Monday, February 16, 2009

What is Generation Y?

Finally someone has explained it so that I too understand.....

The Silent generation, people born before 1946..

The Baby Boomers, people born between 1946 and 1964.

Generation X, people born between 1965 and 1983.

Generation Y, people born between 1984 and 2002

Why do we call the last one generation Y?

I did not know, but a caricaturist explains it eloquently below...




3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I must admit -- you made me laugh!

Jay said...

Interesting listing of the generations. And Gen Y IS sometimes over the top.
but---are they also the ones known as the millenial generation? Aren't they also leading us into using some of the Web 2.0 tools? And, haven't they been a significant factor in helping Barack Obama conduct a new kind of presidential campaign? They seem to have contributed a lot more already than some of the previous generations.

Randy Seaver said...

Jay,

The generation names are from the book Generations by Strauss and Howe. In their later books, they called Y the Millennials as you noted. The years in this post (which was intended as a joke) are a little different from Strauss and Howe's list. For instance, this puts Obama born 1961 in Boomers but many think he's an X.

You may be right that the Y's are really using the Web 2.0 things well, and are probably creating the next wave (Web 3.0?). But most of them are too young still.

I'm not sure that they have helped or hurt - you can fool some of the people all of the time. They did change the election paradigm, for sure.