The Internet Generation

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:20 AM -0400 9/29/10, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:12 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>>  On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 12:28 AM, Ann Burlingham wrote:
>>>
>>>  I saw an ad for the movie Catfish on tv tonight, in which they used
>>>  the phrase "the internet generation". Searching the ADS-L archives, I
>>>  found the phrase only in a CNN press release being quoted in 2003.
>>>  Google gives me 142,000 hits. It seems a particularly apt phrase, but
>>>  is it just not sexy enough to get much usage? Or is it gaining ground?
>>
>>  Seems rather quaint now. Don Tapscott came out with _Growing Up
>>  Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation_ way back in 1997. Tapscott
>>  shortened "Net Generation" to "N Gen," which never caught on like,
>>  say, Gen X/Y/Z.
>
>And Bill Gates once suggested "Generation I":
>
>http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495/is_1_45/ai_59283651/
>
Doomed to fail, given that nobody refers to the Internet as "I"
(there is of course the little i of iPod, iPhone, iChat, and such,
but that's the i of *Jobs's* Apple, so that wouldn't be P.C. for
Gates) and given that there would have been no stopping the puns on
Me Generation vs. Generation I.

LH

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