And that ride has been high for the past three to four years, especially with the establishment of TikTok as one of the highest and most curious facilitators of The Things, or online commodities.

These generational segmentations are fascinating to me as someone who is passing through many of the popularized, yet different terms for what many believe to be as the same group.

I wanted to clear up the “GenZ” phenomenon and where the mind wants to go vs. where generationally focused companies have been.

Generalized-Generational Terms

College Culture	1960s
Youth Culture	1970s
Online Culture	2000s
GenZ Culture	2020s

Term	What it means	What’s thought
GenZ	A generation born in a specific time period.	Online Culture
Online/Digital consumer	Someone who mainly consumers information and good virtually.	Young people
New-age consumer	Someone who only knows how to consumer differently than the traditional capitalistic frameworks.	Younger, online people.

Online Culture.

OC is a term for exploratory and fluid culture. Online spaces are places that:

You can be anonymous
Emotional turmoil is common
Opportunity for influence is abundant.

What’s wrong with young people? Are generationally-focused products possible?

I’m going to keep adding onto this list for years to come. Here are the unique challenges of these groups:

Requirement to opt-into identities not yet explored.
Jadedness to universal pain
Online citizenship before IRL citizenship (first experience voting is through online forums — age is in the teens per state)
Recognition of a virtual state (has seen first-hand the power of online movement — a collective impact, finding and destruction)
Expectation of a fast-paced state (Congress takes hours to years; online forum voting - virtually based - can last minutes.)

For the record, I think all of this generational talk is toxic.

Generation Culture
Generalized-Generational Terms
Online Culture.
What’s wrong with young people? Are generationally-focused products possible?