Cold Y Generation refers to those earliest Gen Yers (also termed 'Millennials' in the anglophone world) who are old enough to have memories of the Cold War era that ended in 1991 with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The exact dates of when the generation begins, are subject to the same disagreements as those regarding Generation Y as a whole, but are generally stated as between 1976 and 1981. [1] The end date is easier to placed, being defined by the youngest age at which someone could remember the end of the Cold War. This places the cut-off date at around 1985.
2006 information edit
- Information in here is more whole than in newer revisions
It has been noted that those born in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s exhibit certain societal and cultural traits, habits and preferences that—while combining certain aspects of Generation X, as well as those which would later be apparent in Generation Y—render them unique in their own right. This partition has been occasionally referred to as the Early Y or Cold Y Generation by most scholars.
Political/societal outlook edit
Reasons for this partition include attitudes about technology, societal norms and, in an indirect sort of way, areas like the global political order. This generation was the very last to (assuming born in 1983 or 1984) obtain cognizance or self-awareness before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Therefore they were the last generational segment with any memory of life during the Cold War. They were also the last to have some idea of what life was like when the modern information based society was in its transitional/formative years, rather than the current all-pervasive and totally integrated form it had taken by the early 1990s. In other words, they were the final generation to be able to compare and contrast the late Cold War/Space Age society with the Post-Cold War/Information Age society using their own personal experiences and memories.
Consequently, one can see these characteristics manifest themselves in areas like the approach to contemporary technology. For the regular Generation Y, modern information technology has always been "there", whereas Early Y grew up during the critical period of technological evolution in which the current bedrock technologies on which our info-based society reliance were moved out of the technical/specialist realm and into the consumer applied realm. Often when traits of each area were mixed and indistinct, giving Early Y a rather odd viewpoint that combines the outlook of the specialist/technical segment of the previous generation (but much more widely disseminated) with the integrationist outlook of the later Y generation.
Societal/sexual constructs edit
In terms of political and societal outlook, there are also noticeable differences. Whereas Gen X has now largely had time to fall into the standard orthodoxes of political participation (in a relativistic sense, not a judgmental/absolute sense, i.e. if you are on the far left in the U.S., a Trotskyite labor group could be considered an orthodox political outlet), and mainstream Gen Y has either done so also or (for a wide segment of it) remained apathetic or non-participatory. Early Y, on the other hand, has also manifested tendencies towards a less common form of what has been termed "policy-centric pragmatism", which places a lower value, relatively speaking, on constructs like ideology or formalism. When what could be termed 'ideology' does manifest itself, the Early Y's seem to have taken-on an unusual tendency to look towards an often imported belief or value system that lies outside the scope of those normally brought into the U.S. from abroad.
Speaking in terms of societal mores and values, Early Y seems to be in a limbo between the post-Sexual Revolution norms of Gen X and the emergent ones of Gen Y (which have been described by some commentators as simply the normalization or commoditization of those of Gen X). This includes an apparent embracing of the basic outlooks of Gen X, but a reluctance to carry to their logical extremes, as we see occurring now with Gen Y. In many areas, Early Y seems to embrace the more cynical world-view exhibited by X while rejecting some of what they view as crassness or immoderation. It has been remarked that in doing so, as Early Y matures they have begun to look several generations behind X in forming certain societal/sexual constructs — thus becoming their own as a generation apart from X and Y.