It annoys me to no end, how the media screws up their coverage of generations, a topic that fascinates me when it is approached competently. Here’s a comment I just posted on the public radio Marketplace website, which it looks like no one will read (mine is the only comment, so it appears that unlike NPR, they don’t have a commenting culture there, alas). It is in response to this story from Monday of this week, referring to Millennials as “13 to 30 year olds”:
Well, Millennials are roughly 13 to 30 year olds. Birth year of early 80s to about early 00s is the usual range. I put them at about 1982-2000-ish, but the outer boundaries are fuzzy. Gen Z would be the generation born since then, but the “born since roughly 1995” is wrong to me by about 5-10 years.
I’ve always gone with Strauss and Howe’s dates, which is what I learned back in university in sociology class. They’re one of the big guns on generational theory, so I go with that, and it also reflects how my peer group uses the words, if they use them at all. The center of Gen X would be people born around 1970, and the center of Gen Y would be around 1990. I was born in 1975, and I consider myself towards the later years of Gen X.
I’ll admit to finding it a little odd to see “Millennials” used for teenagers today. Even for college grads it still seems odd to me. When I first heard/read the term it was used specifically for those graduating high school in 2000.
I don’t know what to call all the generations. I guess sometimes we don’t know until they’re over. And other times, I’m not really sure what makes people part of the same “generation” - “Baby Boomers” seems to cover too large an expanse. Those born at the beginning at the end of it don’t seem like they’d have similar social mores or expectations in their childhood or early adult years.
Yeah, if there is an authority on what constitutes a particular generation it’s Strauss and Howe. Their generations tend to be about 20 years long. An age range of 13 to 30 for Millennials lines up pretty well with their definition, and they’re the ones who invented the name “Millennial” in the first place.
Twenty years from now the lower bound for Millennial will be much more distinct. My kids are 14 and 17 and it’s not yet clear if they really have that much in common with their cousins who are in their late 20’s/early 30’s. Over time it will be easier to identify the dividing line.
Nobody else knows, either. But that doesn’t stop the media from creating a new name every 6 or 8 years. 
And it’s really unnecessary. There really isn’t that much difference between one decade and the next.
With one major exeption: the “sixties” generation…which wasn’t even a full decade. Between 1967 and 1972, truly major cultural changes occurred-- Deep, and permanent changes.
But the rest of the lables (X,Y,Z,millenial , etc) are relatively minor. The only real difference could simply be labelled ‘pre-internet’ and ‘post-internet’ kids.
Because generations are so much an objective, really-existing things, with a scientifically well-established periodization and nomenclature. :rolleyes:
Mod Edit: One rolleyes is enough - gargantuan ASCII ones need not apply.
Hal Briston – MPSIMS Moderator
I would argue that the difference between X and the second half of Y and beyond is actually pretty huge, and the whole pre-internet/post-internet difference you mentioned is a major reason why. I’m pretty much astounded and can’t comprehend what it would have been like to grow up with the world as “small” as it is now, with much of humanity’s information at my fingertips, etc. To me, this is just mind-boggling.
The popular media hardly admits that even Gen X exists (even as an age-group, not just a social definition). Gen X people like me aren’t exactly young anymore and a few of us qualify for pensions already because we have been working in our careers for 20 years or even much longer. Still, that doesn’t matter because we only existed in the popular media for a few years in the 1990’s. The worst was an interview on an NPR show I heard a few months ago. The topic was whether the Millennials were sufficiently established enough to be sufficiently ‘in charge’ and more powerful than the Baby Boomers who will never admit that they are getting old. The conclusion from the Baby Boomer commentators like Emily Rooney were that the Millennials just aren’t old enough to take over the torch. I can almost agree with that if those were the only choices but you have a whole other generation of people in their prime years, Gen X, in that spot right already.
Me too. I got on the web early when it first started it and was a radical shift even in its primitive form and I was a legal adult by then. I can’t imagine what it is like to have everything from porn, online games, personal information, social relationships segregated by vast geographic distances, scams as well as all of the general information and disinformation at my fingertips 24 hours a day when I was growing up. That would have radically changed everything about how I grew up. Some of it would have been very good but not all of it.
Is the OP under some impression that “the media” has a central office in charge of issuing approved labels for things?
Or even, to be slightly less arch, that “the media” is a monolith with standardized terms for such loosely defined things?
I’m old enough to remember when people were saying these things about the Greatest Generation (pbut) and the era between 1929 and 1945 or 1963 or thereabouts; you know, the era that Defined The World and Changed Everything and Was Meaningful, as opposed to those eras you get these days, let me tell you, sonny…
Maybe it’s just life in a northern town, but the world didn’t freeze then and it won’t freeze in the future, at least not for a long, long time. Everything happens and nobody understands it while it’s happening and we only invent periodizations after the fact, which is one of the things historiographers sort out.
Anyway, I fully expect to eventually hear about how 1991-2001 or so was such an amazingly Meaningful and Deep and Well-Defined era, not like the eras you get these days, let me tell you, sonny…
I graduated high school in 2001, and never heard the term “millennials” back then. More recently, the term I though was new was expanded to cover me, to my consternation. I think Gen Y and millennial should be separate. Wikipedia says 1982 on Strauss-Howe(!) If you had a cellphone in 9th grade and have known the WWW your entire life, you are a millennial. Not a Hero generation.
Or maybe I just want them off my lawn.
Their whole theory of “cycles” is interesting, but I don’t think their years for various generation quite line up with their defined phases in the cycle. They say it basically goes from the post-crisis “high” where institutions are strong, and people are confident and mainly conformative (right after WWII to the early 60s) to the Awakening, where people want to break out of their molds and attack the institutions (obviously the whole counterculture era). The next phase is the Unraveling, where institutions are weak and individualism is strong, followed by the Crisis, where life is destroyed and rebuilt. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I guess these phases kind of make sense, but what counts as a cycle’s major crisis is a bit subjective. What I’d say is that the 2008 crash is the most recent crisis, and that all those who were young adults or coming of age during it would be a Crisis generation (Stauss-Howe say that a generation is shaped by whichever phase they’re in in their 20s or so). Therefore, if we call this generation the Millennials, it shouldn’t include teenagers right now. They’ll be coming of age in a (hopefully) more stable world. So therefore the Millennials should span roughly from, say, 1980-1995 or so. Everyone who’ll enter the job market during a more prosperous time falls into the next generation, no?
To be honest, though, I have issues with the whole idea of assigning personality traits to generations. It’s fun, sure, but not really accurate. Plus, it fosters animosity and competition between age ranges, which is stupid.
I personally seem to remember Generation Y being the term most in use during the first half of the 90s, but then it segued into Millennial Generation sometime in the mid-90s. Similarly, I don’t remember Generation X being used to refer to my generation until after the popularization of the Douglas Copeland novel by the same name. I seem to recall “baby busters” or simply “busters” as in “boomers” vs “busters” being a popular term before “Generation X” gained currency. Even Strauss and Howe used the term “13th Generation” and “13ers” to refer to the generation in their 1993 book 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?" So it was, too, a term that was somewhat retroactively applied.
If the board still supplied a decent rolleyes, that actually looks as if it is rolling its eyes at stupidity, rather than looking smugly pleased with it, I wouldn’t have needed to used the giant one. I admit the size was overkill, but I don’t know how to do a decent one that is smaller. :mad:
I’m a Baby Boomer. At least, now I’m a baby boomer: I wasn’t a baby boomer when I was born, because the baby boom was already over.
And I wasn’t a baby boomer when I was a young man, because the baby boomers had all the jobs, and I was unemployed.
But I’m a baby boomer now, even though I’m not well off, and don’t have a lot saved or invested (see comment about employment above), because “baby boomer” has been expanded to include everything before genX, and genX has been contracted to mean everything after approx 1960.
I personally think there are some broad generalizations that can be made about different generations, but the boundaries of generations are fuzzy and continuous, and when people place too much stock in it, almost treating it like a hard science, it gets annoying. I have one friend who really gets into the Generation X vs Boomers thing and it drives me nuts.
It also might have to do with confirmation bias. You notice all the 20-something hippies in the '60s more, sure, but come on - there were tons of young people keeping their heads down and not interested in rebelling. Just like there were plenty of people in the Greatest Generation who were cynical, uninterested in any kind of greater good, and enjoyed kicking puppies in their spare time. We pick characteristics that might be a bit dominant in a given age group, then ignore anyone who isn’t like that.
Contracted? When I first learned about Baby Boomers over thirty years ago, it was consistently described as spanning 1946-1964.
I hear ya. The problem is that we are dwarfed by those two generations (Millennials being known earlier as “echo Boomers”). They had to pay attention to us when we were the prime youth culture age. But as I say, they kept wanting to just use “GenX” as synonymous with “teens and twentysomethings” for several years, so that people born in the mid-Sixties were totally GenX when the Coupland novel came out, and in the heyday of grunge, but then were defined out of the cohort for several years in the late '90s and very early '00s before being defined back in (sort of being handed over to political scientists* rather than pop culture writers) when Millennials became au courant. Mark my words: five years from now, many commentators are still going to describe 30 as the cutoff for Millennials, meaning someone 26 now is going to be defined out (then five or ten years after that they will be readmitted).
*And this BTW is one area where generations do seem to have a lot of validity: rather than the old trope about being liberal when young and conservative when old, political scientists report that generational cohorts stay pretty consistent throughout the years as they shuffle their way through this mortal coil.