Bran Blackbyrd said:
People didn't start talking about generation X until I was half way through highschool. At the time the people whom they were referring to as Gen-X were my age. Most of the children of the baby boomers, people who were teens in the 60s, 70s and early 80s, didn't really ever get a nickname. Maybe they got lumped in with the punks, yuppies, etc from the "Me Generation".
Perhaps in your area, that may have been true. Generation-X was already an old term by that time, though. The first time I heard of Generation X was in 1979, in reference to the famous punk rock band that Billy Idol came from. Douglas Coupland claims that the title of his book came not from the band, but instead from a sociology book. I think he's full of malarkey, and trying to cover his tracks, frankly.
The problem with any 'generational' name is that there is a base concept of a generation, which really has no official span or length. For example: the famed "Baby Boomers", named for the post-WWII birth spurts that spawned them, is generally accepted as 1946-1965....because this was when the huge increase in births subsided. But early boomers and late boomers are from competely different generations culturally. Someone born in 1948 has very little in common with someone born in 1964.
Consequently, the media is always looking for a way to bundle folks together. The 1965-1975 'generation' was labeled the 'baby busters' by the media, to reflect the sudden drop in the birth rate. It stuck, but barely. Since then, they've been stumped. Generation-X has been given a variety of birth ranges to work from.
From the Generation-X FAQ:
- [font=Arial,Helvetica][size=+1]Who exactly IS Gen-X?[/size][/font]This question is in [font=Arial,Helvetica]hot dispute[/font]. In the mid-1980's the Gen-Xer's had been labeled "Baby Busters", due to the low birthrates of the 1965-75 age bracket. Demographers noticed as early as 1966 that the "boom" was over, and began planning and budgeting downward for this massive change from the "boom" in births between 1946-1964. (These "Boomer" dates, by the way, have never been in doubt nor have they been doubted or tampered with by the media.) Today, however, many people lump those born in the years 1961-81 together. Why 1961? Despite being Doug Coupland's birthyear, it more likely began with theHowe & Strauss book "Generations", which used those years. The 1961-81 years are also being accepted and popularized by media like TIME magazine, which has used those years in a Gen-X cover story. The years 1965-79, 1964-82, 1960-1970, 1966-1977, and 1970-1983 have also been used in articles on Gen-X, but these all seem very arbitrary, and as you can tell, are all over the map, demographically."
In other words, it's just a label that no one can even agree on. Depending on who you ask, I'm a Baby-buster or a Gen-Xer. A kid born five years after I was would be hard pressed to understand why Pong was so amazing when it first debuted, or that color TV was an innovation to be boasted of ("The Brady Bunch! In
COLOR!"). Hell, he might not even remember time before cable TV.
But by the same token, he and I probably both enjoyed MegaMan or Donkey Kong, both owned an Atari, and so forth.
Go figure.
