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Didn't I just read about this in JPod? That Coupland guy is behind this, I'm sure of it...

Er...the real reason "Gen X" caught on was not because "X" referred to the "10th generation", but rather because "X" felt right to the general culture in an algebraic sense, as in for the value x. Undefined, without reference points, without grounding. Thus the easy move to "Y" for the next group --- other than at its initial introduction, no one thought X=10. Though "Y" isn't accurate as a count, it is here to stay.

We have Douglas Coupland to thank for much of the spread of "Gen X" as a term; we have The Replacements to thank for singing great songs which (without intention) gave voice to much of what Gen X-ers were thinking.

Frankly, I think the cutoff from Gex X to Y ought to be 1974 --- do you have at least vague recollection of when Nixon was president? The worldviews of those born after are often much, much different than those born before.

microserfs by doug coupland is by far one of my favorite books of all time. i read it my sophomore year of high school and even now it still resonates strongly with me. actually, i really like almost all his books (particularly all families are psychotic, hey nostradamus!, and generation x).

i have a hard time expressing just how profound an effect doug coupland's work has had on me microserfs was the book that cemented my decision to major in c.s. for the first time in my life there was a book with characters who i could actually relate to. looking back now, a lot of the technological details seem a bit quaint, but it is still a really excellent read.

Generation X, the band, existed since 1976 The also shortened their name to Gen X and also documented here

An interesting repudiation of Gen Xers as slackers was listed by none other than David Schwimmer in 1995.

Douglas Coupland's Generation X dates from 1991 and is listed as the source of the term generation-x here

Now, I can't find a single source about Gen Xers, as in when the term was first used, but I seem to recall it being used for a long long time. Pre 1991? I can't tell you for sure. I can't even tell you for sure when the Baby Boomlet term was first used, nor when Gen-Y, what I consider the current youth generation to be, was first used. I can tell you that the "Gen-X" movement, attitude, etc, was already noticed as early as 1982. The media at the time just couldn't understand the punk movement at all. (Things got a little out of whack on a large scale right around then, teens wearing earings, dyed hair, spikes, etc.) It was also the time in the 80s that we noticed that gee, our economy wouldn't keep growing insanely, and thus the first of us to graduate college started looking at ever bleaker job prospects, getting paid barely enough to get by, with no real prospects of advancement if you happened to get a job. (Sort of one defining aspect of GenX)

But I want to say all 3 terms have been in use more than 10 years, and I would swear that Gen X was in use prior to 1991. I would love to have this nailed down, but who's to say for sure? It's been almost 15 years and predates most of the internet (there were only a couple of thousand USENET newsgroups around at that time, and the myriad BBS's, the survivors that eventually comprised FIDONET. But that's going down almost forgotten memory lanes...even the waybackmachine doesn't go far enough back for this.

Now having done the research, I do recall we were initially called the Post-Baby Boom generation, in the early 80s on some of the freakier stuff that got reported in the news. Oh well, at the very least, Coupland is not in my frame of reference when someone mentions Generation X. I always related it to the band, who's single, Dancing with Myself, was re-released on Idol's first solo album and was a big hit at my high school, anyways. So I've 100% dated myself now!:)

The ecology of Gibson's relationship to technology is vital to his writing. His strength, like Coupland's in Generation X and Microserfs, has been his understanding of the zeitgeist of digital culture. He has an orgranic relationship to - and a prescient understand of - what is happening.
His latest book reflects this more than any other, and this is why it was not well-received by geeks. The social impact of the internet is reflected in things like teenage girls texting each other, not unix programmers with bad facial hair.
This interview explains Gibson's intentions.

Douglas Coupland did a TV interview in Denmark a while back, all about Lego. It's under TV in his flash website.

If you want to read an ficitional account of every day life at Microsoft, try reading Douglas Coupland's Microserfs. The book describes a group of friends who watch the lawn get cut everyday or every other day at the same time to ensure the grass is at the same lenght and the email exchange between friends is incredibly funny. Here's a link to the official Douglas Coupland web site. Since I read the book several years ago, I included a posting from the Fatbrain web site: "Microserfs: a hilarious, fanatically detailed, and oddly moving book about a handful of misfit Microsoft employees who realize that they don't have lives and subsequently become determined to get lives inside the lightning-paced world of high-tech 1990s' American geek culture. Amid a Seattle backdrop of software corporate cultishness ("B-B-B-B-Bill!") and the financial terror of San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech startups, the members of Coupland's quirky ensemble "stick a piece of dynamite inside themselves, like a cartoon cat, in the hopes that when they reassemble their exploded pieces they will be somebody different"

Modern life is hard and stressful in unique ways, but reactionary longings for a golden age gone by are a waste of time.

I agree with this -- I certainly believe that we have it better off today than in any previous era. Douglas Coupland wrote a wonderfully obnoxious essay about this called `` The Past Sucks ''. He notes that if you dig deep enough into the minds of some SCA type who longs for the past, you'll hear a laundry-list of exceptions: ``but I'd have to be a member of the royalty; and I'd have to have had my shots; and I'd need espresso.''

So no, I don't want to live in the past, I don't want to go backwards.

My point was, isn't it about time that the progress we've made started paying some dividends?

We're getting more work done faster instead of being able to work less. That hardly seems like a good trade to me.