Cold Y Generation

Cold Y Generation refers to those earliest Gen Yers who are old enough to have memories of the Cold War era that ended in 1991 with the fall of Communism in eastern Europe.

It could be said this cohort only strongly exists in the former Communist states that broke up between 1989 and 1991, for example the pop singer Kerli, born in 1987, speaks of living in the Soviet era as a time "without music", though being she was only 4 at the time of the fall of the Soviets in Estonia, she is likely referring mostly to the period briefly after.

Birthdates go from 1981 to about 1987.

Existence and Definition

Several scholars within the realm of sociological academia have postulated on the existence of a small generational subset falling at the start of Generation Y, at the point at which Yers are not yet distinguished from Generation Xers.

This generation was the very last to obtain cognizance or self-awareness before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War in 1991.

They were also the last to have an idea of a pre-informational society, as the Internet, cable and other technologies caused a complete saturation of media between about 1988 and 1995.

They were the final generation to be able to compare and contrast the late Cold War/Space Age society with the Post-Cold War/Information Age society using their own personal experiences and memories.

Political and societal outlook

Whereas Generation X has now largely had time to fall into the standard orthodoxies of political participation (meaning that in a relativistic sense, not a judgmental/absolute sense, i.e. if you are on the far left in the U.S., a Trotskyite labor group could be considered an orthodox political outlet), and mainstream Gen Y has either done so also or (for a wide segment of it) remained apathetic or non-participatory. Cold Y, on the other hand, has manifested tendencies towards a less common form of what has been termed "policy-centric pragmatism", which places a lower value, relatively speaking, on constructs like ideology or formalism. When what could be termed ideology does manifest itself, the Cold Y's seem to have taken-on an unusual tendency to look to often imported belief or value systems that lie outside the scope of those normally brought into the U.S. from abroad.

Societal/sexual constructs

Cold Y seems to be in limbo between the post-Sexual Revolution norms of Gen X and the emergent ones of Gen Y (which have been described by some commentators as simply the normalization or commoditization of those of Gen X). This includes an apparent embracing of the basic outlooks of Gen X, but a reluctance to carry to their logical extremes, as we see occurring now with Gen Y. In many areas, Cold Y seems to embrace the more cynical world view exhibited by X while rejecting some of what they view as crassness or immoderation. It has been remarked that in doing so, as Cold Y matures they have begun to look several generations behind X in forming certain societal/sexual constructs.

ee also

* Generation X
* Generation Z
* MTV Generation
* Post-Echo Generation

External links

* [http://novotusllc.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/all-the-fuss-about-gen-y-aka-the-millennials-2/ All the Fuss About Gen Y (aka, the Millennials)]
* [http://prackova.com/index.php?id=coldy06 | Cold Y |*]
* [http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_holukoff/20060111.html CBC: Newspapers in the Information Age]