Ah 1990…the year NATO and the Warsaw Pact signed a joint declaration of non-aggression; the year that Nelson Mandela was freed after having spent twenty-seven years in prison; the penultimate year that the San Francisco 49ers won the Super Bowl.
I find it fairly easy to situate the year I was born in a historical context. Deciphering which cultural generation I belong to, however, is more like trying to figure out when the 49ers will next win the Super Bowl.
Most commentators now generally agree on the spans associated with the Baby Boomers and Generation X, but the elusive and continually evolving Generation Y remains somewhat harder to pin down. Many demographers see Gen Y as beginning sometime in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, but often disagree about when it comes to term, which ranges anywhere from 1989 to as late as 2002. It is often followed by the so-called Generation Z, which begins somewhere in the late ‘90s/early 2000s.
Where do we fit int0 all of this? Yes, mid to late-90s kids, the ones who brought Giga Pets to school and pretended to be Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, I’m talking to you. The answer is that we don’t.
The current paradigm of what constitutes a generation is outdated. The idea that a population can be neatly cut up into approximately 30-year spans and attributed a certain set of cultural values is incompatible with the rate at which technology is evolving. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of my generation, a group that I believe falls somewhere between about the ages of 16 and 21 today, and that forms a sort of “Transition Generation”.
This group sits on the cusp of what is most commonly referred to as Gen Y and the yet to be fully formed Gen Z. Take, for instance, the Internet, which could easily be singled out as one of the defining aspects, if not the most important cultural element, of the current generation.
Unlike Generation Yers, most of whom were already well into their teens when the Internet really began to hit, and thus had to adapt to the innovation, the Transition Generation was much younger when the Web took off, and in a certain sense evolved with the technology. Having grown up with the very first personal computers (I remember taking my first “computer science” class in 4th grade), this group is more attuned to variations in the technoverse, is better equipped to adapt to changes in today’s technology-saturated world. For instance, we represent more than two thirds of active users on popular social networking site facebook.com.
The Transition Generation also occupies a particularly unique space in time relative to what is currently this century’s defining historical and socio-political event: the attacks of September 11th, 2001. We were too young to understand the complexity behind the causes and consequences surrounding the attack, and thus were never truly imbibed with the same level of intense fear that gripped most people (including many members of Gen Y) in the U.S. soon after the attacks. Yet, at the ages of 9, 10, 11, or 12 we were old enough to grasp the extreme significance of the event, and the day will remain cemented in our minds in a way that the members of Generation Z will never be able to understand.
The ease with which we adapt to technological change, as well as the fact that we grew up removed from the deep-seated fear and xenophobia generated by 9/11 (and were able to observe its cultural aftermath in some of our most intellectually formative years) represent only a couple of the many factors that put the Transition Generation into a very fortunate position. This generation has an opportunity to provide the essential link between previous generations such as X and Y, used to a world predating the Internet and the post-9/11 mentality, and the generations to come, that will know nothing but. Hopefully, we’ll know not to waste that chance.
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