This argument is really weird. Somebody born in the US in 1980 certainly wasn't too old to have gaming consoles growing up. The Atari 2600 already was in millions of homes by then and the Nintendo NES would have been released when they were toddlers.
NES released in North America in 1985. Toddlers are 1-3 years old. I don’t mean to be pedantic but as someone born in 1979, your statement didn’t match my experience.
I agree though, I already had significant time on my Atari 2600 and on my father’s Intellivision before NES came out.
Why is toddler the age you use to consider whether someone grew up with game a console? I was born in the early 90s and had a Nintendo 64 first (released in 96). Just because I was 6 or 7 when I got it doesn't mean I didn't effectively grow up with one.
Toddler is what was said, so toddler is what I was correcting. I didn’t make the statement in your question, “toddler is the age you use to consider whether someone grew up with a game console.”
I'm in pretty close to the same boat. But one thing I've noticed looking back - the games we played in our childhood and early teens were very different than the games my brother-in-law grew up on, and he's only 8 years younger than me.
For example, I had no problem setting my Atari games down as a child; there's only so many rounds of Pac-Man I could stand even then. Had I been inducted into gaming with Super Mario World and Final Fantasy II instead, well, my parents would have had a much harder time of it.
> Somebody born in the US in 1980 certainly wasn't too old to have gaming consoles growing up.
I was born in 1973 and had consoles growing up, the Atari 2600 being the second not long after it came out (don't remember what the first was, except that it didn't use cartridges and had a few built-in games.)
People of about my age and even a little earlier were widely recognized at the time as being the first to have a digital childhood.
The idea that there is a “microgeneration” born later characterized by an analog childhood and digital adulthood is silly.
I don't understand why so much effort has been put into branding "generations," but it's just gotten more and more ridiculous as time goes on. Now we're doing transitive generations, apparently. Soon every quarter will have its own generation, like game consoles. Probably named after game consoles.
Sure, but irrelevant, and your comment is seemingly more a random attack against liberals than anything deep.
It's more likely a marketing term. It's much easier to sell to people if you can convince them of a special identity, and promote things as being part of that identity. Marketers spend a lot of money trying to identify and target certain demographics, and they will try different things to see what works.
Consider Malcom Gladwell's TED talk on "Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce". Prego made a lot of money by identifying different market segments with different tastes and preferences in pasta sauce. You can think of it as a k-means clustering, where each cluster center is a different flavor ... or a different group of people.
Of course, sometimes there aren't 'k' clusters, or the clusters have been misidentified, or the boundaries are simply vague.
In any case, it could also simply be that talking heads love to promote their sociological interpretation of how the world works.
It's funny how irrelevant "identity politics" is to the topic, and yet you keep bringing it up.
I thought my example was quite apropos.
Most of marketing is based on pop science. That is, I believe that this so-called identification of (micro)generations comes from a marketing technique of identifying sub-populations that can be marketed towards. Gladwell gives an example of why marketing people try to do that. I then relate it with clustering, where there's a long history of finding good - and bad! - cluster centers.
Would you care to explain how identity politics provides a more meaningful interpretation than what I gave?
Or, for that matter, how it provides any meaningful interpretation, other than "talks about identity therefore must be associated with identity politics."
To be clear, I think that 'identity politics' can be meaningful. Consider the transphobic bathroom bills which sprang up last. That's a clear case of people using the formal political system to castigate others based on identity.
Similarly, when a security guard attacks someone who identifies as a woman and who was assigned female at birth, for using the woman's room because she didn't look feminine enough (on the presumption that she must be male), than that's an informal use of identity politics. (This is not hypothetical: https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-woman-k... ).
But politics must somehow be involved for this to be "identity politics", and I just don't see it.
That experience doesn't seem much different from millenials born in the early 90s. We also played outside, made phone calls and used floppy disks. Most of my friend group didn't get cell phones or myspace until high school, forget facebook.
The only real difference I see is we had playstation or 64s first, not NES, ataris, or sega genesis. Though I guess gameboys and tamagotchi were pretty new.
Seems like an arbitrary distinction. Just because the millenial experience isn't perfectly uniform doesn't mean they aren't still part of it.
I’m chuckling a little bit as someone who would be considered part of the Xennials (born 1983). Your comment about friends not getting cellphones until high school is what got me. I didn’t get a cellphone until nearly the end of university. From my observations going back for my MSc a couple years after getting my BSc, university life with and without cellphones is dramatically different.
Google came out when I was 15.
Napster came out when I was 17.
Wikipedia came out when I was 19.
The iPod came out when I was 19.
I think you can appreciate that spending your entire childhood without all of these things and then suddenly there they are is a real difference from someone who got them when they were 6 or 7.
If a recurring theme of your childhood was the saturation and ever present threat of nuclear war throughout the media you consumed, as was the case with most entertainment in the 80s, then you are a member of generation x. It does not matter what year you were born.
Eh. Kuwait, Iraq, same thing, right? (~similar place, different decade) Also, the Balkans look far scarier when it's a few hours' drive...and even scarier in retrospect, when you find that some of your friends of the same age fought in the Yugoslav war(s).
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadI agree though, I already had significant time on my Atari 2600 and on my father’s Intellivision before NES came out.
Wasn't even the first in the category of "first-generation of video game consoles". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#First_gener... .
For example, I had no problem setting my Atari games down as a child; there's only so many rounds of Pac-Man I could stand even then. Had I been inducted into gaming with Super Mario World and Final Fantasy II instead, well, my parents would have had a much harder time of it.
I was born in 1973 and had consoles growing up, the Atari 2600 being the second not long after it came out (don't remember what the first was, except that it didn't use cartridges and had a few built-in games.)
People of about my age and even a little earlier were widely recognized at the time as being the first to have a digital childhood.
The idea that there is a “microgeneration” born later characterized by an analog childhood and digital adulthood is silly.
As silly as it is - as inaccurate as it is - it's still effective and automatic.
It's more likely a marketing term. It's much easier to sell to people if you can convince them of a special identity, and promote things as being part of that identity. Marketers spend a lot of money trying to identify and target certain demographics, and they will try different things to see what works.
Consider Malcom Gladwell's TED talk on "Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce". Prego made a lot of money by identifying different market segments with different tastes and preferences in pasta sauce. You can think of it as a k-means clustering, where each cluster center is a different flavor ... or a different group of people.
Of course, sometimes there aren't 'k' clusters, or the clusters have been misidentified, or the boundaries are simply vague.
In any case, it could also simply be that talking heads love to promote their sociological interpretation of how the world works.
It's funny how you construe the mere mention of "identity politics" as an attack on your beliefs. :)
I thought my example was quite apropos.
Most of marketing is based on pop science. That is, I believe that this so-called identification of (micro)generations comes from a marketing technique of identifying sub-populations that can be marketed towards. Gladwell gives an example of why marketing people try to do that. I then relate it with clustering, where there's a long history of finding good - and bad! - cluster centers.
Would you care to explain how identity politics provides a more meaningful interpretation than what I gave?
Or, for that matter, how it provides any meaningful interpretation, other than "talks about identity therefore must be associated with identity politics."
To be clear, I think that 'identity politics' can be meaningful. Consider the transphobic bathroom bills which sprang up last. That's a clear case of people using the formal political system to castigate others based on identity.
Similarly, when a security guard attacks someone who identifies as a woman and who was assigned female at birth, for using the woman's room because she didn't look feminine enough (on the presumption that she must be male), than that's an informal use of identity politics. (This is not hypothetical: https://www.advocate.com/business/2015/06/17/detroit-woman-k... ).
But politics must somehow be involved for this to be "identity politics", and I just don't see it.
The only real difference I see is we had playstation or 64s first, not NES, ataris, or sega genesis. Though I guess gameboys and tamagotchi were pretty new.
Seems like an arbitrary distinction. Just because the millenial experience isn't perfectly uniform doesn't mean they aren't still part of it.
Google came out when I was 15. Napster came out when I was 17. Wikipedia came out when I was 19. The iPod came out when I was 19.
I think you can appreciate that spending your entire childhood without all of these things and then suddenly there they are is a real difference from someone who got them when they were 6 or 7.