Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Keep it messy: “Gen” criteria

I’m a Gen Y-er, coming of age in a professional marketing world coming of age in a Web 2.0 world.  I’m also a Gen Y-er who came of age in a Web 2.0 world; more or less, it’s a first language.

In recent years, the “Gen” terms have become buzz words; to many minds, it’s more necessary than ever, given the rise and possibilities of Web 2.0, to segment by (age) demographics.  However, if you conduct an internet search to determine which category you belong to based on your age, you’ll find a lot of conflicting answers.  According to Wikipedia, if you were born between the years 1982 and 1995, you can be considered both (either?) a product of Generation Y and a “Millenial”– which, also according to Wikipedia, may, or may not, be synonymous terms.  This ambiguity is telling, and probably necessary.

Conceptually, an attempt to map “Gen” definitions based on age (and outlooks) would form a ridiculous, tangled mass of Venn Diagrams.  What they’re meant to get at are large shifts in cultural psychology, as experienced by cohorts within a loosely defined age range– which is certainly a step up from tightly defined age brackets.  But this step is still too conservative for certain purposes, in my humble, Gen Y opinion.

The great “Gen” divide, as told by mainstream media

Most of the mainstream media attention given to the “Gen” hype, which has arisen primarily as a result of internet culture, has focused on the great divide between Gen Y and “older generations.”  (For an interesting post on Gen X psychology and the eruption of the Internet, from a Gen X blogger, check out “The Nintendo Generation” by Michael Critz.)  For example, you can read the top 5 trends for “Managing Gen Y as they Change the Workforce,” by Reuters, written for an entirely non-Gen Y audience.  It speaks about Gen Y as if we’re not in the room and, frankly, a little bit alien, if endearing.  Well.  Of course we’re in the room; Gen X may have built the structure of the house, but they’re sharing our iPhone plans, appending our Wikipedia articles when they should be working, and coveting our Wii Fits.  And we’re reading their articles online.

I’m suggesting that the great divide between Gen Y and older generations isn’t so large, afterall.  So, there are 25 million Facebook users under the age of 25, according to the New York Times; “there was [also] an estimated 276 percent increase in Facebook users ages 35-54 during the last six months of 2008, bringing their total to almost seven million.”  The article, “Growing Up on Facebook,” written by a Gen X-er (presumably– she demurely declines to mention her age in an article about age), kicks off with a high falutin reference to Faulkner about one’s “undead past.”  She probably hasn’t read Faulkner since university, where a lot of Gen Y-ers have and are currently reading Faulkner.  (We also read Donne.)

The author’s thesis is primarily that– okay okay, now the older generations are here in these social spaces, but their experiences of social networks must be so different because they “actually have a past” which they use to (re)connect with old friends.  In juxtaposition, she extrapolates the possible developmental side effects (many positive) of growing up alongside social networking, but still manages to trivialize a youth that’s compatible with the online social climate; “a study published in 2007 in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggested that hanging onto old friends via Facebook may alleviate feelings of isolation for students whose transition to campus life had proved rocky. Evidently they took comfort in knowing that ‘Dylan is drinking Peets.’”  At best, all this author can do is concede the rapidly increasing migration of older generations to social networking platforms, and offer self-conscious speculation as to why their experiences must differ so significantly from those of Gen Y.

It’d be ludicruous to infer that different generations don’t have very different experiences of the internet and, particularly, of social networking; if you’re active online and you talk to people at all, this conclusion is impossible to avoid.  However, I’d like to shift the focus to the shared experiences of social networking by a broader online audience, because I believe there’s ubiquitious appeal to these services (and facets of communication therein) that are useful to know, and just plain worth acknowledging.

(Check back for forthcoming entry.)