By the time it is done, COVID-19 — this deadly rascal — will do more than kill hundreds of thousands of people and close entire nations. It will also define a generation.
My seniors completing their degrees at Weber State University this unfortunate spring will someday tell their grandchildren what it was like to graduate via Zoom, just as my 7-year-old granddaughter in a few years will compare notes with her high school friends about how they studied at their dining room table on their parents’ laptops.
This is the defining crisis of the rising generation. It is their Sept. 11, their Challenger explosion, their Kennedy assassination, their Pearl Harbor.
It has been clear for a year or two now that the students entering college are not millennials. My student journalists at The Signpost, Weber State’s student newspaper, did a project this year defining the millennial generation, and as they did so, the barely 20-somethings on the staff had a sense this was not them.
In my classes, the older students, the millennials, also knew something was different about their younger peers. They just didn’t know what.
Chuck Underwood knows. A social researcher who has been studying this field for 25 years, Underwood knows that new generations exhibit new values. He’s not sure yet what values the emerging generation has. He’s pretty sure they don’t know yet either because those values form through a cohort’s years in school, and the elders of this generation are just experiencing college.
Underwood can tell you that millennials are idealistic and confrontational, entitled and distrustful of politics. That the generation before them, Gen X, are strongly individual, self-sufficient and unwilling to depend too much on others. That baby boomers are eager to break the mold and think they are forever young.
He knows this because he has conducted focus groups with hundreds and hundreds of people in these age groups and those that came before. He has analyzed their responses to determine what values are shared by people who grew up at the same historical moment in the United States. He’s pretty sure he’s right because when he travels the country talking about the personalities of the different generations, people ask him afterward if he has been reading their journals.
What he can’t tell you yet is what this new generation, which some pundits are calling Generation Z, will be like because that is still undetermined. The research is not done because the kids are not fully grown.
But he knows one thing: They deserve their own name.
Generation Z is derivative, an extension of Generation X. The name worked for the earlier generation because of their desire to define themselves as individuals. X marked the spot where each of those peers born between 1965 and 1982 placed their own stamp.
In fact, I remember when the millennials were called Generation Y, an extension of their older brothers and sisters. Back then I wondered when my children’s generation would get a proper name.
Sept. 11, 2001, was their christening day. No longer were the millennials an extension of anyone. Their crisis moment also gave them an identity.
You see, Generation Y and Generation Z are no more proper names than Baby Norman was for my biological children. It does for a time, but the birth certificate needs something better.
Now it is time to give the rising generation its proper name, and I have one to offer.
I propose the Viral Generation. It touches on the social media phenomenon these children have grown up with while also making reference to their crisis moment.
A little like the classic theater mask representing both tragedy and comedy, it captures both the sad and the silly moments of their formative years. It makes room for both the resilience they are learning and the vulnerability that will always be with them, for their adaptability and their desire for certainty.
I nominate this new name for this emerging generation.
All in favor, say “OK, boomer.”
Jean Norman, a baby boomer and a former journalist, is associate professor of emerging media at Weber State University. She is teaching an honors course this fall called Generations.
