MTV WANTS TO CALL THE NEW GENERATION “THE FOUNDERS”

There are, it turns out, a plethora of monikers for the new generation of kids who have been raised on social media, who don’t remember a time before Instagram and Snapchat. Some of the names tossed around: Gen Z, iGen, Posts, Homeland Generation, ReGen, Plurals. But for MTV, the cable and satellite network which has been studying this generation for the last few years, none of those names represented what its researchers were seeing in surveys and data they’d been collecting. So in March 2015, the network asked more than 1,000 kids who were born after December 2000 what they should be called. The survey generated 544 names including the Navigators, the Regenerators, the Builders and the Bridge Generation. But the winning name for the current generation of teens: the Founders. Research is beginning to show that teenagers today are more pragmatic and independent than their millennial predecessors. They’re more likely to stand out than fit in. They’re slightly more risk-averse, having grown up without a safety net. Their Gen X parents appear to be imparting a hard realism about life onto their kids as opposed to a more optimistic, “you-can-do-anything” parenting style of their Baby Boomer parents.
* The Founders? Are they all smelting metal?
* Maybe they meant “flounders”, but spell check screwed it up.
* A lot of them sure seem to be floundering.
* But then, aren’t we all?
* They’re more likely to stand out than fit in? Sorry, but there just aren’t that many ways to be unique.
* How about the Living At Homers?
* Raised on social media? How about the Timewasters?
* The Hashtaggers?
* Okay, that was stupid but so is the Founders.
* Maybe the Founders should find a better name.
* The Homeland Generation? Please tell me you’re kidding with that.
* Let’s get Tom Brokaw on this. He’s the one who came up with the Greatest Generation.