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"Twitter is very popular with young people, according to reports about young people by middle-aged people" - Onion. I have Twitter, but never use it, for the s

by IsaacL 17y ago

"Twitter is very popular with young people, according to reports about young people by middle-aged people" - Onion. I have Twitter, but never use it, for the same reason I didn't have a Facebook account for a long time; very few people I know use it. I reckon it'll have taken off amongst UK university students by the end of the year, though. I understand the comment about "self-branding", though I think that applies to younger teenagers. When I was in high school, I cared about making my MySpace profile a perfect expression of myself (without looking like I was trying to do so) - now I'm older, not so much. The comment about posting status updates to show how cool and exciting your life is rings true, but I don't think Gen Y is the only one guilty of narcissism, and we're not all that narcissistic. In fact, I don't think the concept of "Generation Y" is a very useful one. It seems like the Boomers were very united as a generation against their parents values (at least how history seems to portray it) - us kids today, not so much. Very few people I know would define themselves as part of "Gen Y".

IsaacL 17y ago
I remember finding the whole generations concept fascinating when I first heard about it, but I think this quote from the Wikipedia article sums up my misgivings about the concept : "Britney Spears is seen publicly as the female pop icon of Generation Y[19][20][21][22], due to her enormous music career success and pop culture impact during the late 1990s to early 2000s. Eminem is also a huge voice for the Generation Y. His album "The Marshall Mathers LP" has affected many of the youths in that generation." This is about as useful as saying "the average human has one testicle". I imagine the intersection of "people who like Britney Spears" and "people who like Eminem" is fairly small, yet you hear a lot of this kind of thing, where it's assumed that most Gen Y-ers were involved in all the trends of the 90s and 00s. I can understand that there's certain cases where saying "x% of people born in the 1980s like y, compared to only z% born in the 1970s" can be informative. What doesn't work is when the media starts trying to amalgamate all the trends into a narcissistic, apathetic, social-network-using, ritalin-popping, blogging, twittering, hyperactive, Pokemon-playing, tech-savvy, lazy, childish, ADHD-suffering hip-hop listening, emo self-centred archetype.

by IsaacL 17y ago

IsaacL 17y ago

I remember finding the whole generations concept fascinating when I first heard about it, but I think this quote from the Wikipedia article sums up my misgivings about the concept : "Britney Spears is seen publicly as the female pop icon of Generation Y[19][20][21][22], due to her enormous music career success and pop culture impact during the late 1990s to early 2000s. Eminem is also a huge voice for the Generation Y. His album "The Marshall Mathers LP" has affected many of the youths in that generation." This is about as useful as saying "the average human has one testicle". I imagine the intersection of "people who like Britney Spears" and "people who like Eminem" is fairly small, yet you hear a lot of this kind of thing, where it's assumed that most Gen Y-ers were involved in all the trends of the 90s and 00s. I can understand that there's certain cases where saying "x% of people born in the 1980s like y, compared to only z% born in the 1970s" can be informative. What doesn't work is when the media starts trying to amalgamate all the trends into a narcissistic, apathetic, social-network-using, ritalin-popping, blogging, twittering, hyperactive, Pokemon-playing, tech-savvy, lazy, childish, ADHD-suffering hip-hop listening, emo self-centred archetype.