In short, we know the negative power of labels, (through the race turmoil of the 90′s, the gay rights movement, women entering the workforce) and we don’t like them. We don’t even particularly like wearing them on our clothing.

We can’t label ourselves, that would be opening ourselves up for generalizations, when each one of us wants nothing more than to be seen as unique and special. We accept everyone into our groups, so to call ourselves something that inherently would exclude others is against our values.

How do you encompass all the diversity around the globe into one word? I think Prince had it right, we need a symbol to represent us. The generation formerly known as Millenials.

In short, we know the negative power of labels, (through the race turmoil of the 90′s, the gay rights movement, women entering the workforce) and we don’t like them. We don’t even particularly like wearing them on our clothing.

We can’t label ourselves, that would be opening ourselves up for generalizations, when each one of us wants nothing more than to be seen as unique and special. We accept everyone into our groups, so to call ourselves something that inherently would exclude others is against our values.

How do you encompass all the diversity around the globe into one word? I think Prince had it right, we need a symbol to represent us. The generation formerly known as Millenials.

http://ben.casnocha.com/2007/12/marketplace-com.html

“Our society is in tatters. Five years of conservative government in Greece and what is left? The country is bankrupt and burned down, people are struggling to make ends meet. Justice has been raped in this country for decades. We deserve the leaders we choose, but we the generation Y of Greece are here to say that enough is enough. We have brains, we think and have feelings, yes we want change.”
Dimitri Panagiotou, Serres, Greece

Second, I offer another hypothesis: Generations are dead. Thanks mainly to technology, the people I know and converse with today on a regular basis range in age from 18 – 60, but they all feel like my generation inasmuch as we share similar beliefs, interests and ideas. The idea of being associated with a group of people because we happen to be the same age seems more ridiculous than ever in the face of this truth.

It’s not that I don’t recognize that being born around the same time means you share a certain set of experiences that shape you, I just don’t care about them that much.

At the end of the day, it’s me (as a marketer) that needs a name for my generation, not me as a person/member of said generation.

Mostly this, only it’s more complex than simply “digital options”. A better, more complete description is that we have such fine control over our own identities that we don’t need to resort to big, poorly-defined memes like generational labels. Most of the people my age that I spend time with are too busy pursuing their own American Dream to worry about what our parents call us. For my peer group, identity is constructed around personal taste (art+music+film/use of recreational time), professional (or non-professional) employment, kinds of education, and what each of us wants to accomplish in our short time here.

It’s a pretty extreme hypothesis to put in a comment, but I think that we’re interested in authoring our own stories and destinies. I put responsibility for this at the feet of our educational system: it tests and tests and teaches us to work for test scores, with the message that once in college, we’ll figure out what we want to do with our lives. Well, the kids that went through that system are starting to go through college, and we’re saying to each other that, “this system is broken, and we need to fix it”.

We can’t claim any responsibility for our new president’s victory, but it rippled across my entire social life, reigniting a fever for self-determination among me and my friends. Our new president exemplifies the principle that here in America, if you set your mind to it, you can do anything and be anything. That’s an insanely powerful image to send to a generation of youth (not to mention the whole school-debt forgiveness promise. We haven’t forgotten that, and won’t).

So in answer to your question, “who gets to define and design this generation?”, let me establish a framework. Social networking tools let us define ourselves in a much more complex and nuanced language than English. Not to mention that we have a lot of “designing” to do to replace the broken ideals and morals of the Boomer generation.