You're a Boomer, but what generation are your kids?

We all know that Boomers were born between 1944 and 1953, but did you 
realize that cohorts following Boomers can be broken into several sub-categories  
According to Brainiac's GUIDE TO AMERICA'S GENERATIONS
1954-63: OGX (Original Generation X

1964-73:  PC Generation
1974-83: Net Generation
1984-93: Millennials

I found Brainiac's well-researched article very illuminating and thought-provoking, and reading it provoked me to create this blog this evening, so I want to recommend it here. 

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2008/01/generation_x.html)

Characterizing generations is rather like characterizing historical periods, an imaginative arbitrary construction, like a balloon, that offers different perspectives and invites comment, elaboration and 

most likely eventual destruction. But it makes for good ride, lots of fun if you enjoy exercising your mind. 

If your children were born between 1954 and 1963, 

they are the original Generation Xers (OGX)

By mistake they have sometimes been lumped in with the Boomers. 

In the early 2000s, Jonathan Pontell offered a new name for this lost generation, 

whose members, he claimed, were born between 1954 and 1965: "Generation Jones."

In the past year or so, Barack Obama (b. 1961) himself has become the spokesman                        for this lost generation, because of his insistence that his generation's worldview and 

politics aren't a Baby Boomer's.

Here is one man's attempt to characterize this unique generation to which I bet some                  of you belong, or had children that did:"The Original Generation X is cynical, ironic,                     skeptical -- which is not the same as directionless, nihilistic, or depressed! 

OGXers had a front-row seat for the Reagan Revolution, during which they saw "liberal" become a pejorative term, as many Americans recoiled from the various liberation movements (sexual, feminist, gay, ethnic) of the Sixties and Seventies. 

The Boomers had Roe v. Wade; OGXers got the anti-abortion backlash and the keeping-my-baby meme. The Boomers had the Apollo moon landing; OGXers got the Challenger explosion. Too young for Woodstock but not Altamont, just old enough for Watergate and the energy crisis, not to mention Three Mile Island.

In 1990 Time Magazine dubbed their youngest members "twentysomethings" (i.e., directionless, nihilistic, and depressed); and their oldest members were lumped in, strictly because of demographic considerations (which is foolish), with the Boomers. Whom they tend to resent and despise! No wonder two of their (non-American) cohort -- Billy Idol ('55) and novelist Douglas Coupland ('61) -- independently popularized the anti-label "Generation X."

The OGX is a generation that has brought us punk, post-punk, and cyberpunk, hardcore and hip hop ..."Seinfeld" and "The Simpsons," "Ghost World" and "Love and Rockets," "Master of Puppets" and "Pulp Fiction," "Slacker" and "Do The Right Thing," sardonic "charticles" and impossibly convoluted and footnoted prose. 

Howard Stern, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Arsenio Hall, Rosie O'Donnell, and Conan O'Brien are OGXers; so are the Hollywood Brat Pack and the New York one. Also: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer; Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and David Foster Wallace; Al Roker, Katie Couric, and Matt Lauer; and Madonna, Prince, Bon Jovi, and Michael Jackson. Plus: Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee.

This generation of latch-key kids and children of divorce were the first American adolescents to be informed -- incessantly, and persuasively, by TV shows and Hollywood movies -- what it's like to be an adolescent. "Lost in Space," "The Andy Griffith Show," "Happy Days," "The Brady Bunch," "The Partridge Family," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Taps," "Risky Business," "Little Darlings," "Bad News Bears," "The Outsiders," "Rumble Fish," "21 Jump Street," "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," "St. Elmo's Fire," "Pretty in Pink," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "Joanie Loves Chachi," "Family Ties," "Eight is Enough," and "One Day at a Time" all cast OGXers as... themselves, sorta. 

When French Situationist Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle)wrote that "the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him," this is the sort of alienation he meant. [Debord wrote that in 1967, when the oldest OGXers were 13, and the youngest 4 -- and all glued to the TV]" 

(This long quote is from the delightful article by Joshua Glenn available on his blog: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2008/01/generation_x.html)

Glen calls the children born in the years 1964-1973  "The PC Generation."  

Neil Howe and William Strauss's bestselling books "Generations" (1991) and "13th-Gen" (1993) claimed that these post-baby-boom "13ers" (aka Gen X) were born between 1961-81. [However, in their 1997 book "The Fourth Turning," Howe and Strauss confessed that the members of this so-called generation didn't buy into it: "Compared to any other generation born in this century, [the 13th generation] is less cohesive, its experiences wider and its culture more splintery."]

In 1993, the political advocacy group Third Millennium, announced that it had formed to represent the concerns of those Americans who'd been dubbed "twentysomethings" or "Generation X"; following Howe and Strauss, its leaders claimed that the cohort in question was born between 1961 and 1981. 

[In her 1998 book, Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the New Economy, a young economist named Meredith Bagby (b. 1974) said she was proud to be a member of Generation X, which she defined as those born between 1965-76].

In 1997, Time also claimed that "Generation X" was born between 1965-77. 


Generation Y (Glen's Netters) were born between 1974 and 1983
Who, then, are these  Generation Yers that we've heard so much about? 
The New York Times called "Generation Y" those born from 1976-90.
But Glenn argues that "there never was a Generation Y; like Generation X, 
it was a placeholder label that lumped together young Americans who were actually members of discrete generations." 


Instead Glenn calls them "the Net Generation, describing them as "Web-savvy, boss-flustering, heavily tattooed Americans, [who] were born between 1974 and 1983." 
[In other words, the older Netters were lumped in with younger PCers and called "Generation X," while the younger Netters were lumped in with older Millennials and called "Generation Y."


In this schema "Millenials" refers to the children born in or after 1982. 
According to the consumer research outfit Iconoculture, Millennials are those Americans 
who were 29 and under in 2007. In that scenario, the first Millennials were born in 1978. 
Newsweek, meanwhile, has described the Millennials as those born between 1977-94. 
In their 2000 bestseller Millennials Rising, Howe and Strauss claimed that Millennials were born between 1982 and 2002. 
[The nice thing about a flexible generational periodization scheme is that you can neatly peg the Millennials to 1982, which allows the first-born of their cohort to graduate in the year 2000]