When did the concept of "Generation" become so ubiquitous?

July 6, 2020 2:47 PM

It seems like the concept of "Generation" (Boomers, Gen-X, Millennials, etc.) has gained increasing prominence in the past decade or two, but how did that concept gain steam culturally, and when?

I have an okay understanding of the idea of an age cohort and Karl Mannheim's conception of that in the 1920's, but I feel like it didn't become any kind of zeitgeist until popular media started talking about Baby Boomers, and then once marketers got ahold of the concept and ran with it, it became much more a shorthand for how to SELL to different generations than anything about the Generations as cohorts from then on.

So, I'm looking for answers and sources that get at these types of questions:
- Were Baby Boomers the first named generation, and then the prior generation ("Silents," "Greatest Generation") named after the fact, since we had to name their parents?
- Did sociologists study generations before marketers started marketing to them? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
- If we only started to study the behavior of generations in the mid-century and only then in the context of consumption (media or products or otherwise), how do we know whether people behave in ways consistent with their generation or consistent with their age?

posted by juniperesque to Human Relations (12 answers total)

In my recollection, there were Boomers, although sometimes you heard about hippies, yuppies, yippes, Beats/Beatniks. But the Boomers were the real generation. In 1991, Faith Popcorn came out with the Popcorn Report and suddenly futurists were talking generations. Douglas Coupland came out with Generation X that year and Nirvana came out with Teen Spirit. Suddenly, Seattle Grunge was very visible and 80s had more of a cultural distinction. Glasnost and the Berlin Wall and all that made for a dividing line between the old 80s and the new 90s. It became clear that the GenX experience was not that of the Boomers. For a while, there was attention on GenX. But then people started slicing and dicing and they started talking about tweens and really the Baby Busters (later called Millennials). Then the Busters or Millennials started to be seen as having way more market power than impoverished, stunted career, limited opportunity, big college debt GenX and no one paid any more attention to Gen X. Not that they usually paid attention to poor GenX, sitting at home, not touching the stove, not talking to strangers, not frying eggs, not having sex without condoms, quietly building the Internet, singing along to being stupid and contagious and your job's a joke, but maybe we can free Winona....
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 3:19 PM on July 6, 2020

Strauss and Howe were the big popularizers of these ideas recently, and coined the term Millennials. They are closer to marketers than sociologists, I think. They have some arguments for traits of generations going back to the 17th century, but I am not familiar with the details.

Hemingway coined the term "Lost Generation" before the Baby Boomers, so there was at least one named generation. Other generational names I think came afterwards, in response, though.

I don't think there's much strong evidence for any of the generational stuff, other than obvious demographic trends which show up in opinion polling and things like that -- which may have more to do with age than generation per se.
posted by vogon_poet at 3:31 PM on July 6, 2020

As vogon_poet points out, Hemingway popularized "lost generation" (coined by Gertrude Stein's mechanic though). Per Wikipedia, the term "silent generation" was coined in 1951. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, I definitely knew I was considered a "baby boomer." Wikipedia says the first recorded use of the term was in 1963. "Greatest generation" was invented by Tom Brokaw in 1998.

I think these terms are very different from hippies, yippies, and yuppies, which were categories within a generation, and that goes back to beatniks, Teddy boys, and loads of similar terms, probably even before "whippersnapper," coined in 1700.

I think there were some more or less organic generational names, but now it's like every generation has to be named something. Personally, I think it's all a bunch of bullshit. There's no single attitude or experience that covers every generation. There are divisions based on class, race, gender, and individual experience that matter a hell of a lot more than what year you were born. And even those aren't absolute.
posted by FencingGal at 3:45 PM on July 6, 2020

There was a big business revolution in the 90s, where they could create 1:1 marketing campaigns and target by demographic. I think that contributed to it too, as it also fit with polling. They were analyzing backwards how yuppies elected Reagan.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 3:45 PM on July 6, 2020

The big focus on generations explaining everything basically comes from two guys, William Strauss and Neil Howe, whose books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997) took existing concepts like the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers and tied them into a grand architecture where six centuries of (white, European) history can be explained by an intricate dance of Saecula and Turnings.
posted by theodolite at 4:55 PM on July 6, 2020

A related term from the 1960s was the Generation Gap (link's to the wikipedia page, which has a lot more details).
posted by Rash at 5:00 PM on July 6, 2020

Yeah I think Baby Boom generation was when the landing gear really came down with a thump and began laying rubber. There was the Lost Generation and the good old "Depression Baby" or "Child of the Depression" but I think it took the whole postwar consumerist boom plus the solid demographic baby bubble to really lock in the idea of a like aged cohort being some kind of personality diagnosis.
posted by Pembquist at 7:48 PM on July 6, 2020

People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we g-g-get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

The Who released "My Generation" in 1965, I think they were a fairly popular band at that time so if it wasn't a well known cultural term before the song it certainly would have been after.
posted by yohko at 8:30 PM on July 6, 2020

The Who released "My Generation" in 1965, I think they were a fairly popular band at that time

Jesus. I guess the grave comes for us all.
posted by sideshow at 9:10 PM on July 6, 2020

A related term from the 1960s was the Generation Gap (link's to the wikipedia page, which has a lot more details).

I was flabbergasted that that page didn't mention the Vietnam War, which I thought was the original "generation gap" issue. But I wasn't alive at the time and only got that impression secondhand, so I'm following this Ask with interest.
posted by aws17576 at 9:56 PM on July 6, 2020

Long before Coupland “Generation X” was the title of a 1964 book of interviews with British teenagers, “post-war baby boomers who had grown up in a landscape of increasing wealth and materialism”.
posted by fabius at 6:35 AM on July 7, 2020

It may not sound like it, but I do actually agree with FencingGal that generations are mostly BS, although it would be pretty damn Boomer to think of themselves as special. And as GenX as it would be for me to blame Boomers for BS, I'm not sure they're the culprits here.

This is speculation, but I would be willing to guess that WWII is involved. I've read in a couple of different contexts about how returning GIs othered younger men who weren't old enough to serve. I don't remember the source for the first; it was something I read in college, but it basically blamed returning GIs on the GI Bill for, if not the genesis of, then at least the tipping point for hazing in college fraternities. Basically, guys who had been in the war thought the younger guys were too soft and took it upon themselves to toughen them up via hazing. The second was in Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City" (good book, interesting theory about Boomers I'll mention in a moment), and dealt specifically with a Catholic priest who had served in the war and then taught school after coming back, and likewise took it upon himself to toughen up his "soft" students. It was a single example (the book is a couple of case studies), but Ehrenhalt seems to think it's not an isolated case. Actually, now that I think about this, it was a plot point on Mad Men, too - Roger Sterling initially thought less of Don Draper for having only served in Korea, not WWII like himself.

Generalizing from that, you could easily see that the GI Generation (I don't like to call them "greatest", for reasons that are beyond the scope of this answer, and yet also kind of related to this answer) not only saw younger people as different from themselves, but also older people, who, while they may have been involved in the war effort, weren't frontline GIs. Since such a large proportion of that age group did serve in such a capacity, it's easy to see how the othering of both younger and older people could serve as the spark of a generational consciousness. But this is speculation on my part. I don't know that there's anything to back this up, and I don't have the time to research it myself.

As for Ehrenhalt's Boomer theory, he posits that Boomers' fetishization of individualism (both the inward-focused psychedelia of the late 60s/early 70s and the Me Decade selfishness of the 70s and 80s) arose from the overcrowding they experienced as children. Generalizing, of course, but so many Boomers grew up in households with five or more children, and attended schools that could not properly accommodate the masses of students. The idea is that Boomers pursued individualism in adulthood because they were not able to do so as children, because adulthood was the first time they were able to be by themselves. I don't know if that's true, or even if it's provable, but it's thought-provoking. I have an addendum to the theory, but again, it's beyond the scope of this question.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:23 AM on July 7, 2020