
Xennials, the micro generation between Gen X and Millennials - jrs235
http://www.businessinsider.com/people-born-between-gen-x-millennials-xennials-2017-11
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krapp
I don't understand why so much effort has been put into branding
"generations," but it's just gotten more and more ridiculous as time goes on.
Now we're doing transitive generations, apparently. Soon every quarter will
have its own generation, like game consoles. Probably named after game
consoles.

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oceanghost
You cant have identity politics without identity.

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eesmith
Sure, but irrelevant, and your comment is seemingly more a random attack
against liberals than anything deep.

It's more likely a marketing term. It's much easier to sell to people if you
can convince them of a special identity, and promote things as being part of
that identity. Marketers spend a lot of money trying to identify and target
certain demographics, and they will try different things to see what works.

Consider Malcom Gladwell's TED talk on "Choice, happiness and spaghetti
sauce". Prego made a lot of money by identifying different market segments
with different tastes and preferences in pasta sauce. You can think of it as a
k-means clustering, where each cluster center is a different flavor ... or a
different group of people.

Of course, sometimes there aren't 'k' clusters, or the clusters have been
misidentified, or the boundaries are simply vague.

In any case, it could also simply be that talking heads love to promote their
sociological interpretation of how the world works.

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oceanghost
Gladwell is pop science at best. He weaves everything into a neat narrative
which is too convenient.

It's funny how you construe the mere mention of "identity politics" as an
attack on your beliefs. :)

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eesmith
It's funny how irrelevant "identity politics" is to the topic, and yet you
keep bringing it up.

I thought my example was quite apropos.

Most of marketing is based on pop science. That is, I believe that this so-
called identification of (micro)generations comes from a marketing technique
of identifying sub-populations that can be marketed towards. Gladwell gives an
example of why marketing people try to do that. I then relate it with
clustering, where there's a long history of finding good - and bad! - cluster
centers.

Would you care to explain how identity politics provides a more meaningful
interpretation than what I gave?

Or, for that matter, how it provides any meaningful interpretation, other than
"talks about identity therefore must be associated with identity politics."

To be clear, I think that 'identity politics' can be meaningful. Consider the
transphobic bathroom bills which sprang up last. That's a clear case of people
using the formal political system to castigate others based on identity.

Similarly, when a security guard attacks someone who identifies as a woman and
who was assigned female at birth, for using the woman's room because she
didn't look feminine enough (on the presumption that she must be male), than
that's an informal use of identity politics. (This is not hypothetical:
[https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-
woman-k...](https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-woman-kicked-
out-restaurant-bathroom-looking-man-sues) ).

But _politics_ must somehow be involved for this to be "identity politics",
and I just don't see it.

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jhbadger
This argument is really weird. Somebody born in the US in 1980 certainly
wasn't too old to have gaming consoles growing up. The Atari 2600 already was
in millions of homes by then and the Nintendo NES would have been released
when they were toddlers.

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jgowdy
NES released in North America in 1985. Toddlers are 1-3 years old. I don’t
mean to be pedantic but as someone born in 1979, your statement didn’t match
my experience.

I agree though, I already had significant time on my Atari 2600 and on my
father’s Intellivision before NES came out.

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sudosteph
Why is toddler the age you use to consider whether someone grew up with game a
console? I was born in the early 90s and had a Nintendo 64 first (released in
96). Just because I was 6 or 7 when I got it doesn't mean I didn't effectively
grow up with one.

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jgowdy
Toddler is what was said, so toddler is what I was correcting. I didn’t make
the statement in your question, “toddler is the age you use to consider
whether someone grew up with a game console.”

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brightball
Born in 1980 here and prefer “Generation X-wing” thank you very much.

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Arubis
Indeed. I much prefer “the MTV generation”, ie. those of Ian that remember MTV
as primarily playing music videos.

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sudosteph
That experience doesn't seem much different from millenials born in the early
90s. We also played outside, made phone calls and used floppy disks. Most of
my friend group didn't get cell phones or myspace until high school, forget
facebook.

The only real difference I see is we had playstation or 64s first, not NES,
ataris, or sega genesis. Though I guess gameboys and tamagotchi were pretty
new.

Seems like an arbitrary distinction. Just because the millenial experience
isn't perfectly uniform doesn't mean they aren't still part of it.

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tonyarkles
I’m chuckling a little bit as someone who would be considered part of the
Xennials (born 1983). Your comment about friends not getting cellphones until
high school is what got me. I didn’t get a cellphone until nearly the end of
university. From my observations going back for my MSc a couple years after
getting my BSc, university life with and without cellphones is dramatically
different.

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Piskvorrr
Eh. Kuwait, Iraq, same thing, right? (~similar place, different decade) Also,
the Balkans look far scarier when it's a few hours' drive...and even scarier
in retrospect, when you find that some of your friends of the same age
_fought_ in the Yugoslav war(s).

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warbucks
If a recurring theme of your childhood was the saturation and ever present
threat of nuclear war throughout the media you consumed, as was the case with
most entertainment in the 80s, then you are a member of generation x. It does
not matter what year you were born.

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jadell
Born 1981 here. My cohort call ourselves the "Oregon Trail Generation".

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hashkb
Missed the cutoff by a year. Guess I'm a millennial. I stop working now,
right?

