Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Echo Boomers?

According to this ReadWriteWeb article about "Do regular people really read blogs?", GenY can also be referred to as "echo boomers". If I were a Millennial I might find this offensive. It seems to imply that you're only an echo of the Baby Boomers, although I'm sure the intent is to relate that Millennials are a big generation because they're children of the Boomers.

World Wide Words does a better job of detailing the phrase "echo boomers". Wikipedia also recognizes echo boomers, and goes on to detail several other generational terms I wasn't familiar with:
  • Generation C, where no one can quite agree on what the C stands for.
  • Generation Z, after Y and no memory before the War on Terror. I suspect, given their letter, they'll be the generation that fights the Zombie Wars.
  • Generation V, basically everyone who's been on the web or had to worry about hamster eating aliens.
  • Generation Jones, between boomers and Gen X - a breed of cusper. Not the group that went to the movies over the last few weeks.
  • iGeneration, which seems pretty lame, though it's self explanatory. If you're going to go that far, you might as well coin the term Generation 2.0 or Generation2.0 to indicate anyone who's used a blog, tagging system or social network. Alternatively, anyone who's ever uttered the phrase "folksonomy".
I'm not sure if all of that is necessary. Traditional (Greatest + Silent), Boomer, GenX, Millennial and the inbetween "cusper" seem sufficient to address current generation gap needs. But if you need finer gradations to work with, there's a nice chart here and here.

An interesting piece of trivia, according to Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman in When Generations Collide, what generation does everyone, including Generation Xers, think is the most difficult generation to manage? Generation Xers of course. You have to hate that innate distrust of authority and institution and drive for autonomy. Without good managers, it plays very poorly with a cube farm.

A funny quote, according to Taylor on his tumblr account, his intern asked, “Is he a Baby Boomer? Because I’ve noticed they have bad ideas and don’t listen to other people.” I hope he took a moment to educate after laughing.

3 comments:

Deejayneko said...

On a similar front, I always wished the British slang of calling the decade of 2000-2009 "The Naughties" would catch on. Closest I've heard is "The Naughts" which sounds like a gastric problem.

Well, off to rebel against authority!

Anonymous said...

Ha Ha! The Naughties. I like it!

Scooter said...

Figures you'd laugh at SlipperyNip as you're married to him.