Xennials, the generation born between 1977 and 1983: it is not a digital native but it seems

  • It is a generation between the pessimism of the X and the optimism of the Y
  • The Xennials were still on the phone (landline) and played without the Internet
  • It did not require effort to enter the online world, which reached them with 20 years
The Xennials played without the Internet but assumed it without problems. Photo: Getty

Between Generation X and Millennials there is a microgeneration composed of those who matured with mobile phones or the Internet but who when they arrived still felt it as a thing of the future. Not so old to be children of baby boom not so young to be included among those who rushed to fly from the parents' house. These are the Xennials, those born between 1977 and 1983.

He did not put the name or the temporary dimension but Dan Woodman, a professor of Sociology at the University of Melbourne (Australia), has become the 'face' of this baptism, as he says The guardian. It defines the Xennials as a mixture between the pessimism of Generation X and the optimism of Generation Y (the other name of Millennials).

The Xennials still stayed with friends over the landline, handed out work on diskettes normally, the discman seemed like stepping on the moon – the walkman was the most hitherto – or they grew up in families where to watch the news on dinner was the daily bread to find out if the newspaper had not been read (on paper) that day – or even if it had been done.

Woodman says to Mamamia that the Xennials still enjoyed childhood more like Generation X, without the noise of social networks in the background, but adapted well – already in their twenties – to the rapid advance of connected life, with which they tend to be more selective thanks to the experience of consumption more material acquired in the past. They are not digital natives but they seem.

Obviously, the experiences depend on more factors than the year of birth or the generation of belonging, leaving aside the reality that there will always be people on the brink of one generation and another who may feel more of the next one than of their turn. in theory by the date of birth; that is, the one born at the end of the stage of a generation will grow with the tics of the subsequent one.

These dimensions “are too simplistic and end up treating everyone as if they had always lived under the same conditions.” The teacher explains that social development will be different between men or women or according to the purchasing power of each person. But the common features exist, and hence it has established this short generation hinge, which tends more to the Millennial but does not share 100% of its characteristics – in addition to optimists, they are spoiled, selfish and with the wrong focus, perhaps because have grown in the middle of the turn of the century.