How to Tell if You're a 'Xennial'

Generational labels began to take off with the Baby Boomers—those born in postwar America in a prospering, increasingly suburban environment. Then there was Generation X, the brooding, alt-rock-consuming cluster of babies. They were followed by the Millennials, those coming of age around 2000 and who easily adapted to the digital revolution.

Those broad strokes may now include the Xennials, a specific "micro-generation" of babies born between 1977 and 1983 who grew up with some of the basic tenets of pre-digital technology—landline phones, broadcast television, and handwritten letters—who then adapted to social media in their 20s.

The segment of the population has been identified by Dan Woodman, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Woodman believes Xennials deserve their own banner because of their hybrid youth that straddled the line between the last gasp of quaint communications and the rise of the internet.

"It was a particularly unique experience," Woodman told Mamamia.com. "You have a childhood, youth, and adolescence free of having to worry about social media posts and mobile phones. It was a time when we had to organize to catch up with our friends on the weekends using the landline, and actually pick a time and a place and turn up there. Then we hit this technology revolution before we were maybe in that frazzled period of our life with kids and no time to learn anything new. We hit it where we could still adopt, in a selective way, the new technologies."

Xennials' attitudes, Woodman says, are distinct from Gen X's pessimism and Millennial optimism because they've had a toe in two very different cultural landscapes. Time will tell if Woodman's Xennial label will catch on, but odds are if you grew up with a Trapper Keeper and are now reading this on a mobile device, you probably qualify as one.

[h/t Daily Mail]