Did you know, baby boomers seem to be the only ones who love the name of their generation!
It doesn’t change the world and it’s nothing new, but here’s a small article which allows us to illustrate this. For those who missed previous episodes, we have 5 demographic generations right now:
So why is it since the baby boom, generations were given only one letter?
Because authors/sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe published a book entitled Generations, in which they described the Amercian generations since 1584. According to them, there were altogether 4 types of generations that follow in an endless cycle. If their thesis (published in 1991) has not been terribly well followed by historians, it was a Canadian writer, Douglas Coupland, which, in the same year, made a book “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”. It describes the angst of this generation in search of new spiritual values.
X are thus assigned this letter for expressing their search for values (as if they were the only ones), their difficulty to be positioned in an uncertain world and became bound by their elders who invented rock & roll, computers, retirement pay and the Wonderbra. Then one day in 2001, a journalist or a consultant (we know their imagination) finally said that after X comes Y. Bravo. And here we are again left with a name derived from a generation of a derogatory term ( X = baby loser and in France X = …. well, let’s not go there right now).
In the series “I’m doing investigations on anything and everythign as it comes to my consulting firm”, a U.S. survey involved interviewing several thousand people on their feelings about their title of “X” or “Y”. The results indicated that:
33% of Y would prefer that their digital prowess be recognised and be called the “Internet Generation”
25% of X would prefer “the Tech Generation”
44% of the Silent Generation prefer the term “Responsible Generation”
The study was reported in PlanAdvisor.com in September last year.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Genera(lisa)tion Y. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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