Note: To see what the 5 Minute Month is all about, click here to read the first post in the series.
A couple of days ago, I took a spin through the stacks at the library and checked out a few books on the psychological profiles of current job-seekers based on generational stereotypes. At this point in my career, having completed my doctorate and a post-doc while applying to academic jobs for the past couple of years, I’m doing a lot of self-assessment and self-reflection. Most often, I check in with a variety of web-based resources about once per day, looking for insights on shifting approaches to landing jobs both in and outside of academia. This is one of those fields, I reason, where the internet has more to offer than traditional publishing, in most respects — a book on how to land the perfect job c. 2005 is now pre- Web 2.0, and thus of limited value.
I was struck by two interesting books sitting side-by-side on the shelf (titles are escaping me, and I’m not home to look at them, so if you’re curious, let me know and I’ll pass them along). The first was aimed at helping members of Generation X assess their approach to the job market, while the other was geared towards explaining job market techniques to “older” members of Generation Y. As I paged through the introductions to both books, I realized that, while I have long considered myself a “Gen-X-er,” my birthdate and web/social media competencies alike place me squarely in the “Gen Y” camp. I’m not sure how I feel about that; after all, one of my nicknames in high school (which I graduate from in the 90s) was “flannel man,” and I still view Kurt Cobain’s passing as a highly significant event during my formative years. But it’s also true that I’ve been on the internet for close to 20 years, that I’ve been “wired in” since high school, and can only think of about two jobs that I ever applied to which were only listed in the news paper want-ads (one of them being a news reporter position, the other being a delivery driver position). My first and second post-college interviews came through Monster.com, and I realize how much that has often colored my perception of the twenty-first century job market — setting up a solid profile, carefully listing/deliniating accomplishments and objectives, and flinging it into the void to see what comes back. And results always come back — they’re often not what I’ve been hoping for, though.
But beyond job-market tactics and techniques, I still find it hard to fully embrace the Gen Y label. I’m a child of the 80s who came of age (eh…never like that phrase) in the 90s, whose first iPod came several years after I graduate college and who had an “emergency calls only” cell phone until the start of the 00’s. Thus, I’m proposing a new generational classification (as if we really need another one!), Gen XY (and I’ll bet its already taken). Us Gen XY-ers are still flannel-shirt and Doc Marten -wearing grunge rockers at heart, in no hurry to dig in and adopt the suburban / “traditional” lifestyle we were often raised in (I grew up in a rural area, but still) — yet feel we are no less tech-savvy, or are perhaps even more tech-savvy (in some ways), than many of our early twenty-something friends and colleagues. How about it — any other “Gen XY-ers” out there? Thoughts?
Word count: about 575
Time: lost count, was having fun!
The Cognitive Turn 
Yes! I’ve always identified emotionally and culturally with Gen X and the ’90s but the tech components, including feeling obligated to defend social media and other elements of pop culture (plus my birth year) puts me closer to Gen Y. It’s a problematized, liminal, juxtaposed place developed as an inefficient hegemony.
One of the interesting things for me is the way I’ve been seeing Gen X narrowly defined as, to put it bluntly, “slackers who delayed growing up,” a trait that I feel is magnified when applied to Gen Y. In other words, there’s a sense that Gen Y refuses to grow up and is incapable of doing anything other than glue their noses to the iPhones 24-7. A lot of it is all just “@#$% kids ‘n’ such” grumbling (and you know how I love to do that), but I do agree that these categories are breaking down very rapidly. While it’s relatively easy for me to think of my grandparents generation as “the War generation” (and don’t ask ‘which’ war, kids), because they were unified by a massive global event that reverberated for decades, there’s a higher degree of segmentation going on these days, and “generations” seem tied to expansion in technology. XYs grew up with computers and shifted to the internet rapidly (my college class was the first to register online, as opposed to the old “get in line in the gymnasium” method), but each iTeration (see what I did there?) of tech shades cultural perceptions and touchstones in sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle ways.