It’s hard to believe that we have finally entered the second half of the second decade of the new millennium. So much has changed only in the past 5 years: cloud computing and mobile are mainstream, 3D printers can be bought at the local office supplier and Uber is a verb. (When a noun becomes a…
It’s probably no surprise that “after the millennials” has been one of my key search terms for a while. I first started researching this generation in their infancy in the early 2000s, at a time when very little had yet been written about them. Covering this topic felt very much like entering a land where no man or woman has ever been. Then…
Last week I was standing dumbfounded at the CVS’ greeting card isle trying to look for a Father’s Day card for my husband. None of us are very conventional, and the typical pre-authored Hallmark card has rarely satisfied my somewhat snooty European taste. Somehow Hallmark seems to be in competition with ToysRUs’ gender segregated pink and blue isles, a puzzling…
I recently came across an article in Aeon called “Against Generations“, which is one of the harshest, yet most eloquent critiques of generational research I have read. Author Rebecca Onion disagrees with the epistemological justification for segmenting people based on age cohort, and (rightly) contends that much of the research is arbitrary and the categories…
Social media has been in flames the last few days over a (now withdrawn) Barbie-book Mattel published in 2010. It started with a blog post on Pamiedotcom’s Tumblr site. Barbie: I Can Be A Computer Engineer is the gift that keeps on giving to blogs and click bait sites that thrive on stroking our growing sense of gender fairness….
The White House recently released a report where they labeled the youngest generation the “Homeland Generation”. A storm of speculations hit the internet soon after. How could the U.S. government choose such a paranoid and xenophobic-sounding epithet? Was this a creepy joke? Some claimed the White House took the name out of thin air. Others…
The only other generational topic receiving as much attention as the young Generation Z or Homeland generation is the Millennial parenting cohort raising them. Still held back in life by economic setbacks and lengthy educations, Millennials are nonetheless a family-loving generation and will eventually go for the parenting life phase with full steam. In fact, they like…
Spoiler alert ahead! It’s obvious, Disney has fallen in love with a new meta-theme: Wronged, cold-hearted, lonely woman unearths apocalyptic forces that overtake her kingdom, but is also the only one who can break the spell. But only after she rediscovers her own humanity and beats a deceptive, opportunistic prince with poor facial definition and socio-pathological…
In America there is a sweeping shift in values towards more family diversity and we are starting to see this reflected in commercials for consumer goods. The shift reflects cohort changes (effects isolated to single generations) as well as period effects (change over time in an entire population). This means that variables that indicate tolerance of diversity is…
It’s been a while since I wrote about gender issues so today I’ll harness International Women’s Day to give a few forecasts that will affect women of the Homeland generation, or Generation Z, which is a more widely used name. I chose to describe the developed and the developing world in two different paragraphs. This…
