Post by ticket2ride on Mar 4, 2019 19:14:51 GMT 10
Whether you’re a self-proclaimed 90s kid, 00s kid or whatever, why bother stressing over determining who “officially” experienced this or that? There are no objective criteria for pop sociology.
People try to put their identity onto something they grew up with and feel compromised by younger or older people having been exposed to the same thing. Why? Because their perceived uniqueness is under threat when that happens.
So their response is to make excuses to exclude people from sharing things from their childhood:
- “This show is ours and not yours.”
- “You weren’t part of the main audience when it came out.”
- “You were freaking 17 when it came out. You were too old for that stuff.”
- “Reruns don’t count.”
- “You were only 5. You may have seen it, but you didn’t experience it the way 10 year olds would have.”
- “You can’t possibly have remembered that; you were only 4.”
- “You have to have been born no later than #### to have experienced that.”
- “You only caught the tail end of the run!”
Everyone has individual experiences and you can never be too rigid about these things. Exposure factors include:
- Level of parental control
- Older/younger siblings
- Individual cognitive development (chronological age is different from developmental age; a quickly-maturing 4 year old can be as developed as the average 7 year old.)
- Interest
- Peers
- Country (we can’t describe the rest of the world based on the Western experience)
Things get very controversial with people born near imposed cutoffs, because having to be on either side means being denied a significant portion of their childhood. That’s why people were driven into creating cusps - so that they could more comfortably identify based on their transgenerational experiences. Boomer/X created Generation Jones, and X/Millennials created the Xennial group. Not much is known about Gen Z yet, so creating a cohort for the Millennial/Z cusp might be pretty premature at this point, though some studies have already begun, and one sociological source already suggests 1993-1998 with the name “MinionZ.”
Even professional sociologists acknowledge that generations are not meant to oversimplify or dictate what people grew up with. Rather, they are a lens though which to describe societal change. You can never set generational studies in stone, because they are probabilistic and not deterministic. They create general descriptions, but they don’t impose them on everyone.
You don’t see Beatles fans going all “the Beatles are ours not yours. Fuck off!” If anything, they’re happy to share the Beatles with younger generations.
If you experienced and remember it, then go ahead and be nostalgic about it. No need to overcomplicate things. Sharing things with people older or younger than you has no bearing on your experiences.
It’s ridiculous to see people being dogmatic about their “pop sociology”, when professionals themselves aren’t even being rigid with their proper sociology.
People try to put their identity onto something they grew up with and feel compromised by younger or older people having been exposed to the same thing. Why? Because their perceived uniqueness is under threat when that happens.
So their response is to make excuses to exclude people from sharing things from their childhood:
- “This show is ours and not yours.”
- “You weren’t part of the main audience when it came out.”
- “You were freaking 17 when it came out. You were too old for that stuff.”
- “Reruns don’t count.”
- “You were only 5. You may have seen it, but you didn’t experience it the way 10 year olds would have.”
- “You can’t possibly have remembered that; you were only 4.”
- “You have to have been born no later than #### to have experienced that.”
- “You only caught the tail end of the run!”
Everyone has individual experiences and you can never be too rigid about these things. Exposure factors include:
- Level of parental control
- Older/younger siblings
- Individual cognitive development (chronological age is different from developmental age; a quickly-maturing 4 year old can be as developed as the average 7 year old.)
- Interest
- Peers
- Country (we can’t describe the rest of the world based on the Western experience)
Things get very controversial with people born near imposed cutoffs, because having to be on either side means being denied a significant portion of their childhood. That’s why people were driven into creating cusps - so that they could more comfortably identify based on their transgenerational experiences. Boomer/X created Generation Jones, and X/Millennials created the Xennial group. Not much is known about Gen Z yet, so creating a cohort for the Millennial/Z cusp might be pretty premature at this point, though some studies have already begun, and one sociological source already suggests 1993-1998 with the name “MinionZ.”
Even professional sociologists acknowledge that generations are not meant to oversimplify or dictate what people grew up with. Rather, they are a lens though which to describe societal change. You can never set generational studies in stone, because they are probabilistic and not deterministic. They create general descriptions, but they don’t impose them on everyone.
You don’t see Beatles fans going all “the Beatles are ours not yours. Fuck off!” If anything, they’re happy to share the Beatles with younger generations.
If you experienced and remember it, then go ahead and be nostalgic about it. No need to overcomplicate things. Sharing things with people older or younger than you has no bearing on your experiences.
It’s ridiculous to see people being dogmatic about their “pop sociology”, when professionals themselves aren’t even being rigid with their proper sociology.
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