again without change by age, and there's a continuous change between 1970-1980 birthyears. https://news.gallup.com/poll/172439/party-identification-varies-widely-across-age-spectrum.aspx
And don't give them misleading names! The broad shared-experience cohort of which I am a part includes people born up to about 1960. They picked a label that people not paying attention think includes people born in 1964. Yes, I will die on this hill.
It's also hugely misleading to speak of shared-experience cohorts as all believing the same thing. If people in an age cohort are 60/40 Republican, or 65/35 Democratic, all you're doing by looking at that and saying 'everyone X old votes Y' is refudiating -- as that famous GenX icon put it -- yourself.
10: Good point, it's like the red state/blue state fallacy.
8- I've seen a "mini-generation" (ahem, BIRTH DATE COHORT) between Gen X and Millenial based on Gen X = no internet until adulthood, mini-group = internet during middle/high school, Gen Z = internet from childhood, and I think that for certain aspects of life this is a meaningful distinction.
But does Juno count as "internet"?
In middle school we had local BBSes or MUGs that we dialed into which I don't think counted as internet but certainly accustomed you to interacting with faceless online people. Then compuserve, aol, then open internet via browsers. In that era the school gave the kids who were allowed to play with early internet stuff the login credentials of the district computer coordinator, although I failed to do anything terribly interesting with this access.
I don't know what generation my kid is but yesterday he bricked his computer by stopping a Win update at a bad time. I bought him a usb stick and he made his own boot device, repaired the install, and recovered the data without any additional guidance from me. Maybe next I'll ask him to program the clock on my VCR.
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Just had a bear climbing up on to our back porch. Yearling. I suppose that's what the dog was barking about a 1:45 am.
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Yesterday I walked past a porcupine on the street.
12: "No internet until adulthood" vs. "middle/h.s." has a class element, though, right? My family didn't have AOL or anything like that until after I started college, and I think I had to convince my mom to use her adjunct faculty account to dial into the university modem pool in the summer of 1997. (And buy a modem, I suppose.)
The fact that I couldn't waste time on the internet before college is a gift I will treasure forever, although I suppose I responded to campus broadband the way other people responded to abundant free alcohol.
We all responded to access to the internet the way that other people responded to abundant free alcohol.
I don't think it was interacting with internet people that changed The Kids. I think it was the near-instant gratification from entertaining content. I really think it re-wired them.
20: just to play devil's advocate, the 18-22 year olds in my classes don't seem particularly re-wired.
I agree with the OP. As for the concept of an "Internet generation" specifically or whatever they're calling it, it's more rigorous than most discussions of generations, but not by much.
I still need a dismissive way to refer to young people and old people.
Honestly, they both cause me so very many problems.
I feel like a decade-plus of highly online living has rewired me, fwiw. But perhaps hard to disentangle those effects from the rest of the differences between one's late thirties and early fifties.
I won't find out what it is like to be in my fifties for a long time. Several weeks.
Do other countries do this with their generations? I don't have my finger on the pulse of Iranian discourse, but I don't remember hearing it. I thought it was an artifact of the huge post-war baby boom, which kinda needed a name, and then naming generations persisted a little out of habit, and a lot out of writers needing hooks for their pieces. In summary, I blame war, capitalism, sex, and America.
To answer my own question, it looks like generation names typically attach to massive social changes, so let's stick to that.
I'm guessing Germany has a different name for the Greatest Generation.
33: That's the way it used to be. Now there's a whole profession devoted to speculating about what the name of the next generation will be. Will there be a COVID generation? What will their core values be? Most importantly, what will they buy, and how can we sell it to them?
I saw an article that said that GenZ is a placeholder until they develop trends as adults. Does that mean they expect that GenZ will become something else (the Covid generation?) and Z will always refer to the current crop of kids until they get their grown up generation name?
Generation We'd Like to Talk to You About Your Car's Extended Warranty.
19- I meant age when the internet came into being, not when individual people had home access to it. (I'm not sure whether or not I drastically changed Megan's point...) For sure individual experience with technology has many more factors than just birth year and access is still not anything like equal or ubiquitous.
As a Baby Boomer I resent the way people talk about us, but it's not like they're wrong.
True, but white men invented the aerosol room deodorizer.
I thought it was an artifact of the huge post-war baby boom, which kinda needed a name, and then naming generations persisted a little out of habit, and a lot out of writers needing hooks for their pieces. In summary, I blame war, capitalism, sex, and America.
I think this is right. The trigger for our current cycle of generations was the huge decrease in fertility due to WWII and the subsequent bulge of elevated fertility in the postwar years. The subsequent generations are reverberations of that oscillation, with the magnitude decreasing and spreading out over time as we slowly transition back to a more typical pattern of more constant fertility. So each new "generation" becomes more arbitrary until they all blur together, which may be happening now.
I don't know. Somebody said that I should know to follow "Peaches come from a can" with "They were put there by a man." I don't know what the fuck that's about because I'm old.
You're like twenty-two still, in my head.
I admit that I am enjoying being in the know about Millennial cultural references that baffle the Gen-Xers after many years of the roles being the other way around during the Early Unfogged era.
If there's one thing we're good at, it's repeating a reference over decades.
"Yeet" is such a great word that I have hope for these kids in the future.
I made up my own joke with that! What do you call a Yankee who's always making throwing errors? Derek Yeeter. My kids were not impressed.
32, 44: I propose that in the US at least, generations prior to the Baby Boomers were named after the baby boom had begun primarily to differentiate prior generations from the Baby Boomers.
Google ngrams seems reasonably supportive of this view, with "Silent Generation" recognized in books for the first time in a surprisingly early 1950, only a few years after the "baby boom" concept itself got started. "Greatest Generation" was actually slightly a thing during WWII, but basically disappeared until the '90s.
In short: The entire US culture has revolved around Baby Boomers since we were born.
33: "Lost generation" wasn't at all used in the same way that other generation names are used. It was used to describe the impact of World War I on people. Wikipedia, in trying to shoehorn it in with the other generation terms, describes a generation whose births spanned seven years.
Wikipedia does get the Baby Boom basically right. It's from 1946 to 1964. I don't know what Charley is on about in 10. (Though I do tend to think of it as having ended in 1963, the year my little brother was born.)
Millennial cultural references that baffle the Gen-Xers
Peaches is a Gen X song!* It came out in 1996,** when the youngest millennials were zero years old!
*I don't know why I'm getting protective about Peaches. That song is awful.
**Holy cow, that's 25 years ago. Fuck I'm old.
Stop acting like the fucking name means something. It's about Ike, JFK, and the moonshot. A cultural phenomenon, not demographic.But, yes, i
It's basically astrology for social scientists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
something something Generation Awesome something
57 In this country there was very definitely a wartime generation: anyone in their 20s in 1940 would be marked for life by a collective experience unshared by any subsequent or previous cohorts. [There was no civilian bombing in the first world war].
I'd have said that for people born in the Fifties, roughly, the defining experiences were the discovery of drugs and consequence-free sex for -- in theory -- everyone; and ubiquitous rock music.
Then the next big change of attitudes was as Megan said, the experience, and expectation, of ubiquitous effortless access to entertainment.
Somewhere as a result we really did move into a post-Gutenberg era, in which otherwise normal people appear to find it less effort to listen or watch a talk in real time than to read the text of it.
Divorced parents seems to be the big Gen X experiential marker. (That, btw, is one of the many reasons Obama is the Gen X president: absent father, mom who followed her bliss, questionable step-father, blew off lucrative post-college opportunities, went to the beach to write his memoir before age 35. The man is so Gen X it isn't even funny. And if he's the only president we get, boo-yah, I'm good.)
As for the so-called Greatest Generation, it's GI Generation tyvm. The whole "greatest" nonsense only started happening when the Boomers finally realized their parents were dying and it was time to reconcile. Or were already dead and they could pretend to have admired them all along. Which they most assuredly did not.
Born in 1961, I am too young to share many boomer experiences and too old to be X. I am also born on a cusp, so I cannot believe in astrology.
Am I correct that Douglas Coupland invented "Generation X". I have not reread that novel in at least a decade.
60.last: I think Tom Brokaw was the one who really cemented the "Greatest."
On the other hand, as soon as they died, the voting patterns of the older people got worse.
The Germans have the so-called "Flakhelfergeneration" - people who were just old enough to be made to be anti-aircraft assistant gunners at the tail of WW2 but were too young to be meaningfully responsible for Nazism, like Helmut Kohl. I was looking for a very good essay about this with regard to the differences between Kohl and Merkel but I can't now find it; I remember when web search worked.
I think the concept of 'Boomers ' extending to people born in the early 60s is unhelpful unless you're really looking at reproductive rates. I would stop the cultural generation in about 1955- old enough to have believed that MLK's Nobel really meant that the times were a-changing, to have been terrified by the Tonkin Gulf incident and to have thought that Khrushchev was a fixture. Culturally, to remember when the Beatles played straight up rock, the Stones tried to play the blues and Jefferson Airplane were unknown outside northern California.
I have no idea what the parameters of the next cultural cohort are in detail, but it's older than it's conventionally thought.
My ex is in that group -- technically the last Boomer by birthrates, but I'd agree that people his age aren't culturally Boomers. I think of them as pretty continuous with older Xers, except sort of systematically less beleaguered: everything was a little easier for that generation.
61: Yes on Coupland, a friend of a friend of a friend.
62: Yes on Brokaw, with a book of that name published in 1998.
it's GI Generation tyvm
Gastrointestinal?
59: "I'd have said that for people born in the Fifties, roughly, the defining experiences were the discovery of drugs and consequence-free sex for -- in theory -- everyone." Not everyone.
65: I know someone who is 80 and thinks of herself as a Boomer, but I had to explain to her that technically, she was a member of the Silent Generation, as was my Dad who was born in 1944. My mom is a Boomer.
My Dad said that when he showed up at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York (Hobart) in 1962 young men wore blazers, and it looked like the opening scenes in Animal House. By the spring of 1966 things had changed. I do think 45/46 birth year is actually a meaningful cut off in terms of cultural experience.
Yeah, my parents are Silents and they were a little older when they had kids, so my friends' parents are the oldest Boomers, and it was a very clear difference. Mine were always politically left, but found hippies super annoying.
My dad was a good deal older than any of the other parents I was around. For example, he still wore hats.
He would also say "dungarees" instead of "jeans".
Called dungarees because you could poop in them and it wouldn't show.
And the name changed after the war when poop stopped being blue.
Except after eating cake with very heavily colored frosting.
76: That's always a bit surprising.
Batman-theme birthday parties are like that.
Little known fact: blue denim originally referred to the dye rather than the fabric. Tailors in Nîmes proverbially overindulged in cakes with lurid icing. Hence "Bleu de Nîmes".or something like that.
Oh man, 76-78 is such a universally true thing.
Unfogged's Greatest Generation (the UGGs) wouldn't pass up low-hanging fruit like "bulge of elevated fertility".
69 Larkin was born in 1922. In those days when you called your parents Nazis it meant something.
Before Twitter and Facebook, it was hard for you friends to know if you didn't feel them.
Friends that let you feel them are the best friends of all.
OT: I like how when Dabney Coleman tries to poison his wife on Columbo, he helpfully labels the vial as Chloral Hydrate in large type.