Generation X vs Generation Y vs Generation Z- DEEP THOUGHT PROVOKING QUESTIONS
DEEP THOUGHT PROVOKING QUESTIONS about Generation X vs Generation Y vs Generation Z: I personally don’t like cut-off years and labels about “generations”- it makes no sense if you think hard enough about it. Neither does the so-called “Greatest Generation” or the often used “Baby Boomers”. Most of, if not all of these labels and year ranges come from magazine articles, authors named Howe and Strauss, or Wikipedia.
Like other labels such as “Third-World Country” or “Superpowers”, they really have been accepted by social commentators, which in turn plant these labels in our heads like they mean something tangible. Yet they are all generalizations with nothing scientific about them. There is so much overlap and so many exceptions- not to mention it being so American- that it’s hard to take seriously. It seems to be totally skewed to modern times as well, like the world didn’t exist before radio or TV. Even history books show that the United States started to shape a national cultural identity in the 1950′s thanks to TV. So heaven forbid people that existed in 1833 have a “name”.
If nothing else, using terms like Baby Boomers and Generation X just create another class war, this time based on age and “shared cultural experiences”. One problem with this is the influx of immigration in the U.S.: many immigrants haven’t experienced many shared U.S. events. Perhaps they might have listened to some of the same music as I did in 1986, but there is no doubt that their home county had local stars I’ve never heard of, and events such as U.S. sporting events or U.S. disasters lose all meaning.
When I was a kid I had problems with people saying “generation” because most of my friends had different aged parents, grandparents, and most didn’t have great-grandparents like I had the honor of having. Also, my grandfather was born in 1919, and my grandmother was born in 1925; according to most year ranges, they come from separate generations- which is ridiculous.
Another problem with generations is that some “expert” changes the time-line, and does some retroactive continuity. When I was a kid, I never thought of myself as “Generation X”. I was born in 1977. Experts have it from 1961 to 1981, which is mind-boggling. Meanwhile, some define Generation Y as children born in 1982 to 2001 (the onset of DailySkew’s Earth-Zero). Again, all of this is fun, but not scientific.
So I spent so many paragraphs ripping generations to shred- does that mean they are without any value? It seems kinda crazy to define generations based on if one grew up with Pokemon vs if they grew up watching He-Man, but ultimately there is some value in this when trying to predict future trends.
In the past, with technology like radio, telephones, cars, and TV, citizens of the U.S. had shared cultural events due to limited MEDIA outlets, a more homogenized cultural base, shared value systems, in addition to events that shook the U.S. like World Wars and famous assassinations.
Generation Z, the post-9/11 generation- the sons and daughters of Generation X- however- they have no identity and are bombarded with information at the speed of light. Members of the so-called Generation X and Generation Y fall into this category as well. Generation Z is totally digital and everything about them suffers from ADD (attention definite disorder). Baby boomers to them are authority figure dinosaurs from a time not recorded by Youtube.
My grandmother always tells me that things changed in the 1960′s when it comes to children lacking fear or respect for their parents. It could be that every generation has a brash cockiness about themselves, and this may have been amplified with how easily Generations X, Y, and Z grasp electronics- from programming the VCR in 1984 to surfing the web in 2009.
Yet despite all of the education and technical mastery that new generations have, it appears on the surface that they generally don’t have a curiosity about expanding their vocabulary (they type very casual and everything gets shortened thanks to texting/IM’ing). This started with Generation X’s use of computers, calculators, and spell-check. The laziness will continue with people simply looking up something on a search engine or wiki, accepting the first result, and moving on, as opposed to researching or digging further. With so much data to digest, the ADD aspect kicks in as well.
The ugly charactiture of Generation Z was perfectly demonstrated by writer Jim Krueger in Earth-X, where earth’s future tyrant is a young boy who doesn’t even know who Adolf Hitler was, and had no sense of spirituality, cultural identity, history, or morals. I hope that future doesn’t come true.
Of course, I grant everything I just said generalizes and provides little or no real evidence- that’s the problem with trying to discuss generations coherently.
Anyway, food for thought regarding which direction we are headed.
© TheDailySkew | Generation X vs Generation Y vs Generation Z- DEEP THOUGHT PROVOKING QUESTIONS
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