the_axel: (Default)
Axel ([personal profile] the_axel) wrote in [personal profile] the_siobhan 2013-09-24 07:55 pm (UTC)

If I understand the article you linked to correctly
1. There's a guy called David Foot who wrote a book that says Generation X is the tail end of the Baby Boom, and that's the proper definition.
2. Douglas Coupland, who wrote Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, used that cohort for his book.
3. Every other definition of Generation X is the fake, marketing definition.

Wikipedia, by contrast, says very different things:
1. The term "Generation X" was coined by Robert Capa in 1953 as a title for a photo-essay about young men and women growing up immediately after the Second World War.
2. Generation X is a 1965 book on British Mod culture.
3. Coupland got the term Generation X from Billy Idols band formed in 1976.
4. Couplands book is about Americans who reached adulthood in the late 1980s - so they would have been born in the 60s.
5. Coupland denied that Gen X existed. "This is going to sound heretical coming from me, but I don't think there is a Generation X. What I think a lot of people mistake for this thing that might be Generation X is just the acknowledgment that there exists some other group of people whatever, whoever they might be, younger than, say, Jane Fonda's baby boom."
6. Generation X has become the common term in academia, media, etc. for people born between 1961, 2, 3, 4 or 5 and 1981. For example:
a. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122044
b. http://www.volunteeringinamerica.gov/about/glossary.cfm#Generation X

So you people born in the first half of the 60s are part-time Boomers and part-time Gen-Xers.

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