Generation TBC: the case for renaming generations

By Lyndall Spooner, Founder and CEO, 5D

Generation Beta arrived just last year, having followed Generation Alpha, and Generation Gamma is scheduled for 2040. Every 15 years, we hand a fresh cohort of newborns the next letter of the Greek alphabet and call it a new generation. The modern approach to naming the next generation is a tidy system, but it's one that tells us less and less about the people inside it.

Generational profiles are supposed to earn their keep. They exist to describe the social, cultural and technological conditions and formative experiences people share while they are developing their values and pursuing their goals – in short, the defining forces that shaped them and influenced how they see the world.

The problem lies in the predicting and naming of generations before they are even born.

How generations used to earn their names

Historically, every generational name that has ever meant anything was applied retrospectively, once the shaping force revealed itself.

The early labels did the work: The Lost Generation (1883-1900) came of age through World War I and the disillusionment that followed it. The Greatest Generation (1901-1927) survived the Depression and fought in World War II… and ran for 27 years because that is how long the defining conditions lasted.

Baby Boomers (1946-1964) were named after the birth rate that produced them. Gen X (1965-1980) is where it stopped. That name came from a 1991 novel, and the "X" stood for a cohort nobody could define. A generation whose name described uncertainty more than a defining social condition.

After Gen X the naming became sequential rather than meaningful. Generation Y (1981-1996), also known as Millennials, then Generation Z (1997-2012), then a jump to the Greek alphabet, Alpha (2013-2024), Beta and Gamma when the Latin letters ran out. Dull and uninspiring names, autogenerated every 15 years, which tell us nothing insightful about the people in each generation, and provide no guarantee each generation is different to the previous.

Generation Y makes the point better than any of them given that few people use the name now. It lost to Millennials, a name that described something. So take Millennials and Generation Z. What is the shaping force that defines them and are they actually different to each other?

Technology is the real shaping force

If Boomers were shaped by post-war prosperity and Generation X by mass media, then Millennials and Gen Z have been shaped by something far more pervasive: technology.

Anyone born after 1980 has had their entire world immersed in technology. Marc Prensky coined the term "digital native" in 2001 for anyone who has grown up with access to technology and digital information and is proficient using electronic devices and platforms such as mobile phones, laptops, video games, iCloud applications and social media. Prensky believed that digital natives interacted so frequently with technology that they had developed a completely different way of thinking. In addition, this new way of thinking had developed as repeated exposure to technology was helping to grow and stimulate certain parts of the brain, while other less stimulated parts were reducing in size.

5D's research on how technology changes decision making in digital natives found declines in conscientious behaviour, self-efficacy and optimism, alongside increases in apathy, anxiety and reliance on external systems to make the decisions older generations would make themselves. Older generations were more likely to use technology to help them think. Digital natives were more likely to use technology instead of thinking.

We can see the clear impact technology has had on people born after 1980, but should we group all of the original Millennials and Gen Z together or split them another way?

From convenience to environment

The first phase of technology and the impact on the brain came from reducing cognitive load: our brains craved the ease and simplicity that technology can bring to complex decision making and processes. Technology made our life easier and more enjoyable, but the trade-off was weaker curiosity and self-efficacy. We became less resilient and more open to influence.

What initially was a tool to make life easier is now an alternate reality that shapes people's behaviour and sense of worth through feedback, filters, feeds and frictionless design.

The latest generation measure their lives in likes, ratings, followers and notifications. Feedback and digital measurement of self-worth is constant and quantified. Their view of news, shopping and politics arrives pre-sorted through algorithmic filters. They live inside an endless personalised stream that was selected for them, which makes the feed an environment rather than a destination. And effort has been engineered out of the whole thing by one-click purchasing, autofill, same-day delivery and AI assistants that answer before the question is fully formed.

The Tipping Point: 2012 to 2015

Facebook had been invented in 2004 and was mainstream in 2009, smartphones were widespread by 2010, Instagram had launched and social media was on the rise. The tipping point occurred between 2012 and 2013, when social media became a daily habit for most people who were online.

By 2015 social media had become the new primary environment for communication, news, entertainment and identity for the next generation, with algorithmic feeds dominating posts and infinite scrolling standard across major platforms. Teens were literally doom scrolling for hours.

Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation argues a major shift occurred in the early 2010s when childhood became increasingly "phone-based" rather than "play-based". He outlined that widespread smartphone and social media adoption changed how young people socialised, learned, entertained themselves and formed their identities.

Two generations worth naming

Taking all of this into account there is an argument to retrospectively review Millennials and Gen Z and combine those who were born between 1981 and 2004 as the original digital natives. This generation has grown up immersed and proficient in technology, but their formative teenage years were mostly completed before social media became mainstream.

The next generation, born 2005 to 2024 is Generation Algorithm – the first generation raised in a fully digital environment and built on feedback, filters, feeds. Digital natives were adopters of the technology, but Generation Algorithm arrived to find it already running and learned to live inside a system that decides what they see, what they want and what they are worth.

The real divide between people born in 1981 and 2005 is between those who adopted technology and those who were raised inside digital environments designed to influence them. We can name these two because we have watched them grow up and we know what shaped them. The children born since 2025 will have to wait. Whatever ends up defining them has not finished happening yet, which is why Beta is a placeholder and Gamma is a guess.

Digital natives and Generation Algorithm, that's two generations worth naming.