The Myth of the Monolith "Millennial"
April 24, 2017 10:54 AM Subscribe

Don’t Call Me a Millennial — I’m an Old Millennial [nymag] 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, as a result of two epochal events that occurred around the time when members of the older group were mostly young adults and when members of the younger were mostly early adolescents: the financial crisis and smartphones’ profound takeover of society.
posted by nightrecordings (168 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite

BUT I HAVE ALL THESE PARTICIPATION TROPHIES
posted by indubitable at 10:59 AM on April 24, 2017 [30 favorites]

Yes! It me! It…

I still prefer to read things — particularly long things — on paper.

GET OUT.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:00 AM on April 24, 2017 [12 favorites]

milleniold, surely
posted by cortex at 11:00 AM on April 24, 2017 [37 favorites]

I said: "Me too! Old Millennial, Nokia 2000 series cohort or Old Millennial, Nokia 3000 series cohort?"
He said: "Old Millennial, Nokia 3000 series cohort."
I said: "Go crawl into your safe space in hell, you coddled little punk!" and pushed him off the bridge.
posted by Behemoth at 11:02 AM on April 24, 2017 [177 favorites]

I sort of get where the author is coming from. But there are lots of young millennials following traditional career paths and not boomeranging, I don't think individual examples are that helpful.

I think the one thing all millennials have is being a digital native - growing up with computers and being comfortable with them in a way older people aren't.
posted by JonB at 11:03 AM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

milleniold, surely

Perfect.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:03 AM on April 24, 2017

milleniold, surely

You should really get that looked at.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:03 AM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's almost like generational boundaries have very low power in determining personal tastes, values and outlooks.
posted by demiurge at 11:04 AM on April 24, 2017 [83 favorites]

This article was already written, except then it was the Oregon Trail Generation.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:05 AM on April 24, 2017 [24 favorites]

who were born around 1988 or earlier ..., really have lived substantively different lives than Young Millennials, who were born around 1989

Yeah, a few months really makes a difference. I'm glad that the solution to "Generational labels are really broad and most of the time don't even matter" is "let's make more arbitrary temporal boxes"
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:06 AM on April 24, 2017 [28 favorites]

Around 1988, or around 1989? What kind of shallow metric is that? That leaves way too much similarity between generations. I know people born in 87 and 86 who has similar experiences to me, alongside people born in 92 and 93.

How about this metric: if you remember 9/11 or not. If you don't remember 9/11 then you're a "young millennial".
posted by gucci mane at 11:06 AM on April 24, 2017 [14 favorites]

Take the financial crash. Many Old Millennials were either already in the workforce by then, or close enough to entering it that we were able to “sneak in” before the crisis had fully unfurled itself.

Uh, I graduated college in '02. The job market sucked then, too. Did this guy forget the tech bubble?
posted by leotrotsky at 11:07 AM on April 24, 2017 [15 favorites]

Yeah, a few months really makes a difference. I'm glad that the solution to "Generational labels are really broad and most of the time don't even matter" is "let's make more arbitrary temporal boxes"

There's two kinds of people, FirstMateKate...
posted by leotrotsky at 11:08 AM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

It's almost like generational boundaries have very low power in determining personal tastes, values and outlooks.

Careful, you start down that road and soon people will be insisting that in general intra-cohort variance overwhelms inter-cohort variance for broad spectra of human experience and preference.
posted by cortex at 11:09 AM on April 24, 2017 [27 favorites]

I'm a older millennial, but I grew up in a tech savvy household, and pretty much was using computers even though they were not were household items yet.

So I consider myself a digital native in a way many of my peers wouldn't.
posted by AlexiaSky at 11:09 AM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I read this earlier today, and feel that, though I am technically an Old Millennial by birth year, I - and my friends - identify more with the Young Millennial framework. I wonder to what extent going to grad/professional school right after college impacts this, since we entered the job market around the same time as the Young Millennials at the start/depth of the Great Recession.
posted by melissasaurus at 11:11 AM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

What a very strange article. Pointing out all the ways that notional generations fail to describe age cohorts in any coherent way while clinging firmly to the essentialist claim that millennials really are unlike any generation in recent history.

One could point to similar events in any so called generation, and make similar arguments about them. But the reality is that "millennial" is a marketing category, not an anthropological one.
posted by howfar at 11:11 AM on April 24, 2017 [11 favorites]

Uh, I graduated college in '02.... You're Gen X!

Get off of my zines! Did Gen X last that long? I am solidly in that bucket, graduating in 1988.
posted by thelonius at 11:12 AM on April 24, 2017 [10 favorites]

Nothing about our collective experiences as adolescents and young(ish) adults, overall, feels that different from the stories we’ve heard about how members of past generations grew up and carved out their personal and professional niches.

no way
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:13 AM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

> There's two kinds of people, FirstMateKate...

and "misc."
posted by vanar sena at 11:13 AM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

This also reminds me of something funny that is mostly about me being an outlier from any of these generations. A friend of mine goes to this event that happens every week where this group shows a rare/old independent film at a theater that allows them to. It's really neat, because people who are into cinema and want to see some good films in the theater can (they just played Chris Marker's "A Grin Without a Cat"). She's 21, so this is her nominal experience of watching these sorts of movies thus far. I'm 28. I was ribbing her for being young and doing the whole "when I was a kid I had to go on IRC to download movies I bet you don't even know what that is haha" type of jokes, and then I realized my friends my age never even did that, and mostly didn't know what I was talking about. So like, fuck it. I don't really fit in either generation due to a bunch of weird factors in my life.
posted by gucci mane at 11:13 AM on April 24, 2017 [8 favorites]

I've been distinguishing these groups as "High Millennials" (the olds) and "Low Millennials" (the youngs) a la high and low modernism, with the dividing line as whether you graduated college before the financial crisis (and got into the job market before it went sour) or after (and have struggled to get a career foothold).

“The Simpsons used to be good” Millenials and “The Simpsons was never good” Millenials.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:13 AM on April 24, 2017 [48 favorites]

I think the one thing all millennials have is being a digital native - growing up with computers and being comfortable with them in a way older people aren't.

This persistent myth causes problems at my mother's university every year, as some new process becomes entirely managed online and a bunch of incoming students just don't know how to handle it. There are incoming students who not only don't know how to use email, they don't know how to save and find a document on a computer. Sure, they can snapchat. That doesn't make them digital natives and it doesn't make them at all comfortable with computers or technology in general.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:15 AM on April 24, 2017 [112 favorites]

One could point to similar events in any so called generation, and make similar arguments about them. But the reality is that "millennial" is a marketing category, not an anthropological one.

Sadly, no. It was coined by William Strauss and Neil Howe as part of their Strauss-Howe generational theory back in 2000 with Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.

They're also the schmucks who gave us Steve Bannon's favorite The Fourth Turning, predicting catastrophe for the United States.

Best I can tell is it's like historical phrenology.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:16 AM on April 24, 2017 [17 favorites]

So I've noticed that my horoscope does a pretty good job of describing me and my personality, but on a lot of things it's pretty off. And I think it's because the label "Pisces" is just too broad. In a lot of really important ways, us Early March Pisces have had fundamentally different life experiences than the Late March Pisces. Watch for my next thinkpiece on Medium.
posted by biogeo at 11:16 AM on April 24, 2017 [30 favorites]

This article was already written, except then it was the Oregon Trail Generation.

Which was itself pre-empted by Generation Catalano.
posted by AndrewInDC at 11:19 AM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

There's two kinds of people, FirstMateKate...

and "misc."
posted by vanar sena at 2:13 PM on April 24 [+] [!]

That's my new gender.
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:19 AM on April 24, 2017 [10 favorites]

This reminds me of a recent favorite tweet:

Every time I see a baby boomers vs. millennials tweet I wonder if they realize there's a whole generation in between who hates them both.

(Note: Pretty sure neither the author nor I really hate either in the aggregate. Also, the replies are funny.)
posted by octobersurprise at 11:20 AM on April 24, 2017 [53 favorites]

So I've noticed that my horoscope does a pretty good job of describing me and my personality, but on a lot of things it's pretty off.

At least horoscopes have a moderately-convincing Barnum effect. As someone who was born in '84 (milleni-x? x-ennial?) I was kind of disappointed by how much I didn't relate to this article. I'm not even close to getting married or owning a house, for instance, let alone having kids.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:22 AM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Uh, I graduated college in '02. The job market sucked then, too. Did this guy forget the tech bubble?

You're Gen X!

That explains why I have all this OK Soda.

...and contempt.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:22 AM on April 24, 2017 [27 favorites]

ha - I was receiving participation trophies way back when I was a kid in the late '70s and early '80s...
posted by randomkeystrike at 11:23 AM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Born in 1981. As each generational subcluster tries to distance itself from my ever-wizening ass, I hope I will be ejected completely from Oregon/Catalano/High Millennial status into Generation X, and eventually they'll just group me with the Boomers and I'll finally have some money
posted by Beardman at 11:23 AM on April 24, 2017 [28 favorites]

I think a defining characteristic of being an old millennial is that you lived on both sides of the digital divide. You were old enough to remember and participate in the analog world, yet grew up alongside and feel comfortable in the digital one.

These labels are still bullshit.

I don't remember and have never participated in "the analog world", yet I was born (barely) during the Carter administration. I've had some sort of computer in my room since my 5th birthday. I was online early enough to spend way too much energy in fights about "the web browser is not The Internet!". According to this article I'm really 17 instead of 37.

The main thesis of these articles is just "CHECK OUT THESE ASSHOLES!", with an emphasis on "young" or "old" depending on the age of the author.

However, when the author starts to age out, therefore move more towards the "Old Asshole" part of the spectrum, they feel the need to make new boxes in order to make sure there are both old and new variations of assholes to complain about.
posted by sideshow at 11:24 AM on April 24, 2017 [11 favorites]

As a young baby-boomer, all I can say is, "Get off my lawn, everyone who was born after me!"
posted by pangolin party at 11:25 AM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

If we're talking about the first "digital natives", I'd make the case people who graduated HS around the time these "old millenials" were born would also make the grade. I'm one of them. I've had a computer in my life since I was 12, and have been online since I was 20. Practically my entire adult life has had the internet as part of it. Many of my cohort have the same experiences.

But I guess I'm glad Gen X gets ignored. We're spared the relentless & breathless generational navel gazing.
posted by honestcoyote at 11:26 AM on April 24, 2017 [15 favorites]

There are incoming students who not only don't know how to use email, they don't know how to save and find a document on a computer. Sure, they can snapchat. That doesn't make them digital natives and it doesn't make them at all comfortable with computers or technology in general.

I've noticed this as well. The Kids These Days are "digital natives" in the sense that they are fully acculturated into the use of smartphones and social media, but this doesn't actually necessarily translate into increased computer literacy in a meaningful sense. I mentored a very bright high school kid who was like this: completely comfortable with texting, social media, etc., but only had the vaguest idea that a Word document was something that was present on her computer as a file which could be manipulated independently from within Word itself. She caught on really quickly, and actually showed quite an aptitude for programming, but it was all new information to her. In a lot of ways I think the people who came of age with late-90s computers are "digital natives" in a very different sense, in that this kind of basic computer literacy was something you had to pick up in order to chat with your friends on AIM, whereas now you don't really need to know how to use your computer, just how to use Facebook. On the other hand, as someone born in 1984 ('sup en forme de poire, x-ennials represent) I still find using my smartphone more confusing and difficult than I find using my Linux laptop, so there's clearly a certain window of plasticity that I missed.
posted by biogeo at 11:27 AM on April 24, 2017 [32 favorites]

Many Old Millennials were either already in the workforce by then, or close enough to entering it that we were able to “sneak in” before the crisis had fully unfurled itself.

Yeah, no, maybe his social group snuck in. Mine--even the smartest of mine--went back for graduate degrees because we weren't able to find decent paying work, lost jobs and weren't able to replace them with anything comparable, maybe even only offered clerical work and settled for $9/hour despite college degrees and are still struggling to convince people that they should actually be doing professional work for a living wage. I'm doing okay now--but only a couple years ago I was on food stamps and I had a couple big strokes of luck in the meantime.

I suspect that this is more indicative of how the middle class preserved their own kids' opportunities at the expense of opportunities for anybody else than of how we're doing as a generation.
posted by Sequence at 11:28 AM on April 24, 2017 [10 favorites]

Oh my god typing on a phone, can we talk about how much that completely sucks and yet everyone somehow just seems to think it's normal and acceptable??? Compared to using a regular computer keyboard, typing shit on my phone makes my brain feel like I'm trying to swim through glycerol.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:32 AM on April 24, 2017 [67 favorites]

I've been distinguishing these groups as "High Millennials" (the olds) and "Low Millennials" (the youngs) a la high and low modernism, with the dividing line as whether you graduated college before the financial crisis (and got into the job market before it went sour) or after (and have struggled to get a career foothold).

Most millenials—like most people of every generation—did not graduate from college.
posted by enn at 11:36 AM on April 24, 2017 [28 favorites]

Oh my god typing on a phone, can we talk about how much that completely sucks and yet everyone somehow just seems to think it's normal and acceptable???

I know, right? I'm usually bored with myself before I even finish typing a sentence, which must be how other people feel most of the time when I'm talking.
posted by biogeo at 11:38 AM on April 24, 2017 [7 favorites]

I think a defining characteristic of being an old millennial is that you lived on both sides of the digital divide. You were old enough to remember and participate in the analog world, yet grew up alongside and feel comfortable in the digital one.
posted by mpbx

Yep, this. Or stated a grosser way, if you went through puberty beginning with dirty mags and ending with internet porn.
posted by lazaruslong at 11:41 AM on April 24, 2017 [7 favorites]

Milleniold ('82) here. My instinctive and completely unsupported theory is that which side you identify with depends on how old you were when Columbine happened and whether the subsequent anti-bullying initiatives did anything to protect you. In my day (she said, lifting her hand from the onion on her belt to shake her fist) a certain amount of abuse was totally okay as long as it wasn't disruptive. Which is to say bullied kids got yelled at for crying about it (disruption) but bullies were fine as long as they were smart about when and where they did it. By the time my brother ('89) was my age, bullying (by teachers or students) seemed less acceptable and inevitable. When he complained about being bullied, things...happened. (When I complained about being bullied, I was told to ignore them, and also to stop doing whatever it was that was making them bully me.)

I'm leaving out cyberbullying because computer/Internet access wasn't widespread enough among our peers for that to be as viable an option as analog bullying.
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 11:43 AM on April 24, 2017 [13 favorites]

My instinctive and completely unsupported theory is that which side you identify with depends on whether you remember 'car phones'.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:45 AM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

Just throw the whole idea of "generations" that can't be tied to a single, demographically-well-established event like the Baby Boom in the trash already and be done with it.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:46 AM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I feel strongly that, as the pace of fundamentally world changing technological change gradually slows, these generation identities will fade in importance as the generational gaps shrink. This is informs my theory as to why there is currently no popular sitcoms set in a previous generation a la "That 70's Show" or "Happy Days."

This theory might only be 4 hours old given the recent FPP on Joanie...
posted by midmarch snowman at 11:49 AM on April 24, 2017

bullied kids got yelled at for crying about it (disruption)

Yup, very much this. My major flaw as a male child was that I cried, which caused almost every adult in my life to get angry. At one point I had to leave art class to go to the school counselor for mandated sessions (due to crying!) and my art teacher yelled at me for it, the irony of which was not lost on me, even at that tender young age.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:51 AM on April 24, 2017 [12 favorites]

Heh. At 44 I'm solidly Gen X, but I've had a personal computer since 1978 -- my family were very early adopters of any new tech -- and have been on the internet since ... I dunno, 1994? Whenever it was still Veronica and Archie. Good 'ol Gopher days. Before that I was using BBSes. How early and how much exposure to computers does it take to be a "digital native"?

I finally hit my wall when smart phones came out. I was an early adopter of cell phones -- I've had one since the early 90's when I got a Motorola MicroTAC, but never made the switch to smart phones. Still don't have one and I find them confusing and annoying. Must be getting old.
posted by fimbulvetr at 11:51 AM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

there is currently no popular sitcoms set in a previous generation a la "That 70's Show" or "Happy Days."

The Goldbergs?
posted by octobersurprise at 11:53 AM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

Milleniold ('82) here. My instinctive and completely unsupported theory is that which side you identify with depends on how old you were when Columbine happened

That makes sense to me as I've always used "Were you in school when the Challenger exploded? ('86)" as an indicator of being Gen X.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:54 AM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

Anecdotally, and while my experience in India likely has little to do with the generations here in the US, there is a huge gulf between me and my cousin, just four years younger. I'm 31, he's 27 and sometimes the gap between my group of friends and his feels like the gap between my parents' friends and mine.

I vividly remember standing outside my high school early in the morning, trying to figure out what to do because our tutor had not arrived (for a class that took place before regular school hours). I was 17 years old, and I asked, hey does anyone have a cellphone so we can call him? And everyone looked at my shocked, and one person said, no, we're not millionaires! no one has a cellphone. Two years later they were ubiquitous among my middle-class Indian circles. It really was night and day.

When I graduated college in 2007, the financial crisis had not hit. Many many people I know were getting gold-plated offers from Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. I got a generous fellowship package to go to grad school, which I know became significantly less generous in later years. In 2007, it really felt like the possibilities were endless. I can relate to her notion that we were more inclined to go into less practical careers. It really felt like we were dreamers, and people even a few years younger were more cynical, less willing to gamble on grad school. So I think there's something in what she's saying, even it only applies to a small slice of the world's population.
posted by peacheater at 11:56 AM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

This kind of article should itself be read as an indicator of the author's privilege, which makes the stated argument "look! Not all millenials! Me!" all the more subtly offensive.
posted by polymodus at 11:56 AM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

As an old whatever-the-label-is-for-what-comes-after-millennial, I don't think that the defining event of our generation has actually come along yet. I really don't think it's the smartphone. Texting just isn't fundamentally different enough from talking. Nor is social media, really (which none of us are using as much as you think we are anyways).
posted by perplexion at 12:00 PM on April 24, 2017

..I don't think that the defining event of our generation has actually come along yet.
Maybe the real defining event was the friends we made along the way.
posted by FirstMateKate at 12:03 PM on April 24, 2017 [9 favorites]

AIM. AIM is the defining experience for Milleniolds.

Friends don't let friends AIM drunk.
posted by maryr at 12:03 PM on April 24, 2017 [18 favorites]

..I don't think that the defining event of our generation has actually come along yet.

Maybe the real defining event was the friend we made along the way.

Maybe the real friend we made along the way was this buried chest of gold doubloons.
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:04 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

Around 1988, or around 1989? What kind of shallow metric is that? That leaves way too much similarity between generations. I know people born in 87 and 86 who has similar experiences to me, alongside people born in 92 and 93.

Yeah, I think about "old millennials vs. young millennials" a fair amount, but I think of my cohort being... '86-'93? Which I guess is actually the middle of the "official" millennial range. Late 90s kids feel easier to classify with 00s kids/whatever comes after millennials to me - i.e. I don't expect to understand them (culturally), while those a few years older than me don't seem so far away. I could see people at the oldest end of the "millennial" range feeling like they're in a different position than someone like me.
posted by atoxyl at 12:08 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

This is informs my theory as to why there is currently no popular sitcoms set in a previous generation a la "That 70's Show" or "Happy Days."

The Goldbergs?

Not to mention last year's sleeper hit on streaming (albeit not a sitcom), Stranger Things?
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:08 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Most millenials—like most people of every generation—did not graduate from college.

Definitely true, but your comment got me wondering just what the fraction is. According to the US Census, about 47.5% of Americans aged 25-34 ("millennials" excluding those young enough to still be in school) in 2016 had an Associates degree or higher, which is actually higher than I thought. By comparison, for the 35-44 cohort ("gen X") the number is 48.4%, after which it drops pretty rapidly.



Age   | % having Associates or higher

------+------------------------------

25-34 | 47.5

35-44 | 48.4

45-54 | 44.9

55-64 | 41.9

65-74 | 40.4

I thought that was kind of interesting. Also, educational attainment is a bit higher for women than men at all age cohorts except the 65-74 group.
posted by biogeo at 12:08 PM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

Texting just isn't fundamentally different enough from talking. Nor is social media, really (which none of us are using as much as you think we are anyways)

Aw, come on now. That ain't true. You're just trying to make me feel extra old now.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:10 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

As an old whatever-the-label-is-for-what-comes-after-millennial, I don't think that the defining event of our generation has actually come along yet.

Hey, it took until September for the Bush administration's incompetence at national security to produce the defining event for the Millennials. Give the Trump admin time.
posted by biogeo at 12:11 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

(Also as a gay dude I think spending too much time on social media and getting depressed/feeling body dysmorphia about it is pretty ubiquitous regardless of your age, partly because of the way casual cruising and even pick-up bars have given way so entirely to Grindr/Scruff/etc. and their endless tiles of ripped torsos...)
posted by en forme de poire at 12:12 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

I went to Easter Brunch at an apartment where they had a two foot high stack of 45s that one of the residents had salvaged from the estate of an elderly relative who had died. While we were discussing them one person was astounded "What?!?! You only have one song each side?".

I suddenly developed arthritis, rheumy eyes,a stoop, a touch of angina, arteriosclerosis, osteoporosis and nostalgia for dead friends and acquaintances.
posted by srboisvert at 12:13 PM on April 24, 2017 [9 favorites]

Most millenials—like most people of every generation—did not graduate from college.

I also wanted to say something similar to this. I graduated from high school in 2007. By the time I was done with college, things were really picking up for my field. This is already a different situation from that of someone who finished college at the same time with a different degree, but it's a very different situation from that of someone who was out of high school the same year and didn't go to college.
posted by atoxyl at 12:14 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I mentored a very bright high school kid who was like this: completely comfortable with texting, social media, etc., but only had the vaguest idea that a Word document was something that was present on her computer as a file which could be manipulated independently from within Word itself. She caught on really quickly, and actually showed quite an aptitude for programming, but it was all new information to her. In a lot of ways I think the people who came of age with late-90s computers are "digital natives" in a very different sense, in that this kind of basic computer literacy was something you had to pick up in order to chat with your friends on AIM, whereas now you don't really need to know how to use your computer, just how to use Facebook. On the other hand, as someone born in 1984 ('sup en forme de poire, x-ennials represent) I still find using my smartphone more confusing and difficult than I find using my Linux laptop, so there's clearly a certain window of plasticity that I missed.

As your last sentence demonstrates, "basic computer literacy" depends on what computer you are talking about, which depends on when you grew up. That high school student looks at Word files the same way you look at assembly code.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:14 PM on April 24, 2017 [7 favorites]

As a young baby-boomer, all I can say is, "Get off my lawn, everyone who was born after me!"

As a young baby-boomer I am still waiting for my Boomer parents to die so I can buy a lawn with their money if any is left.
posted by srboisvert at 12:17 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

I love this idea that the difference between being a young millennial and an old millennial might be being conceived after their parents were sad the Jamaica Bobsled team crashed in Calgary or in celebration of Louganis winning the springboard in Seoul.

Splitting groups of people this way is completely arbitrary. Considering a lot of these assumptions seem to be based on cultural landmarks, computers and media consumption, we could put them in columns, draw a squiggly line between all of them and then maybe find a common ground.
For instance: the first record they went out to get (ie: not from older sibblings or parents), where was it from? A tape or CD from a store, a MP3 download from napster/KaZaA/whatever, Apple Store or Spotify stream? What music was popular then? Do they remember using VHS tapes, or just DVDs, downloaded DIVX files from the internet or just streaming services? What is the first really popular mobile communication device they remember seeing? Is it a pager, the 3310, the RAZR, the iPhone or some later smartphone? And how did they connect to the internet as a kid? None at all, from school, home with dialup, cable, inside home with an Wi-Fi, 3G phone? What did they use to chat online? ICQ, IRC, MSN, Google Talk, Facebook, Skype, Snapchat? What first TV show do they remember being really popular? What Sports team do they remember being really dominant? What was the first political event that made an impression on them? Columbine, 9-11, Tsunami, Katrina, Obama, Arab springs, Fukushima, Boston Marathon, Ferguson Riots? What was the first celebrity death they remember being a big deal?
I think with enough variables, it's possible to get a far better representation of what a generation one might fall in.

I said: "Go crawl into your safe space in hell, you coddled little punk!" and pushed him off the bridge.
Any chance of New Yorker comissioning a Millennial Police Force short out of this?
posted by lmfsilva at 12:18 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

As your last sentence demonstrates, "basic computer literacy" depends on what computer you are talking about, which depends on when you grew up. That high school student looks at Word files the same way you look at assembly code.

People in this cohort have mostly been presented with computer tools as discrete closed boxes or walled gardens. They are often very adept with those tools, but it doesn't even occur to many of them that there is a hood to look under. I don't blame them for it; that's the consumer attitude clearly desired by the biggest companies selling them these tools, and, further, when an app is broken or whatever, general tinkering "under the hood" isn't going to fix it, so the knowledge is of less immediate/practical use to them.

Many people in this cohort have also basically never experienced the Internet except through a tiny phone screen over slow crappy connections (to sites that aren't built with the expectation of low bandwidth, unlike the days in which low bandwidth was universal), which inevitably constricts what they think can be done with it.
posted by praemunire at 12:26 PM on April 24, 2017 [10 favorites]

I'm starting to feel like there isn't that much space between "Let's sum up the wants and needs of an entire human generation in a single magazine-style article" and "Let's figure out what women really want in a single magazine-style article" or even "So hey what is it with brown people anyway, now in a convenient magazine-style article."

I mean, God forbid I might have to speak to a millennial without doing any research to mentally prepare myself. Remember not to say "you people," remember not to say "you people..."

How about we treat each other like people and, you know, speak.
posted by Western Infidels at 12:29 PM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

Fresh Prince/Will Smith.

Or, yeah, his group of mates aren't actually that representative of an entire generation.
posted by threetwentytwo at 12:31 PM on April 24, 2017

I was born near the early end of what is considered a millennial (to the point where I wonder WHY I'm apparently considered a millennial) and I get the impression that I'm supposed to nod and smile knowingly at the examples the author brings up of how us "old millennials" are way different from new ones, but I can't. I've known people in my age group who have had trouble finding a steady job, or jump from gig to gig every couple of years or less. I've been the guy who stayed at home for years after university because it plain wasn't affordable to do otherwise.

I agree that grouping so many people under a single label isn't really helpful or useful. I'm not sure that using two labels instead of one illuminates much more.
posted by chrominance at 12:35 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

As your last sentence demonstrates, "basic computer literacy" depends on what computer you are talking about, which depends on when you grew up. That high school student looks at Word files the same way you look at assembly code.

I think that's a really good point, but I also think there's still an important difference. I might not be able to write assembly code, but I have a basic understanding of what it is, what it does, and how it affects the level at which I do interact with my computer. That's probably more sophisticated than most people of my age cohort who aren't as nerdy as I am about their computers, but the point is I, and many of my friends who didn't multiclass computer geek as a child, have a basic understanding of the computer as a tool, and can use that knowledge to do basic repair and maintenance when things go wrong, and can adapt it to solve new problems (to varying degrees depending on the complexity of the task and the level of expertise). For that high school kid, when something went wrong with a program she was using, she didn't even have an idea of where to start fixing it. I don't mean to say that this necessarily puts her at any huge disadvantage; she was clearly smart enough and had enough mental plasticity to pick it up quickly when I showed her. But it wasn't part of her natural repertoire the way it was for me at her age.

It might be somewhat analogous to the situation with car maintenance in generations past. At least the stereotypical picture I have of the 1950s is that everyone knew a little about the mechanics of their cars, to be able to do basic repairs and maintenance. As cars got more reliable and complex, this knowledge became both less necessary on a day-to-day basis, and less available to the average driver. Today, most of us rely on someone else even to change our oil (myself included), putting us much more at the mercy of car manufacturers, dealers, and specialist mechanics when anything goes wrong. There are both costs and benefits to this (most drivers are liberated from having to spend time and mental effort on car maintenance), but certainly I think it's fair to say that today most of us have significantly less "basic automotive literacy" than did drivers in the 1950s.

I wonder if someone then might have written a thinkpiece about the difference between "Early Baby Boomers" who grew up in the do-it-yourself-automotive era, versus "Late Baby Boomers" who all drive automatic transmissions to their Lovers Lane makeout sessions.
posted by biogeo at 12:36 PM on April 24, 2017 [11 favorites]

You're not computer literate until you've debugged firmware using an oscilloscope.
posted by walrus at 12:39 PM on April 24, 2017 [9 favorites]

You're not computer literate until you've built your own oscilloscope.
posted by biogeo at 12:48 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

You’re not a literate oscilloscope unless you’re a computer.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:50 PM on April 24, 2017 [14 favorites]

Millenials, having grown up around computers, are digital natives the same way Boomers, having grown up around cars, are automotive natives -- they are mostly bad dangerous drivers who don't know how their tools work but can use them to get to the store.

Always accounting for inclination, race, and class, of course.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:52 PM on April 24, 2017 [19 favorites]

Pish. Oscilloscopes. In my day, you were not computer literate unless you used a galvanometer and graphed your waveforms by hand.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:54 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

Galvanometer. Hah! Try building a perfect pyramid using only some equally spaced divisions on a string and a vast army of slaves!
posted by Behemoth at 12:56 PM on April 24, 2017 [20 favorites]

I've always been skeptical/critical/eyerolling of these Generational Labels. But then, we Second Decade Baby Boomers ('55-'64) are so NOT like First Decade Boomers ('45-'54).
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:57 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

All articles making sweeping statements about people based on what year they were born is worthless and this one is significantly worse for claiming to be a cure for that while clearly being exactly the same.
posted by bracems at 12:59 PM on April 24, 2017

Is there a metric for the number of comments in a technology and culture thread until punch cards are mentioned?
posted by amtho at 1:00 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

When somebody says "computer" to me, the first image that comes to mind is a young woman with a carefully coifed hair-do, red lipstick, pearls, a smart summer dress over architectural underwear, silk stockings, high heels, and a proficiency with logarithm tables and making biscuits from scratch.

We call our age cohort the Prehensiles.
posted by Chitownfats at 1:00 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

My instinctive and completely unsupported theory is that which side you identify with depends on how old you were when Columbine happened and whether the subsequent anti-bullying initiatives did anything to protect you.

I'm not going to say that Columbine didn't cause an improvement w.r.t. bullying, but mostly I remember suddenly getting shook down for contraband and a great surge of hatred for anyone who seemed weird.
posted by pan at 1:07 PM on April 24, 2017 [9 favorites]

AIM. AIM is the defining experience for Milleniolds.

Yes! Yes, AIM was my first form of what would now be called "social media." This actually led to the most hilariously onion-on-my-belt memory in my life so far. When I first heard about Twitter, and I mean right at the beginning when the company had just formed and someone explained the basic functionality to me, I thought: "what's the point of that? It's like AIM with just the away messages." I don't even remember why I thought that exactly; maybe it's that they're both short, relatively persistent messages that everyone can see. It seemed so obvious to me that no one was going to share anything meaningful to the general public, and all the interesting stuff would be in private chats a la AIM.

Wheee! Haven't thought about that in years. So anyway... yeah. Generation AIM. BTW I have become slightly less clueless about Twitter conventions since then.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 1:21 PM on April 24, 2017 [11 favorites]

Yeah, Columbine started the whole zero tolerance movement in public schools which profoundly changed how kids experienced authority.
posted by AlexiaSky at 1:22 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

That makes sense to me as I've always used "Were you in school when the Challenger exploded? ('86)" as an indicator of being Gen X.

I was supposed to be, but was home "sick" that day. Saw the news on the pre-Price Is Right "news break." I wish we still had news breaks every hour or two. We later watched the return to flight on TV at school.

Pointless reminiscing aside, late-70s to early 80s kids (say '78-'84ish) have little in common with "real" GenXers like my sister and little in common with Millennials. The attempts to lump us in with either cohort are ridiculous and stupid. We're old enough to remember the Cold War and the fear of nuclear hellfire, yet young enough to mostly have grown up with (pre-Internet) computing.
posted by wierdo at 1:23 PM on April 24, 2017 [10 favorites]

There is definite anthropological value in ferreting out the key cultural events and factors (including technology) that shape herd behavior over time. It is just almost completely impossible to do that while the cohort your are studying is still alive, doubly so if you are part of the cohort.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:29 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

I get why the media and marketers and do it, but I've always thought it was really weird when people identify strongly with really broad demographics like this. Sure, there might be a few defining political events that affect people differently according to their age at least on a broad scale, but as far as the social and technological aspects, people grow up in very different environments. Such a broad designation is a really bad predictor of individual traits.

How boring would your life have to be for your interests, your proclivities, and your personal traits to be predictable based on the year you were born? And we do all understand that not everyone has the same opportunities and experiences.

The idea of "digital natives" is an interesting one, but it's not strictly based on age because different people adopt at different rates, and it's not always entirely clear what people mean when they say it. Digital native means someone who has used technology all their life or close to it, but what does that mean? Does it mean they don't know how to do basic things without the use of technology? Does it mean they're adept at using technology? That they understand it? That they adopt new technologies uncritically, without really understanding what they do?

I don't know anyone in real life, no matter what age, who does fit a neat generational category. I know young technology abstainers as well as a few real enthusiasts, a lot of people who've gone to weird schools and run in completely different social circles in different areas, people who care about politics or music and people who don't. I know "millennials" who got good, stable jobs early in life, stuck with them, got married, bought houses, etc., and I know plenty of older people who never did.

Because everyone's life is different.

So if you see some generalization about your designated generation and think, "Hey, that's not applicable to me!" step back a little.
posted by ernielundquist at 1:29 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

Pan, I was in high school, and that's what I remember too -- an initial wave of panic about the Different Kids that took years to resolve into something constructive. (I'm not saying the execution has been flawless, but anti-bullying stuff exists in a purely theoretical realm for me so I can't speak from experience.)
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 1:34 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I get why the media and marketers and do it, but I've always thought it was really weird when people identify strongly with really broad demographics like this.

"Generations" in the contemporary American pop psyche function like astrological signs or sports teams. None of them are very enlightening about anything, but sometimes it's still fun to identify as a "Flashing Yellow" or to cheer for the home team.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:42 PM on April 24, 2017

I was in my 3rd year in college when Columbine happened. Mostly, it made me annoyed that people wanted to hassle me for my KMFDM t-shirt.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:45 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I was just getting to middle school - so prime bullying years - and suddenly the teachers were definitely part of the problem. It's strange to think that something good could have come from all the zero tolerance and paranoia - bends my mind a bit - by the time I felt it was mellowing I was already heading to college.
posted by pan at 1:48 PM on April 24, 2017

back in my day we had to shake quartz rocks in our hand to get the timing right...
posted by Nanukthedog at 2:11 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Just checking in because I didn't see anyone representing the best year ever, (that would be 1983), and I started school early and so graduated from college in 2004. My interns look at me quizzically when I explained to them I learned to type on an IBM Selectric and we eventually bought a computer in...7th or 8th grade, I think? It had a 14.4k modem and I was jealous when the 33.6 was released and my parents said "no we've already spent enough money on the idiot box." When I got to college in 01, the dorms weren't wired and I had a cell phone because purchasing minutes was less expensive than paying for the tolls between my dorm landline and my parents' landline. We also had radiator heat and no AC. I feel like a dinousaur compared to the 18-22 year olds that intern for us.

The biggest distinction I've noticed is humor; Monty Python isn't funny to them, nor was Stripes or Friday, or SNL Celebrity Jeopardy or needing more cowbell. And when I suggest they show me something funny, I rarely "get it."
posted by sara is disenchanted at 2:12 PM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

Ah, the children these days, with their short pantaloons and their rap-and-roll muzak! Why must they constantly mow my lawn?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:19 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I've been distinguishing these groups as "High Millennials" (the olds) and "Low Millennials" (the youngs)

Let's not forget the "Dark Millenials", born right after the fall of Generation X. Generally dated to when the last music video left MTV, causing the isolated Hot Topic youth to pledge fealty to local pokelords.

Traditionally considered a cultural wasteland, recent scholarship has challenged this view; in fact the whole idea may have been invented by Renaissance Millenials in order to have something to feel superior to.
posted by happyroach at 2:38 PM on April 24, 2017 [9 favorites]

The biggest distinction I've noticed is humor; Monty Python isn't funny to them, nor was Stripes or Friday, or SNL Celebrity Jeopardy or needing more cowbell.

This reinforces my idea that as a dead-center millennial ('89) I'm more on the same page culturally as 80s-early 90s people than mid-late 90s people. We liked all that stuff (except I've never seen Stripes). And while I did grow up with the web from when I was in grade school, it was growing up with me - I remember the DIY era, having a sub-56K modem, etc.
posted by atoxyl at 2:47 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's almost as if defining all of our generational cohorts based on how they relate to WWII gets less exact the further away we get from WWII. They were already out of ideas when they came up with Generation X, but they just kept going.
posted by ckape at 2:57 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

But I guess I'm glad Gen X gets ignored. We're spared the relentless & breathless generational navel gazing.

Wait, wait, I thought Gen X was all about navel-gazing. Hang on a sec. Heh.

Anyway, by dint of having married a solidly Gen X dude and being a High Millennial myself, I'll claim whatever dubious status is afforded me. At the moment the vast knowledge of cultural references that gives me is somewhat pale shelter.

Get off my lawn, I guess, because I'm enjoying my wine in my hammock while watching butterflies land on my solar lights at the end of a hard day remotely managing web projects in chat and on video conference calls. C'est la vie.
posted by limeonaire at 2:59 PM on April 24, 2017

Oof, Jesse Singal, who wrote this, has written a whole lot of really harmful stuff about trans people. It bums me out to see his stuff shared around even when it's on other topics.
posted by ITheCosmos at 3:03 PM on April 24, 2017 [8 favorites]

P.S. I typed all my papers senior year of high school on either a Windows 3.1 machine a friend rebuilt for me for $50 or an actual typewriter. I also grew up playing Atari 2600 and Super Pong for years before we got anything newer. So I'm a rather atypical High Millennial anyway.

Also, ugh, didn't know that, ITheCosmos. Now this guy can really get off my lawn.
posted by limeonaire at 3:06 PM on April 24, 2017

Is there a metric for the number of comments in a technology and culture thread until punch cards are mentioned?

I still have a few rolls of paper tape preserving the first few programs that I wrote using a teletype terminal in 1978 or so. Do I win?
posted by octothorpe at 3:10 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

People born after '88 are "digital natives" like people born after ce 170 are astronomy natives.

"HIS ROOMMATE: [Downloads Bonzai Buddy, which promises to help him surf the Internet]

BONZAI BUDDY: [Screeches monkey sounds from his computer speakers in the middle of the night for weeks]

lectroids born after 1938 are 8th dimension natives, monkey boy

"Fresh Prince/Will Smith. "

as I continue to aver, those born after '85 or so are Willennials. Millennials want to use Snapchat to hasten the apocalypse.
posted by klangklangston at 3:21 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

I don't remember and have never participated in "the analog world"

How did you look up/store phone numbers for a business or person? Find somewhere to eat or stay when on vacation? Organize a party/social outing/family reunion? I'm about the same age as you and have been using the Internet since before the web (though only just) and the answers to these questions were all analog for a bit. If you could manage to find all this stuff digitally then hats off to you, but most of this stuff wasn't available "online" in any reasonable capacity until much later.
posted by ODiV at 3:23 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is informs my theory as to why there is currently no popular sitcoms set in a previous generation a la "That 70's Show" or "Happy Days."
The Goldbergs is in 1980-something.
Fresh Off The Boat is set in the 90s.
posted by soelo at 3:23 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

ODiV, that's what CompuServe and Prodigy were for. ;)
posted by wierdo at 3:38 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

How did you look up/store phone numbers for a business or person?

My beloved and I were reminiscing about making reverse charge calls to our parents from phone boxes the other day. UK phone boxes got sufficiently advanced in approx. 2004 that you could text from (some of) them.

I actually missed Blockbuster the other day. We fancied watching a MCU movie but our Internet is a bit dodgy at the moment. We used to have two Blockbusters within a five minute walk/drive. Our Toddler will never go wander round a Blockbuster on a Friday night!
posted by threetwentytwo at 3:38 PM on April 24, 2017

I was born towards the end of '84, so I guess I'm a Highllennial? I've always gotten along better with/felt more connected to my elders than my cohorts though, so Lowllennials are truly lizard people a lot of the time to me. I think having an older sibling is a big part of that. Things that may not have been on my radar (being too young) often attracted the attention of my brother and then got transmitted down to me.
posted by downtohisturtles at 3:43 PM on April 24, 2017

Having been born in 1980, I'm never sure whether I'm a really young Gen-Xer or a really old Millennial. In other words, I'm a member of the Taint Generation. Patent pending.
posted by brundlefly at 3:44 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

I will be going through this thread, but I had to jump to bottom, just to say, in the year 1994 Villanova University set your email address as SSN@villanova.edu

Your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

I claim this as the reason my identity has never been stolen, but that's another story...
posted by waitangi at 3:49 PM on April 24, 2017 [11 favorites]

Wait, wait, I thought Gen X was all about navel-gazing. Hang on a sec. Heh.

You're thinking of shoegazing, and in fact, I'm going to see a Slowdive show in a couple of weeks. I'm very excited about it. Thanks for asking.

As to the post: I (b. 1976) was part of that late 70s cohort that was originally not "officially" included as part of Gen X until roughly Lollapalooza 94. I remember when they finally lumped us in, I felt both relieved to be included and also sort of like it was conciliatory and it made me a pose(u)r in that "I know I'm a freshman but I swear I'll be cool and I totally know all about the Replacements from Sassy , so I can I please sit with you cool older people?" sort of way
posted by thivaia at 3:49 PM on April 24, 2017 [8 favorites]

How boring would your life have to be for your interests, your proclivities, and your personal traits to be predictable based on the year you were born? And we do all understand that not everyone has the same opportunities and experiences.

Wasn't this a line in Pump Up The Volume? Or maybe Heathers?

As a member of Gen X I kind of vaguely assume...I am definitely boring enough. Here I am now/entertain me. #soblessed #suburbanlife
posted by warriorqueen at 3:59 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

sara is disenchanted, that goes to show that birth year doesn't give a good indication of these things. I was born in '83 and have had a computer in the house for as long as I can remember. I was getting online in 5th or 6th grade and remember when 14.4 seemed impossibly fast. But I took a landline phone to the dorms with me and didn't get any kind of cell phone at all until after I graduated.
posted by eruonna at 4:01 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

thivaia: I totally had the same reaction to being lumped into genX after the fact. Also a 76er. We are definitely an awkward vintage.
posted by grumpybear69 at 4:03 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

How about this metric: if you remember 9/11 or not. If you don't remember 9/11 then you're a "young millennial".

That's an excellent metric. It would make the ignorance of Twitter teens back in 2011 much more understandable.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:34 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I was born in the Carter administration, at what most call the tail-end of Gen X. We owned a TRS-80, a Commodore 64 (both utilizing the same tape player!) before finally getting a 286 capable of dialing up to a BBS and running up my poor mom's phone bill and getting my first virus (Michelangelo).

I always considered the line of where Gen X tailed off was an appreciation for Reality Bites. I mean, if you haven't vacillated between whether you cheered for Troy or Michael, I'm not sure we're part of the same generation.

Now, what's interesting about being on the very cusp of generations is seeing the differences in your own experience —that I went to school both just a year older and younger than me, work with the same, experiencing rites of passage in life within that variance.

One example: When I was a freshman in high school, there were actually smoking areas for students on the school grounds. Like, between periods, there were places around (outside), where students could go and smoke cigarettes, and it was okay. By the time I graduated high school, not only was that done away with, but it was actually illegal to possess tobacco if you were under 18. In fact, because of that (and Columbine, to a limited extent), students were prohibited from leaving the building during school hours. They actually chained the doors locked for a while, until the fire marshal determined that was not...okay. I'd posit that it is no coincidence that when millennials became old enough to go to bars, that it was the exact same time that most states banned smoking in bars.

It's been a wild time riding that line.

In re: remembering 9/11: Is this the right time to mention that next year there will be service members serving in Afghanistan who weren't even alive on 9/11?
posted by General Malaise at 4:39 PM on April 24, 2017 [11 favorites]

Shoot, we never got in trouble for smoking in high school, but we were asked to do so in the parking lots or in our cars. They stopped "open lunch" at some point when I was in high school, but the unwritten rule was that as long as you brought something back for the teacher (coffee, cigarettes, cheeseburger, etc) no one would say anything.
posted by sara is disenchanted at 4:52 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

Old Millennials, as I’ll call them, who were born around 1988 or earlier (meaning they’re 29 and older today)

Hey, that's totally me! (born 1961). Definitely "or earlier".
posted by msalt at 5:14 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'm a member of the Taint Generation

I really think you've got a song in there.
posted by octobersurprise at 5:27 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

Urgh seriously, a lot of problems with the broad labelling of generations would be trivially solved by overlapping them (I've only used 20 year gaps below for illustrative purposes).

E.g. instead of conjecturing just:
Gen existentialisms: born '70s or '80s Snarky Fatalistic Cold Warts
Milleniumhandsandshrimps: born '90s or '00s Earnest Smartphone Beliebers

there also exist:
Generation NeXXXt: born '80s or '90s Pepsi Guzzling Nu-Spice Metallers

who have some reference points in common with both, but are also sufficiently distinct.
posted by comealongpole at 5:34 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

This discussion of generational markers is pretty fascinating from an immigrant's perspective. I always feel like an old man in America because my lived experience includes so many things that have either never been a thing here, or haven't been a thing in decades. When I was a kid in China in the 80s, we lived in assigned housing, and we shared a kitchen with everybody else on the same floor. We had an outhouse and bathed once a month, at the public baths. Food rationing was still a thing, black and white TVs were the norm, and nobody had a car or a personal computer. My parents' wedding photo was a colorized black and white photo.
posted by hyperbolic at 5:38 PM on April 24, 2017 [17 favorites]

Silly age divisions aside, it is fascinating to me to remember a time before computers in homes and before the internet everywhere and before both being in the palm of your hand. It really is a revolution, and watching the young ones come up when they've known nothing else is something with observing.

I mean, this article didn't, but that's why we have MetaFilter.
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 5:38 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

Truth is, I am fully cognizant of the time when computers (forget about phones) were nowhere near ubiquitous, but here I am, on a Monday night, and were it not for the computer in front of me, I'd have no idea what I'd do. Were this 1992, I guess I'd watch something terrible on TV, or read a book, or play with Lego, or write this novel I've been trying to write since, well, 1992, but, well, thank god I live in 2017 and not 1992.
posted by General Malaise at 6:00 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

Oh, and having actually read the whole thread now (but not the article, Hells No!) I want to say that robocop_is_bleeding's reference point above of the Challenger disaster is a good one. For my own part, I remember Challenger and Chernobyl (nothing good ever began with a "C-H"), but the first time I was conscious of history happening was the fall of the Berlin Wall. One day, the world had always been like this and probably always would be, the next day everything was different. For some people that would be 9/11 or Diana or Kennedy or whatever. My cohort are Berlin Wall people.
posted by comealongpole at 6:02 PM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

Speaking of generational markers, one of my favorite stories of pre-cellphone, pre-internet life (aside from looking for jobs and housing in the Village Voice) was when I was meeting up with college friends at a party somewhere in Manhattan. I didn't have the address, but I had the phone number, and I was stuck at Penn Station. So I called the number on a payphone (with quarters!) and left a message telling them to call my at the TGI Friday's in the LIRR terminal. I then went to TGIF, ordered a coke and waited around. Eventually the phone rang and a gruff bartender answered, put it down, looked around and said "Is there a grumpybear69 here? Call for you!"

I don't remember the party at all.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:06 PM on April 24, 2017 [12 favorites]

Ooh, another high school thing: When I was a freshman in high school, we had what Gen Xers would recognize as standard eight, ~hour long periods; same classes at same times, all year. Then they started experimenting with scheduling my sophomore year: first, with double periods but alternating days (I still have nightmares about going to the wrong class because dammit, it's Day A, not Day B)

Oh god my entire highschool experience was during the block-schedule experimentation era. 1998 (middle school, I had 1 period at the high school) - 8 periods. 1999 - 7 periods, 1 "short block". 2000- 6 periods, 1 "short block", but the 6 periods were not always the same with A and B days for electives, core classes every day. 2001 - 4 blocks, 1 "short block" for electives 2002 - 4 blocks, electives incorporated into the normal block schedule.

I may have messed that up. I barely got it right at the time most days.
posted by T.D. Strange at 6:07 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

comealongpole: Same here! I remember Challenger because our kindergarten teacher made us watch it—and we all cried but didn't know why. But, BUT, when the Berlin Wall came down, I remember it with graphic detail. We had a German (West) exchange student in our class, and he gave us the very real context for what we were watching in real time on our little (17 inch?) television that was carted in our 4th grade classroom. Fourth graders, sitting there, rapt, with a German telling us why this was changing the world, and that this basically meant the Soviet Union, and the Cold War order, was collapsing while we watched.

Maybe it's my generational bias at play, but I don't think it's that bold to suggest that the collapse of the Berlin Wall was a more globally important generational touchpoint than either the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. [please don't come at me.]
posted by General Malaise at 6:08 PM on April 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

nothing good ever began with a "C-H"

BZZZT. Wrong!

Chupacabra.
posted by ernielundquist at 6:14 PM on April 24, 2017 [9 favorites]

T.D. Strange: It's almost like we went to the same high school. Did they also try doing away with the bell, because, as we were told, "Bells were there to get you ready for union work*, but we are here to get your ready for college, so no bells," only to be shown that bells were pretty much necessary to make sure that classes ended on time so you could get to your next class?

* Yeah, another generational marker.
posted by General Malaise at 6:14 PM on April 24, 2017

nothing good ever began with a "C-H"

C₂H₆O

C₈H₁₀N₄O₂

Sweet Jebus, the time it took to format that on a goddamn phone. Not really worth the joke.
posted by asperity at 6:17 PM on April 24, 2017 [10 favorites]

Actually I think we did try a 9 week period with no bells although I don't remember hearing that reason. The bells came back after I think the teachers threatened to revolt or something, because most of the clocks in the rooms weren't digital, only the couple centralized ones in the hall. You could see how that would be an issue.
posted by T.D. Strange at 6:18 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah that was a big reason why they brought the bells back for us. Plus, the fact that students were cited if they didn't get to the next class in the allotted two minutes. Two minutes. With uncalibrated clocks.
posted by General Malaise at 6:23 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

My high school had bells to mark the start and close of the school day but nothing between classes. If you tried to tell a teacher class was over they'd say it was over when they were done, talk over the three minute switch and possibly beyond (it was a long split level building, 3 min end to end without a 30-40 lb. bag and traffic) and then your next teacher would cite you for being late and lecture you about how it was your responsibility to notify previous teacher when class was over.

In retrospect it's shocking nobody ever assigned us Catch-22.
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 6:35 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

the agents of KAOS: I mean that on Day A, you'd have western civ, gym and geometry, and on Day B, you'd have geometry, biology and art. And you'd switch every day, so even the day of the week didn't give you a clue on which day it was.
posted by General Malaise at 6:38 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I didn't mean to use geometry twice in that example.
posted by General Malaise at 6:40 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Oh wow, the Berlin Wall was a marker for me. I don't remember it falling. But I sure remember the souvenir "fragments of the wall" stones that were sold for a couple years in the aftermath. So I knew the event was important. It's just hard as a kindergartner to keep up with Cold War politics as much as I should have.
posted by downtohisturtles at 7:06 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Kinda relevant to Columbine, is remembering the decade previous when Heathers was a hilarious black satire of how suburban school systems tried to deal with peer abuse and suicide. But not yet a bellwether of school shootings.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:36 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

I think there's also a big different depending on whether your parents were older or younger when they had you. A person born in 1983 who was brought up by parents born in the 1940s had a very different childhood from a person born in the same year whose parents were born in the 1960s.

And those parents had their ideas about child-raising shaped by the way their parents raised them, which in the case of boomer parents probably meant a father who had been in the war, who might have had untreated PTSD, and a childhood that took place while rationing was still in place (depending on what part of the world that childhood was in, I guess). That sort of thing is either going to make you a strict, frugal parent who accepts a certain amount of domestic volitility, if not violence, or it's going to make you rebel against it all and try to provide your kids with the exact opposite. Either way, it's going to be a very different parenting culture than one that comes of growing up in the hippie era.

Even just in terms of access to technology while growing up, which the article points out is different for older and younger millennials - that too is likely to be influenced by the age of your parents. My parents, born in the 1940s, had already had more than half of their working lives by the time I was born, and retirement was in sight by the 1990s when computers were really starting to appear in middle-class homes. They didn't see a need to learn to use the new upcoming technology for work, and they weren't that interested in it for its own sake, so they didn't get a computer until a year or two before I left home and so I never really used one until university.

People born in the 1960s would have had a harder time avoiding new technology, because they probably weren't senior enough in the workplace yet when it started being rolled out, to just refuse. And with familiarity enforced through workplace practices, perhaps they were more likely to bring new tech into the home as well, thereby introducing it to their children at a younger age.
posted by lollusc at 8:07 PM on April 24, 2017 [11 favorites]

What generation are you when your first TV memory is Picard being assimilated? That's me.

Seriously though, it seems pretty clear that at this point a lot of people think millennial means "person between 18 and 29" and write trend pieces accordingly, right? Ten years ago I think they used "hipster" the same way.
posted by potrzebie at 8:28 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

nothing good ever began with a "C-H"

BZZZT. Wrong!

Chupacabra.
posted by ernielundquist at 6:14 PM on April 24

Clearly you have never met one.

I think another generational marker is this question: how often are the Olympics held?
posted by susiswimmer at 9:28 PM on April 24, 2017

Fun fact: as a kid I just assumed the Winter and Summer Olympics were about 2 years apart because that seemed like the logical thing to do. I was told that this was not how they did things.
posted by ckape at 11:51 PM on April 24, 2017

remembering the decade previous when Heathers was a hilarious black satire of how suburban school systems tried to deal with peer abuse and suicide

The only reason I saw Heathers is that my sister (also a Heather) asked me to record it from HBO for her. None of our VCRs had timers yet. I was a bit too young to fully get it at the time, but later I was glad to have seen it. Kinda like RoboCop in that sense, actually. I didn't fully understand the satire until later.

Looking back, it's amazing the things my parents let me watch before I was even 10. If the moral panic people were correct, I'd totally be an axe murderer. I wanted to see RoboCop, so my dad rented it for me. I was annoyed I didn't get to see it in the theater, but he was right that people would have frowned upon them taking an elementary school kid to see it.

Helicopter parents they were not. As long as it didn't involve hardcore sex, I could watch it.
posted by wierdo at 12:44 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Who let the old Z-ers/post-millennials in here and why can they from coherent sentences? Oh right, they're twenty now. Hell, my three year old (old-alpha?) niece can from coherent sentences now.

/has an old person sad
//another odd 76er representant
posted by ZeroAmbition at 3:36 AM on April 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

Technology exposure had a lot to do with socioeconomic status, too. I was born in 1980, to a solidly middle-class family, with parents who both had signficant STEM interests (mom is a math teacher, dad was a journalist with a tremendous enthusiasm for computers and who would later in fact become a technology writer). We had computers in the house. Always. And they were Apple //s and MS-DOS PCs, which is to say, they gave you no help in figuring out what to do with them once they got you to a command prompt (the Apple was a bit better on this front in that for most purposes you could just boot off a floppy and avoid command prompts, but the PC had a hard drive).

My point is, the early-adopter experience was not quite the same if you were from a lower economic class and had parents who didn't view computers as a worthwhile addition to the home (which was a pretty common view; it was at least a decade before most people found the answers to the question "why would I want a computer in my house?" remotely covincing; contrast with the automobile, which was obviously and immediately a useful technology for people in all walks of life). For many people on the Gen-X/millennial threshold, the computers of their youth weren't things they learned to appreciate deeply through having to interact with them primitively; they're things they didn't learn to appreciate at all because they had fairly peripheral contact with them (at school, mostly).

(Incidentally, my own early-adopter experience has made me a complete atavism today. I still use mostly things I can wedge inside a terminal window when possible, such as mutt for email. I used lynx until the web became utterly impossible to navigate in text mode. I still respond to emails using quote-and-response bottom-posting, a habit ingrained by a decade of USENET, and I break my lines at 76 characters. I drive my correspondents nuts, although the format=flowed MIME parameter has reduced the grief.)
posted by jackbishop at 5:56 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Hell, my three year old (old-alpha?) niece can from coherent sentences now.

Can what from them?
posted by thelonius at 6:12 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think the cutoff should be what your first game system was: Nintendo or Sega (anyone remember Sega channel??) or Playstation?
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:34 AM on April 25, 2017

Can what from them?

Form, form goddamnit! Well, I never said Gen-Xers could. ._.
posted by ZeroAmbition at 6:34 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Kinda relevant to Columbine, is remembering the decade previous when Heathers was a hilarious black satire of how suburban school systems tried to deal with peer abuse and suicide.

My ninth grade year (1990-91) was my last at public high school, the perennially beleagured vice-principal kept a "What To Do If Someone Calls In a Bomb Threat" sign posted above the chair where people sat when they got in trouble. Which means that basically everyone knew the administrative procedure of dealing with a called-in bomb threat. People regularly sneaked off campus to call in bomb threats from the pay phone next door. This was viewed as a hilarious prank by the students and a total headache for the school administration, because they had to dismiss us all from class and send us out to loiter on the athletic fields while they searched the school building. Let me be clear here: in those pre-Columbine days, I don't think anyone (including the teachers) ever thought anyone would actually bomb the school. And after a while, they mostly started ignoring the bomb threats.
posted by thivaia at 7:41 AM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think the cutoff should be what your first game system was: Nintendo or Sega (anyone remember Sega channel??) or Playstation?

Atari 2600. Get off my Golden Castle's lawn.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:48 AM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

Yeah but you're a GenXer so no one cares.
posted by LizBoBiz at 8:57 AM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think the cutoff should be what your first game system was: Nintendo or Sega (anyone remember Sega channel??) or Playstation?

First dedicated gaming system (as opposed to general purpose computer which can be used for games) that was "mine" (either owned by me, or at least resided in my family's house and generally recognized as "mine")? A Nintendo Wii.

But that might be misleading as to my age. A better measure would be "first dedicated gaming system which I played from time to time because my friends had one": the Atari 2600.

I've just never been particularly interested in video games.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:27 AM on April 25, 2017

I think the cutoff should be what your first game system was: Nintendo or Sega (anyone remember Sega channel??) or Playstation?

One of the later generations of Pong.

I suspect that there's some whopping problems of class and ethnicity involved in defining cohorts in terms of consumer electronics.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:50 AM on April 25, 2017 [5 favorites]

The worst part of being an Xer is that we kind of continue to Not Exist. Boomer politicians and culture heros are finally starting to die off but nobody gives a shit about our middle-aged asses, people quit caring about GenX as a thing as soon as GenY got renamed the Millenials once they were old enough to start marketing to.

On the other hand we gave y'all Google and its ilk and our storytellers are the ones amusing the kids of today and teaching them our values so I guess, I dunno. Whatever. Maybe it's pretty bodacious to be out of the scope of the Generational Thinkpiece. Nobody wants to put us in a marketing box and we're free to just be whatever the hell we want to be.
posted by egypturnash at 10:07 AM on April 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

I expect this is because we're small. Prime gen-x years like 68-72 were a baby bust, while millennials as "echo-boomers" are a larger cohort. So people talk about the big meal going through the snake and the next big lump moving through the snake and not our tiny bite-size bit in between them.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:22 AM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

Born 1969 (I don't know where that puts me in Gen X chronology), raised by a Boomer whose parents were born in the 1920s (and born to a Boomer, also—the women in the generation before me in my family had their kids very young). We were definitely raised in an older, stricter, less tech-oriented way: color TV in the late 70s (!!!), touch tone phone finally in the 80s. In my (quite poor) family, all I could do in the 80s was look upon my richer classmates' computers and Ataris with longing. Anyway, I read this woman's article, and it occurred to me how the advent of new tech has accelerated since the 1980s and that's lead to so many changes within their generational cohort in a way that Gen X didn't deal with.

We had time to grasp and incorporate tech into our lives in the 70s and 80s because the pace was slower. The tech development cycle now is so much faster, and instead of it being simple incremental changes, you could have entirely new modes and platforms inside of a year, and (most) younger people acclimatize themselves more readily to that than (most) older people. If it were not for the fact that my job involves constantly having to accustom myself to new tech, I'd feel kind of like this young lady.

In turn, the targeting of articles and marketing online and elsewhere is also cycling out to younger people faster these days, I think. They're niche-ing year by year, almost. I was aware by 2007 that many websites weren't targeting people my age anymore as an audience, and I wasn't even 40. A site like Buzzfeed overtly tries to lure seniors in high school-new college grads exclusively, and I'm, like, wow, marketing people want all of us over 30 years old to literally get out of their damn internets and WeWork cubes, since our buying patterns are set. And they'll say "millennial", but they mean even younger people whose consumption habits they're trying to influence.

People born after 2005 surely see Bieber as near-on an old man, and the young Millennials who liked him are letting him go along with their adolescence, right? Poor kid.
posted by droplet at 10:44 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

… maybe the thing to accept is that, especially in the light of media fragmentation, there really aren't coherent "generations" any more, especially compared to the Baby Boom, which itself is less coherent than usually represented (i.e. my parents are arguably late boom, born in the '50s, but came of age after their sibs had ruined the Summer of Love and other hippie markers, and had a really different experience).

The dawn of the age of micro-generations, man.
posted by klangklangston at 12:05 PM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think ROU_Xenophobe has this right - the boomers are meaningful as a generation cause they're a huge demographic bulge, as are millennials (or at least biggest for a while) so they deform the snake as they go through.

I was born in 78. A friend of mine calls us "cuspies."

Anyway, here's Bob and David on micro-generations (some language)
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 5:27 PM on April 25, 2017

Er, I was born in 1989 and there was no way I was graduating college before the financial crisis. I had just graduated high school. What?
posted by stoneandstar at 5:50 PM on April 25, 2017

ur an old millennial if u remember when all formatting was through html

fuck css

marquee tag forever
posted by klangklangston at 10:38 PM on April 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

<blink>



<blink>



<blink>

posted by maryr at 8:19 AM on April 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

marquee forever
posted by cortex at 10:20 AM on April 26, 2017 [11 favorites]

Turn off your wallhack, cortex.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:22 PM on April 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

Since it's your birthday HAPPY BIRTHDAY will "they" let you use the img tag today?
posted by klangklangston at 1:38 PM on April 26, 2017

hApPy BiRtHdAy CoRtEx!
posted by maryr at 2:18 PM on April 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I can't believe I ever thought that wIeRdO was a good way to present my IRC nick. Not can I believe some of the utterly juvenile shit I said that is recorded for all eternity thanks to one particular person thinking it was amusing. (That's right, Jeff, I do occasionally have nightmares about that file being posted on the web..and Jim, if you still read MeFi, there is no need to link to the file. Anyone who cares to see what a moron I used to be can use Google easily enough)
posted by wierdo at 10:10 PM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

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