What is the millennial generation, and why do these distinctions exist?

If you watch a lot of TV or surf the Internet a lot, chances are you have come across more than once the term “millennial, ” or “generation Y”. But who would be the millennials? And why is this generation distinction?

According to the Pew Research Center in Washington, United States, millennials are people born between 1981 and 1996.

Does this mean that everyone born in this 15 year old window is the same? No. Older people probably think quite differently from younger people in many ways, but they were all between 5 and 20 years old when the 9/11 attacks occurred, meaning the attacks or their aftermath happened as these people became adults.

Millennials are also those who have experienced the Internet boom, transitioning from doing schoolwork as a child using an encyclopedia, to starting to use the internet in adolescence or early adulthood.

And that is what the generation distinction is for. It helps researchers delimit a period in which certain historical and technological events have occurred and, from that, understand how a group that has grown and come of age at this time sees the world. That is, following the development of a group that has been shaped by similar world experiences.

The number of years a generation spans is variable; some have a period of 15-16 years, others reach almost 20.

It is known that the post-1997 generation was practically born connected to the internet and barely remembers when it did not have such facility, but the research center believes it is too early to delimit a cut in time as it was done recently with millennial .