from Wikipedia:
The Internet generation is an emerging term in theoretical and popular discourse to denote the American sub-generation branching off Generation Y, immediately following the MTV Generation. Born since the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, the defining cultural-historical event to distinguish this cohort is that they spent their formative years in an age of the birth and rise of the Internet. Thus, the Internet Generation has no recourse to a memory of (or nostalgia for) a pre-Internet history, a factor which greatly differentiates them from older generations, even Generation Y, who had to learn to adapt to ‘new’ technologies. The iGeneration simply takes the Internet for granted as ‘natural,’ with new sites that are launched past 1998 such as MySpace, YouTube, iFilm, and the ever-growing use of Internet Forums, Wikipedia, Google and Imageboards as part of its global cultural ecosystem.
One can compare this situation to those who grew up with TV vs. those for whom TV was a ‘new thing.’ The iGeneration therefore emerged within a paradigm shift that changed how humans relate to each other and how (virtual and real) communities form within globalization and therefore cannot be lumped together with previous generations. Other neologisms to denote this demographic cohort include iGeneration, and the MySpace Generation.
This is an interesting generation, which both of my younger siblings were born into. My sister who was born in the late 80s has had internet access since she was about 7 or 8 years old, and my younger brother has always had broadband access, since probably the time he could walk. Granted, I grew up with the internet too, I wasn’t super-saturated with it from very early on (which is why I’m a part of the MTV generation and not the iGeneration).
From the end of the iGeneration article:
The name “iGeneration” is based on the popular iPod music device, as the majority of iPod owners are members of this generation. The term was popularized by MC Lars in his song “iGeneration”, which was made into a music video. The term foregrounds the paradoxical ways in which this generation’s idiosyncratic subjectivity and individualism (“I”) develop within global capitalism and its technological mediation in a way that both constrains and expands the possibilities for identity-formation, akin to how Michel Foucault points to the relationship between sexuality and discourse in the nineteenth century’s generative effects of power.
