Sean-Ward.com

Today included another staff development meeting at work, and once again, the topic was this upcoming generation group. While I do like the topic of generations and the differences between them, it does tend to become very repetitive after a while. Sure, I’ve gone to see speakers about the subject, but it comes down to that personal decision regarding it; the option to not go to this meeting did not exist. But, moving on…

At this particular staff development, we watched a documentary titled Generation Next.

Generation Next is a massively diverse, exceedingly tolerant and extraordinarily informed group of people. In this one-hour documentary, acclaimed journalist Judy Woodruff travels across the U.S. and speaks with young adults 16-25-year-olds to gauge their beliefs on today’s most pressing issues — such as terrorism, immigration, environment and health care. What she found will surprise you.

If you are part of this generation, or heard other speakers about this topic, her findings are not surprising at all.

Filmed in 2006, this documentary focuses on individuals born between 1981 and 1990. As is normal, I found myself more like the generation in discussion than I would with the generation I am occasionally grouped with, Gen X. As I’ve [?link:http://sean-ward.com/node/33 stated previously (1/4/06)], despite being born in 1980, I went to a community college for two years following high school before attending BGSU for four years. As a result, since I spent time with members of a supposedly different generation group, and due to previous events in my life, I don’t believe I should be classified in Generation X.

Looking at the demographics page on Wikipedia, which I know some would say is a horrible idea, it still helps define what Gen X and Gen Y are. The issue, however, is that that page lists the X and Y cohort groups as being from 1956 to 1976 and from 1983 to 2007, respectively; what about 1977 to 1982? On that same page, it says that X is from 1964 to 1979 and Y is from 1980 to 1999. The page that got me there, Generation X, said that “Generation X includes anyone born from 1961 to 1981″, which of course go against the explanation on the side and the page I eventually went to. How did I get to the Generation X page? I go there from Generation, which lists Generation X as being form 1963 to 1983. I’m not highlighting these differences to point out faults with Wikipedia, as even listening to different speakers on the subject matter will give you similar ranges that conflict with one another.

After scanning a list of generations, I did see the a group called XY Cusp, which is a concept I was thinking about during the staff development. Even in astrology, people born at the end of one sign and beginning of another are said to be on the cusp, meaning that they share some aspects of both. Generational cusp groups exist for most generations, and in the case of this generation sub group, it relates to people born from 1976 to 1983, and is called the MTV Generation, which I personally find to be a terrible name. As stated in the Wikipedia article, and from personal experience, a valid argument, members of the XY Cusp are “generationally bilingual. They can act as translators and ambassadors between the generations.” Sure, I may like that comment because it boosts my ego and my belief about myself, but it makes sense.

Aside from that, there’s the fact that I really was ignorant of the world at large until the beginning of high school. I don’t mean that I thought there was nothing there or important, I just wasn’t exposed to it as much until then, a large part of this was due to my friends, or lack thereof at the time. In high school I eventually met people that I hung out with and did stuff with, whereas previously I just did stuff with Ryan, my younger brother, and Eric, our neighbor, who was Ryan’s age. That’s the way it goes in the suburbs though.

Since being in the XY Cusp cohort makes me part of the MTV Generation, I might as well reference music. My personal taste was always more of the Generation X grunge and alternative rock than hip hop. However, in my mind, Kurt Cobain has always been dead. I cannot recall knowing a time when I knew of Nirvana being a band that hadn’t ended already, which is a view of Generation Y.

When I compare myself with my friends with whom I have remained close with following high school, I see that I do tend to use technology more in the manner of students and recent college graduates. This may simply be the result of working with college students, which then presents me with situations to see what they do and how they use it, something that I have occasionally commented on here. (I’m not sure where or when exactly. Use the search and find out if you want.) That is probably the biggest thing that makes me relate more with Gen Y than Gen X, and thus a definite member of the XY cusp. I recall using comptuers as early as kindergarden and the Internet as early as middle school. However, most of the people I may have gone to school with weren’t using either of these things that often, nor was the degree of use anything like kids now a days. When they did get Internet access, it was due to an AOL account, and that was what the web was. Personally, we first were dialing into the Cleveland Public Library to get online, and after that it was always a dial-up account with an ISP that was not one of larger names, like AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe.

(The problem with trying to type up something like this is that I think I have the time, but then I need to stop to take of things. As a result, I sometimes lose my train of thought and have trouble finding it again.)

I already said that I thought of the concept of a cusp cohort while watching it, but afterwards, I also thought about a normal distribution bell curve, and how the factors that describe a generation probably only refer to about 68.2% of the people born during that particular time frame, which is one standard deviation away from the mean. I also thought about the fact that the most recent generations have been going on at the same time of the adoption and diffusion of many technologies, including the Internet, and this blurs the lines of the generations, as many innovators and early adoptors may then feel more connected with the upcoming generation than they do with their own, especially if the technology happened when there was a “changing of the guard” happening. That’s pretty much what I’m getting at, and why the XY Cusp cohort makes sense to me. In fact, the XY Cusp cohort group’s start time matches up with the [?http://sean-ward.com/node/66 Gamer Generation] that John C. Beck has mentioned.

However, even looking up some of the recent generations list multiple sub-cohort groups, which shows that trying to group all this into a time span of even 20 years is very hard, and that it isn’t a simple relationship of the year you were born in defines who you are. In conversation I typically mention that trying to define who ias part of what group and what that means is hard to do while that group is the current cohort and one of the more recent cohorts. Much like trying to understand events and how they affect people and the world, time is typically needed to get a decent understanding. So, until I’m about 60 or so, I don’t expect the air to be clear in regards to this issue.

And chances are, I’ll post on this again sometime in the future.