I’m a millennial?

[Eric the Green]

(08-03-2020, 08:20 PM)RadianMay Wrote:

(08-03-2020, 05:14 PM)David Horn Wrote: Generation means different things to different people, and the marker police have really been out in force since technology kicked-in in earnest.  In a way, I understand this, because the entire concept of "shared social experience" seems to have a decreasing shelf life as time passes.  How we all interact is constantly in flux -- especially now that the social environment is often dictated by what aps we use and how we use them.  OK, but does that really create generational boundaries or merely a series of social boundaries separate from the less frenetic economic, political and familial boundaries that constitute life?

If that is the case, wouldn’t that discredit the whole generational theory?
Another possibility is that generational differences only really crystallise after the crisis event, because that is the primary thing that causes people of different ages to experience differently and shape (or traumatise) them for life.

Actually it’s hard to qualify what actually causes people to think that they’re part of a generation, such as the separation between Millennials and Zoomers. Thinking about it more, the differences that come to mind to me between the two generations are due to age alone, not necessarily due to differing generational environments and upbringing.

It’s quite clear that if we use the classical birth years of millennials and “zoomers”, the tail end of the millennial generation (which I am part of) is still in late childhood, while the rest of the millennial are in varying ages of early adulthood, all the way up to mid life. Perhaps it’s hard to tell what the younger millennials will be like later, and we might be more similar to older millennials later.

The Gen Z designation that has been widely adopted comes from Pew Research, and indeed it is just a convenient dating tool based only on an age group that they chose. Meanwhile, Millennials, including their late cohorts grouped by Pew as Gen Z or Zoomers, are behaving like civics, just as the authors predicted, and social media involvement is the best example of that networking tendency of civics. And so is their more-liberal outlook on the need for collective institutional power, a necessary corrective to the neo-liberal Reaganomics they grew up in. Their networks may have a lot of diversity and separation from each other, but the fact that they are all so fully attached to social networks is the main trend, and a lot of the social networks overlap. Things on these networks can migrate to other platforms easily.

Not that very much of it gets here. This forum uses tech that is cumbersome (and not well suited to smart phones) and thus is probably more well-adapted to older generations. But that probably makes it somewhat better for actual communication, maybe. Even if not highly populated by millennials.