Business Insider has a pair of articles about generation nicknames in the USA and the rest of the First World, and (conversely) nicknamed generations. The first discusses a Goldman Sachs report that attempts to characterize the members of "Generation Z". If you're a bit challenged as far as remembering exactly what age groups these nicknames refer to, the piece has an excellent chart breaking out the generations by age, and then by population count (in the USA). Details of Goldman's Gen Z portrait are sketchy, but it seems that one point is that GS previously seemed fascinated by the Millenials, the generation that came before Gen Z.
The second article is a proposal by demographer Mark McCrindle for the nickname of the new generation, whose early members are being born as you read this.
Coincidentally, TIME is running a story on how the generation nicknames came about; I was surprised to see longtime NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw being credited with coming up with the 'Greatest Generation' moniker. An older article (from googling) covers similar ground.
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The Absurd Pirate's Internet Blog asks, is gen alpha screwed?:
However, I do think there is a STARK contrast between a curated show from the 90s-00s and a show like Cocomelon that is designed to be like heroin for babies. I walked in on my MIL and daughter watching Cocomelon together one time, and it was jarring seeing how, for one, low effort the animation and songs are, and two, how stimulating this show is, between the incredibly saturated colors to the jump cuts every second. What I learned was that this show uses focus groups of children to make it so there is not a break in the concentration. If a kid shifts his eyes away from the screen, the scene gets edited to address that.
Companies are literally designing everything for addiction these days. Trying to get you hooked on whatever they can profit off of as early in your development as possible.
The points raised there are discussed further by Andre Franca. He adds,
The author also mentions the "mental death" of parenting under modern life, and I totally get that. There are days when I'm so drained that a screen feels like a life raft, so the comparison of high-stimulant shows to "baby heroin" makes total sense to me. That crap is bad enough for an adult; for a child, it can be devastating. I've watched my oldest son's behavior shift in real-time depending on what he's consuming. When it's junk, he turns into different person - more reactive, less patient. It makes me realize that parenting today is largely about shielding them from a culture that wants to outsource their development to an algorithm.
What happens when a substantial portion of a whole generation achieves an age of majority with an nearly complete substitution of life experience for exposure to mindless digital heroin?
Previously:
(2025) Ban Social Media for Under 15s, Says French Report Warning of TikTok Dangers
(2025) Social Media Is Dead – Here's What Comes Next
(2015) Kids These Days: Six or Seven Nicknamed Generations
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @02:15AM
You Damn Kids!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @02:18AM
The On-My-Lawn Generation
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Tork on Monday December 07 2015, @02:25AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @02:34AM
Typical backward thinking of a young fool.
Every previous generation is oppressive and stupid.
Every subsequent generation is decadent and lazy.
Get it straight, kid.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 07 2015, @04:31AM
And the next one (their offspring) is doomed. Doomed I say!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @02:51PM
Pfff... back in my day, the kids were much more lazy and annoying than the current generation. They don't even put in the effort to be worthless anymore...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 07 2015, @02:28AM
Get a load of this [marketwatch.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @02:39AM
Small Screeners
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @02:45AM
All hail the conquering Dominion. Old Hippie Roddenberry is dead and with him the Federation. We pledge our loyalty to The Founders.
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday December 07 2015, @04:41AM
A bucket of sentient goo that can take the form of any object, but always chooses to look like the most popular beings.
That’s actually quite fitting.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday December 07 2015, @06:59AM
They should refer to themselves as the "Fuck MTV Generation".
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 07 2015, @12:50PM
MTV still thinks they drive culture; they haven't in a couple decades.
If you're the "alpha" in a culture you get to decide where to drive. MTV thinks thats their position so they produce this ridiculous crap trying to push society in the direction they want. But they're oblivious to the fact they're not alpha anymore and haven't been since probably 1990 or so, therefore they just run off the road with lower and lower ratings. They act cringeworthy, their shows are like a bad greentext post on R9K, at best.
A popular show like Game of Thrones (or so I'm told, I don't watch, I've heard its shitty gore-pr0n, and I don't even like good gore-pr0n) gets to decide where society is moving toward. So we're moving toward dramatically higher levels of violence, and cultural normalization of incest and rape. Like it or not, get ready for it, thats gonna be our future. MTV is not in the drivers seat, GoT is in the drivers seat.
(Score: 1) by WillR on Monday December 07 2015, @06:03PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Monday December 07 2015, @09:08AM
I love how the picture is an obviously middle class white girl looking sour, couldn't have picked a more apropos picture of a spoiled middle class looking for something to whine about. this is what happens when you mix narcissism with social media, instead of actually going out and doing something positive to make the world better you get "trigger warnings" and calls to censor and shit like the progressive stack where they rank each other over how big a fucking victim they believe they are. Instead of positive action like community outreaches and charity drives like my generation did? They sit in their parents basements puking venom on Tumblr and Reddit. I've lived through the hippies turning into yuppies, dealt with the 90s and the rise of the dudebro, but frankly this new generation is just nasty.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Monday December 07 2015, @06:44PM
Hey look! I found the first whiny post on the thread! Who knew Hairyfeet was a middle class girl?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:07PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Valkor on Monday December 07 2015, @03:07AM
label your fucking axis, businessinsider.
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday December 07 2015, @04:19AM
I’m pretty sure the article is about the allies, but alas, I’m not of the Greatest Generation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @06:49AM
You misspelled "tripe peddler".
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 07 2015, @04:18AM
I really don't know about all these silly names. I don't even know if they've got that chart right - the "baby boom" ended before they show it ending, IMHO. They've run together a couple separate generations because they missed some factor that separates us. That's my opinion, anyway.
Anyway, the next generation is alien. I'm reminded of a song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkaKwXddT_I [youtube.com]
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday December 07 2015, @06:34AM
Further, the millennials keep appearing to be dated as starting further and further back with each new graph I see. I used to be about a year older than the millennials. Now I'm about three years within the millennials.
But I'm drunk and this is junk that I can't even call "science".
Speaking of science. I remember how in sixth grade, I had colored folders with the class topic written on them, in cursive. One of my classmates came along and demanded, borderline accusingly, "Is that the name of your GIRLFRIEND?!" I stammered back, stunned for a second, something about how it was the class we were in currently. He was clearly fucking with me, but it wasn't until years later that it occurred to me out of the blue that he possibly couldn't read cursive in spite of it being taught for years prior. Based upon the terrible things people say about my seemingly arbitrarily decided age group, maybe... maybe my people ARE the boogyman millennials. I don't know though. I look down at my dick and know what gender I am. I appreciate music that involves playing real fucking instruments. I am a pretty damn good cook. I've lived by myself since I was 18. Maybe I'm just a man out of time.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 07 2015, @01:04PM
... in sixth grade... it wasn't until years later that it occurred to me out of the blue that he possibly couldn't read cursive in spite of it being taught for years prior.
Cursive is dead. They don't teach it anymore. Source is my kids who are older than your anecdote. Also it varies from area to area but 6th is just old enough to be first year of middle school, I'd bet the illiterate kid went to a different elementary school that gave up on cursive earlier than your school.
Its possible you had a hot teacher and you were getting teased about her class. Now that I have kids and I meet their teachers and some of them, wow. The death of teaching as a profession due to burnout etc means they're almost all like 25 years old. Its unusual for my kids to have a teacher who is over 30. That's the death of a profession, I guess.
Anyway, not kidding.... my kids don't know cursive. At all. Never learned in school. No worksheets no discussion not even an option. They can't "sign" their own names in cursive which is kinda funny.
I hold some of the blame, I'm just barely old enough to have learned engineering draftsman blockcaps font before taking CAD classes, and other than my signature I haven't written anything in cursive since middle school or so.
I remember being told some line of BS that in college I'd be required to write in cursive, but when I got there its all wordprocessor typed (word perfect era) or blockcaps in things like lab notebooks. They actually collected our ochem lab notebooks and graded our raw notes, and you better be transcribing safety notes etc and everything better be in readable blockcaps font. Of course that "mindless" transcribing probably saved some lives and property in ochem lab... Ditto in high school "they're gonna require you to write in cursive in high school" and it was again all typing / word processor / block lettering.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday December 07 2015, @03:59PM
Actually, now that you mention the different school bit, it was probably me. I went to a pretty bad school for the first year or two and then I was homeschooled for a while (mom stayed at home and we couldn't afford a private school) before ending up in THAT school, which was supposed to be a "good" one. I don't remember when exactly cursive was introduced to me, but it might have been during the homeschool years. I just kind of always assumed it was still in the curriculum by then.
In retrospect, I think it probably screwed me up more than it helped, all things considered. I mean, sure, I could do long division years before it was even introduced and I could read at a college level, but the amount of contempt I developed for the other students and the lack of difficulty in the schoolwork probably did more harm than good, long term.
Nowadays I can write in cursive, and it's pretty legible, but I'm shaky and can't write in it all that fast. I guess it's a use it or lose it thing.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by tempest on Monday December 07 2015, @02:26PM
I'm at the tail end of Generation X and I'm fairly different than those at the front end (perhaps because my parents were in the Silent Generation). The whole idea of labeling them "X" was that they didn't have any defining event for their generation, except that's been true since the end of the Boomers. Currently there should only be one generation after "X": those who can't remember a time before the Internet (Gen-Z).
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 07 2015, @09:21PM
There used to be a generation between Millennial and GenX that seems to have been absorbed.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Magic Oddball on Monday December 07 2015, @04:58AM
The generation naming model doesn't actually match reality, and hasn't for quite a while now. The mess is a bit convoluted, so I'll start with my experience IRL:
My parents, their siblings, friends & cousins were born between roughly 1946-1955, and had kids during roughly 1970-1985. Almost everyone I've known that was (like me) born in the late 70s also had Boomer parents. My older cousins (1968-1973) had their kids between 1990 and 2010.
In Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales Of An Accelerated Culture, he states that X starts in 1960, as *he* was born in 1961. (Either he, or another article on the topic back in the early 90s, indicates that "Generation Y or Why" begins in the late 70s.)
The generation-naming model, however, claims this:
Boomers: 1946-1965
Generation X (Silent offspring): 1965-1980
Millennial (Boomer offspring): 1980-2000
Note two big problems. First, the oldest Baby Boomers (b. 1946) end up being 35 years old before they have their kids — even though IRL, the norm for their generation was to start having kids in their early twenties. Second, Generation X no longer includes the guy that wrote the book defining its existence, and is now only 15 years even though the previous & following generations are both 20 years.
I think Coupland had the right idea when he defined his generation by cultural shifts (though I'd emphasize changes in what an average childhood is like), which also is nicely matched by music styles, so I'd have it more like this:
[World War II Ends]
1945-1960 Baby Boom
[Civil Rights Era gets into full swing?]
1960-1975 Generation X
[Tech Revolution (Computer, VCR, Microwave, Game console, CD...)]
1975-1990 Generation Y**
[Internet becomes common/Eternal September]
1990-?? [name?]
**I hate the term "Millennial," plus it'd end a decade too early for the name.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Monday December 07 2015, @05:15AM
I don't know man, pre-2000 the internet was a very different place.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 07 2015, @05:56AM
Yeah, it was different pre-2000, but it was different. The elementary schooler who started school in 1990 had internet, however different it was. (Most of them, anyway.) He grew up with the idea that the console in the library or computer class was capable of finding complex, important answers.
Kids like me, who started school in 1961 had no such a concept. I learned the Dewey Decimal System, learned to use the card catalog, and burrowed my way through the Jr. High, then the High School, and the City Libraries. I exhausted the first two, and had made real inroads on exhausting the City library before I left home. Knowledge was finite back then, and often inaccessible as well.
To the "millenials", knowledge is virtually infinite, or at least data is. The discovery of knowledge is limited only by their willingness and ability to chase it down.
When Apple and Microsoft first started putting PC's in schools, that did define a break between generations. The older generation will never really understand the younger, nor will the younger ever understand digging through libraries for information that may or may not exist in that particular library.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @01:40PM
You must have experiences a very different early internet than me. The early internet didn't contain too many complex, important answers. It did, however, allow you to connect with people that knew the complex, important answers. So if you had a problem, you didn't go to a search engine to get a ready-made answer, you went to an Usenet group to get an answer from real people (well, there were of course the FAQs, also posted regularly on Usenet). And "RTFM" referred to the manual you had locally, either in paper, or as file on your local computer.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday December 07 2015, @05:57PM
This is how i remember it as well. Search engines didn't turn up professional sites. They turned up geocities pages. If i needed answers about something then i didn't dial up the internet for answers. I inserted the Holy Encarta Compact Disk and marveled over it's ability to have so much information on such a small disk. Like you said though, it was easy to contact real people. Everyone put their email addresses out there on public pages. IRC was also amazing for meeting other technical people.
Early internet was so different. You watched images being rendered line by line. Video was like magic when you first saw it. Then buffering became the biggest joke and video was seen as almost not worth the effort. The internet consisted mostly of text written by other people because they wanted to. Look at the difference between SN and every other modern site. Pretty cool stuff : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by theronb on Monday December 07 2015, @06:46AM
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Monday December 07 2015, @12:40PM
Like most such generalizations, the concept that these "generations" define the people born during those periods is pretty much worthless.
There's two reasons the legacy media (and only the legacy media) push it intensely.
1) Its a prog vaccination for nationalism, especially white nationalism. Certain people do not want a united nation (note the lack of s) they want to do the ole divide and conquer thing for a variety of off topic reasons. So I'm not an american, or a white person, or a white male american, I'm a gen-x and that means I have no common cause with white male americans of other generations, especially no common cause with male members of my own family, which is of course BS. On the topic of divide and conqueror, also see hyphenated-american, same general game plan and overall purpose but different tactic. Also its just as effective at screwing over black nationalists as it is at screwing over white nationalists, but nothing pisses off progs more than white men, so its obviously more fun to use them as an example, although rest assured it sucks for everyone.
2) Astrology is for dumb people and burned out boomer hippie acid casualties and heavy smokers. But its so darn useful. Its basically the medieval equivalent of used car salesman skills, a good astrologer can feed any line of bs to anyone anytime to manipulate their emotions to any goal. So the same dirtbag who would have been wearing a leopard print leisure suit in 1973 and asking "hey baby whats your sign?" would today be making language-sounding noises about generational names in order to stir the pot. Its a strong indicator the true believer is either an idiot or trying to sell you something. "Yo, man, twenty three skiddoo and gen-y is ascendant in the boss house of pluto, man, dontcha get it? err, I meant to say I'm a Pisces baby, that means I'm a real lover, whats your sign? err I mean I'm a gen-y so can I get laid now?"
In summary, depending on who you hate and how much you hate them, pushing generation labels ranges from merely being inhumane and manipulative to being downright evil. As far as content free clickbait from a dying sector of the media goes, it could be worse.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 07 2015, @04:47PM
Its a prog vaccination for nationalism
I don't think that's the reason. Rather, I think it all started as an obvious demographic effect, a population bubble in the 50s. Then pundits and some of the lazier historians started using generational labels as an easy way to generate copy. If you're going to talk about the baby boomers as a label because it's easy, then of course, you need an easy label for the people who came after and then the people who came after that. This has evolved to the point of unintentional parody [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday December 07 2015, @06:47AM
Frankly I think that anything that fails to try to establish any sort of meaningful generational difference between pre-internet human beings and post-internet human beings is suspect at best.
I mean, yeah, I suppose they MAY be the same "generation" (nevermind that the gap is so large now that you could easily have parents AND their children in the same generation--wtf?) but I think if you're actually going to try to extrapolate anything even BORDERLINE intelligent out of the divides, you really should take a look at the difference between people who have used the motherfucking Dewey Decimal System and cracked open a goddamned encyclopedia at least once in their lives and those who haven't.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @10:22AM
Err … you are aware that the internet is a bit older than Wikipedia? There was a whole internet culture long before Web 2.0 (and indeed, even before Web 1.0).
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday December 07 2015, @01:27PM
Yes. I'm referring to a point in time where people existed without ubiquitous access to it. Something existing doesn't hold a lot of meaning for you if you can't get to it. Fine though, let's get pedantic and instead of "post-internet", say, "Eternal September" then.
It's at least a more meaningful cutoff that "whatever the fuck a Gold Mansacks analyst feels is good today".
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Monday December 07 2015, @07:18AM
**I hate the term "Millennial," plus it'd end a decade too early for the name.
your numbers are off. one generation is considered to be 20 years. a "Millennial" is a person born sometime between 1980 and 2000. the ending date of 2000, the turn of the millennium, is where the term Millennial comes from.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 07 2015, @01:07PM
Don't worry mate, they'll stop pretty soon. I mean, look, with Z they reached the end of the alphabet.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @01:43PM
Looking at the ASCII table, next should be Generation [
(Score: 1) by FunnyItWorkedLastTime on Monday December 07 2015, @02:09PM
Thus was defined another age bracket, the Gen-\ will probably revolt though.
(Score: 3, Funny) by cmn32480 on Monday December 07 2015, @04:23PM
Only if they are introduced to Beta.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday December 07 2015, @06:04PM
I expect both of the next generations will escape this silly naming convention and just go with Gen \[.
Ever had a belch so satisfying you have to blow your nose afterward?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 07 2015, @01:19PM
I've also seen it broken up by universally experienced events like JFK getting shot, first moon landing, Challenger explosion, 9/11 attacks... Maybe 20 years from now, young people will talk about Ferguson as being something they all experienced in some form, live, hard to say. In the future maybe President Trump will do something noteworthy (for good or bad), or the fall of the house of Saud and the sudden end of the oil era, or the first colony on the moon or first humans on mars or the first terrorist atomic attack or a flu epidemic wipes out 5% of the population or who knows what'll almost certainly happen someday in the future.
And another breakdown I've seen is military. I'm actually old enough to have been alive when the USA wasn't at war in the middle east. Most high school kids today don't get to say that, in fact plenty of them are probably going to end up fighting over there. That must be weird from a USA cultural perspective to be a little grade school kid knowing you'll fight in the same war more than a decade later when you grow up, or grow up knowing you'll fight in the same war your daddy fought in. Its not unheard of worldwide, but for the USA its something new. D-Day till the end of the war was a pretty short interval, even Pearl Harbor until the a-bombs wasn't that long, the war of northern aggression wasn't that long, our involvement in WWI was very short, of course as a counterexample there was Vietnam.
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Monday December 07 2015, @06:33AM
Judging from the state of societies in this day and age, I would name the current generation "El Fucked".
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Monday December 07 2015, @07:28AM
It is rather simple. There have been scientific studies that show that conservatives (oh, how to I put this so as not to offend?) are not too bright and mostly motivated by fear. So I suggest that we scare them. Right now they are being scared by immigrants and ISIS and the terrorists under their bed or in their closets. But what if, just what if, they had to worry about the normal citizens around them having finally had enough of their shit. We can tell if you are tuned to Fox News on your cable box, Trump supporter. We know who you are, and where you are, because you are not smart enough to know that Android and Micro$oft 10 give us all that information. And we will track you the same way you track abortion doctors. Except, it only takes one or two to cower the conservatives. Abortion providers are doing the right thing, so they do not respond to violence. But conservatives do, since that is the only thing they understand. Why are they running around with loaded weapons hidden under their clothes? When I was a young Greek, only assassins would conceal their weapons. And when I was in the old West, any honest gunslinger or lawman would wear iron outside their pants. Only coward would hide their gat, cowards or criminals, or Republicans, but I repeat myself.
So I am with Ann Coulter, conservative can be killed, and they should live in abject fear that they could be. Of course, they are the ones that actually would capitulate to ISIS, and Sharia law, because they already have capitulated to some rather wacko versions of Christian Sharia law. Where in the Bible does it say that abortion is forbidden? Where does it say that homosexuals can't marry? And where does it say that these stupid conservative can eat raw (or even cooked!) oysters and and remarry as many times as suits them? Stoning is too good for them. I suggest we just kind of insinuate violence. I would never advocate violence, which is probably the thing the conservative would disagree with me the most, but I think we should at least make them nervous. Being a fundamentalist asshole has consequences, the greatest of which is what happens after you die and find out that everything you were taught was a lie. But there could be other unpleasantries before that. Wedgies for Dominionists! That's my new slogan! Who would Jesus Wedgie?
And I just want to say, that this generation, the current generation, the ones that are coming up now, they will do this thing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 07 2015, @12:20PM
The more mass media friendly name would be "peasant generation" because that's about the best they're gonna be able to hope for.
(Score: 1) by driverless on Monday December 07 2015, @07:55AM
I'm sure they'd be very interested, mostly to try and figure out whether the vampire squid can suck as much money out of Gen.Whatever as they did from the parents.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @09:58AM
In my days we didn't have so many classifications of population. It all reeks of good old "divide and conquer" public opinion steering scheme. Invent large groups of people, invent their self-awareness and generation-specific traits and minutia, pit them against each other, sell them things they don't really need, ... profit!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 07 2015, @07:11PM
Yeah I think you've got it. It's a marketing ploy. It's how you sell the next cadre of humans the stuff that their parents and grandparents already have, and who could in a sane world simply give them hand-me-downs.
So the marketers and brand gurus, above and beyond the individual stuff they sell, are selling the verity that you are defined by spending money. The clothes you wear, the car you drive, etc, etc. But now that mass-media is passing away, I think their grip on the public mind is beginning to slip.
I wouldn't be surprised if the touchstones for younger cadres don't turn out to be videos that went viral or internet memes, and those the marketing gurus haven't figured out how to manufacture yet.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:10AM
So, in other words, it's a bit like the we we do Christmas now?