Are the Millennials Different?

US News & World Report: Are the Millennials Different? by Michael Barone

In their excellent 1991 book Generations, William Strauss and Neal Howe described the just-emerging Millennial generation (born 1982 and after). At a time when all Millennials were prepubescent, they wrote:

As these kids pass through school, they will sail smoothly behind a debris-clearing insistence on quality education and good behavior...The Millennial youth culture will be more clean-cut and homogeneous than any seen since that of the circa-1930 G.Is. By the first decade of the twenty-first century [i.e., now], schools will at last be fully computer-equipped and the learning style of students will shift from an MTV-ish 'parallel' thinking back to a more logical 'serial' thinking. Where Boomers and 13ers had once seen computers as a forced for social individuation, Millennials will see them as a force for social homogenization. Teen peer leaders will express a growing interest in community affairs and a growing enthusiasm for collective action...Teen pathologies—truancy, substance abuse, crime, suicide, unwed pregnancy—will all decline...Teen sex...will become less matter-of-fact and starkly physical, more romantic and friendly.

Strauss and Howe go on similarly and at greater length in their 1999 Millennials Rising.
Are these things now happening?...

Comments

[nate]

Hmm, as a youth pastor I may have to disagree here.

I don't know about the rise in homogenization. In fact I think the effects of the increasing networking of society is more in play here then ever. It has allowed small minority groups to collalece so where as 10-15 years ago there were 4 or 5 major stereotypes in HS movies ... now there are 10-15.

These tribes are becoming more and more distinct and at the same time are becoming more individually homogeneous ... i.e. each group is more homogeneous across geographic/ethnic lines but more tribal then before as well.

The shift to logical or serial thinking is gone I think. They tend to be even higher multitaskers ... not the other way around.

MarkO - president of Youth Specialties and a guru of this stuff has even questioned if generational studies have much impact on relating to youth: http://www.ysmarko.com/?p=1738

Nate

[Michael W. Kruse]

I agree with MarkO about much of what passes for generational analysis but I would place Strauss and Howe in a different league.

S & H often use terms in more narrowly specific ways and right now I can't remember how they used the term.

The thing I read and hear about in business circles is that Millennials are indeed good at organizing themselves to accomplish a task. However, that task usually has to be assigned to them. When it comes to discerning which task to do, with reference to an abstract vision, they are nearly paralyzed. I thinkg strategic vs. tactical is what S&H were aiming for with there parallel vs logcial analogy.