(02-22-2019, 04:23 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: The current pop cultural definition seem to be:
Xennial 1978-1985
Millennial 1986-94
Gen Z 1995-2009
Gen Alpha 2010+
They base it on things like type of cartoons and toys one experienced in childhood. 1995 was chosen as the beginning of gen Z because Internet Explorer was launched back then.
Chuck Haidt and others have noted a new kind of undergraduate appearing on college campuses around 2014, and suggests 1995 as a breakpoint. The millennial/GenZ divide has been linked by some to social media and smart phone adoption.
There is a difference between cultural/psychological generations, such as those Pew gives: Millennial 1981-1996, GenZ 1997- and historical/political generations such as those S&H talk about. The former evolve in response to the social milieu in which children grow up. The latter is based on the historical events going on when a group of cohorts come of age.
The cohorts born in the early 1980's are different from those born in the 1970's because the political and economic world into which they came of age was different. Contrast the tech go-go years of the late 1990's through early 2001, which the immediate aftermath of 911. The market fell after 911, and a crash was avoided by the president taking the unusual move of closing the stock market. As it turned out the recession was mild, although the Fed was talking about trying to avoid depression in 2002. Six years later we had a financial panic, something virtually no living American had ever seen during their adult lifetimes.
Over this same time American began to transform into a police state and in 2016 it elected an apparent caudillo. This transformation of the political and economic environment since 2001 has produced a different political/historical generation that contains members of both the millennial and GenZ cultural generations. This historical generation is the type the S&H model in concerned with.