Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

my parents don't know anything about any cultures! I am pretty sure my dad literally flipped between stations until he found one he found pleasing.

my dad definitely is way into his iPhone, my mom kind of begrudgingly has one now and loves to text me emoji. it might be easier than the full sentences she prefers due to the rheumatoid arthritis.

my parents don't even know that my brother is a hipster. they think his slovenly outfits are a function of his thrift/stupidity

my son is a hipster: the treeship's brother story

Varg on boomers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu2nIZyiH48

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/04/two-types-of-millennials.html?mid=facebook_nymag

As it turns out, there are good reasons for this. Old Millennials, as I’ll call them, who were born around 1988 or earlier (meaning they’re 29 and older today), really have lived substantively different lives than Young Millennials, who were born around 1989 or later

the Census Bureau’s definition (born 1982–2000) or Pew’s (about 1981–1997)

iirc marketing companies have just used "up to 35 years old" or somesuch for the last few years, without changing the number. So you can age out of being a millenial! :)

why does the census bureau use a made-up bullshit marketing category

I'd trust them more, considering they have some ability to track birth rates, demographics, income, etc.
so any group they've thrown together at least creates a demographic out of statistical commonalities

if they do that, yes; but then there's still the name and all its baggage

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

every generational label is covered in baggage

especially the Baggage Generation (1856-1877) !

i was literally having this distinction between old and young millennial conversation with my wife this weekend.

There's a real divide between the kids who grew up with a computer in their house and the kids who grew up with a smartphone in their pockets.

i think not being a true digital native; remembering having to phone friends on the landline of their home, or go round to their house and knock their door to see that they're in; remembering not having the internet; remembering making plans to meet people and then either you or them not being there because there was some complication and you had no way of contacting each other; and fairly crucially not having a social media account of any type until you were in your 20s, and scant evidence of your teenage years existing online is a very significant difference.

xp. yeah, not having a smartphone until your late 20s vs having a smart phone when you were 12 is also v significant

none of us are true digital natives, we're still a few years off from having neural implants

instead of jacking in, we're stuck with jacking off

I guess the equivalent for Gen X'ers is Old Gen X wouldn't have grown up with (or at least not until their teens) digital watches/VCRs/home computers whereas Young Gen X (i.e. me) would have at least known people who had them or seen them at school at a young age. E.g. I was 5 when the ZX81 came out vs 15 for someone born in 1966.

people in my peer group (born '81) and a little younger are fascinated with drawing these lines to differentiate their 80s/early 90s childhoods from the late 90s/early 00s childhoods of other people they know/observe. i'm not immune to it but it's the kind of observation about which everything that could be said got said five years ago and there don't need to be any more articles about it imho.

but the internal gen-x divides fascinate me! thinking about my own extended family, where my boomer mother's sibling cohort had kids over just a huge range of time. so my reference points for "gen xers" range from people who are now like 57 to people who are now 37, unless i count too. their childhoods were probably very similar in tons of ways (esp. the existence of the media monoculture, and a certain continuity of the general socio-technical apparatus, versus the techno-centric changes people articulate with millennial groups A B and C) but it's nonetheless a damned broad span of time!

I've usually divided Millennials into "Generation Y" AKA "Millennials old enough to remember when they weren't being called Millennials" (1981-1989) and "Generation Pokemon" (1990-whenever the cutoff date actually is).

people in my peer group (born '81)

my man

yo

Sup

The ryanair generation, our generational baggage is covered in labels

cutoff btwn young/old millennials is whether or not you remember 9/11 imo

people in my peer group (born '81) and a little younger are fascinated with drawing these lines to differentiate their 80s/early 90s childhoods from the late 90s/early 00s childhoods of other people they know/observe. i'm not immune to it but it's the kind of observation about which everything that could be said got said five years ago and there don't need to be any more articles about it imho.

but the internal gen-x divides fascinate me! thinking about my own extended family, where my boomer mother's sibling cohort had kids over just a huge range of time. so my reference points for "gen xers" range from people who are now like 57 to people who are now 37, unless i count too. their childhoods were probably very similar in tons of ways (esp. the existence of the media monoculture, and a certain continuity of the general socio-technical apparatus, versus the techno-centric changes people articulate with millennial groups A B and C) but it's nonetheless a damned broad span of time!

― ✓ (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, April 26, 2017 7:32 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I do this too because I want to imbue myself with some sort of cultural significance because I was born in 79. I'm definitely not a millennial but not really a Gen Xer. Someone referred me to this article which is kinda dumb, but lays some of it out. I first started using a PC when I was 9, had a cell phone at 21 and a smart phone at like 25.

https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/04/oregon-trail-generation/

78, Apple IIc

81

Gameboy when it was new

i have played a star trek game, written in basic, on a trs-80

yeah I can't understand being in my cohort but not remembering 9/11/2001

I was at the beginning of my junior year of college and my sister's peers were starting their last year of high school, with a bunch of them joining the armed forces within the year. The dotcom crash had hit bottom right before then, and the economy seemed mildly bleak -- nothing compared to 2008, in retrospect

it's not as bad as being a 1964 baby boomer (!) and being born after JFK was shot

I was telling the kids Challenger jokes in the car yesterday.

i have had similar conversations like this with my students. im 31, and i teach mostly 17/18 year olds. for me the divide is "do u like spongebob memes" because i try explaining to them that show got big when i was kinda too old for it, whereas they grew up with it p much all their childhood.

that's what i tell my college students about harry potter

they howl in indignation

yeah, i was gonna mention that, too. ive since watched the films but never read the HP books.

My challop in this matter is that age of adoption of computer / internet / smartphone appears to me to have very little impact on people's basic nature and I don't buy this as a driver of temperamental/sociological differences between my cohort and the cohort 20 years younger, if indeed there even are material temperamental/sociological differences.

that's what i tell my college students about harry potter

that's what i tell people about pixar movies

arthur memes were the ones that made me realize that I am old now

for me it's when i'm playing an online game and everyone has amazing reflexes except for me, and then i realize they're all my children and i haven't been making any payments for several years now

I graduated high school before 9/11. I have never played with a Harry Potter nor have I read a Pokémon. I don't take pictures of my food, I eat it. To me a "snap chat" is something you do with your hands while talking. We didn't have "iPads" we had a saying: "hi dad(s)". Beards were for domestic terrorists and mall Santas. The way we "streamed" music was by pissing on CDs! The only "apps" we had were before dinner. The only things we "binged" were alcohol and drugs! The only "molly" we knew was ringwald, and we watched her movies on good old fashioned VHS tapes. You kids just don't know.

and senior things? well you just wouldn't understand! it was all co-ed naked volleyball and that was definitely normal

Pokemon is a dividing line for me - I don't remember it being a thing at all and still associate it with little kids but just a few years after it's a common part of their adolescence.

"XY Cusp" has always felt pretty accurate for me (81) as much as these generational things can be - my media consumption was all Gen X (grunge and My So Called Life) but there was only a short gap between Apple IIs running Oregon Trail and dialing in to Prodigy and then Geocities pages in junior high. My older brother was already out of high school by the time of Prodigy and out of the house by Geocities.

I think anime in general is big divider. Everyone younger than me seems to love it or at least more than a passing familiarity with it.

In my head I still call it Japanimation

I think I saw that scene (you know what I'm talking about) from Ninja Scroll and was like "no thanks" and never watched any anime again. I kinda hate cartoons anyway apart from the classic era of the Simpsons. Speaking of which, I'm old enough to remember when the Simpsons were super controversial and edgy!

i think not being a true digital native; remembering having to phone friends on the landline of their home, or go round to their house and knock their door to see that they're in; remembering not having the internet; remembering making plans to meet people and then either you or them not being there because there was some complication and you had no way of contacting each other; and fairly crucially not having a social media account of any type until you were in your 20s, and scant evidence of your teenage years existing online is a very significant difference.

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, April 26, 2017 6:55 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

- and it never did us any harm... Share If You Agree!!! ;)

my little brother wasn't alive in the 20th century & I don't think there's any significant difference between him and me & my other brother (mid-old millennials). something v desperate about ppl trying to think in these terms

My youngest brother and his cru are market different than the other three of us tbh, lol death of catholic Ireland in 1990

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