Defining the Oregon Trail generation - Sketch Tutorial

- Did you have high-speed internet in your home when you were in high school? I mean real high-speed internet, not dial-up? I ask because if you were born between 1980 and 1994 and had high-speed internet in your home growing up, you're probably a Millennial. But let's say you were born in '83, and you didn't have high-speed internet until you went to college. Maybe you lived in a rural area. Maybe your family was on a budget. Maybe your parents thought the internet was a fad, a-hem, Mom and Dad. I hope you're listening to this. Even though you're technically in the age range of a millennial, you may not actually be a millennial, but you're probably not quite Gen X either. Based on my large-scale research of people in their teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s, I agree with some past researchers who have noticed a gap between millennials and Gen X, people that seem to be half analog, half digital native. These are the people who remember TV with the bunny ear antenna and can't help but chuckle when I say, "My name is Inigo Montoya. "You killed my father. "Prepare to die." This is what we call a microgeneration, as small sliver of people who are technically in the millennial age range but behave more similarly to Gen X because of the environment they grew up in. This microgeneration has been called Generation Catalano, the x-ennials, or even the lucky ones. Yes, really. But in 2015 a name came about that I love, the Oregon Trail Generation. As a proud member of this microgeneration myself, I take pride in being a part of the group that remembers playing the famous Oregon Trail computer game on a floppy disk, not the small floppy, the big floppy. If you're in this generation, in your grade-school computer class you probably shared one computer with two to three other kids, and you cheered each other on as you pioneered your trail, ate squirrel meat, and eventually died of dysentery. These early '80s babies bridge the gap between Gen X and millennials, with what Anna Garvey from Social Media Week calls a healthy portion of Gen X grunge cynicism and a dash of unbridled optimism of millennials. This microgeneration was on the cusp of changes that transformed modern life. In my experience, if you're in this age group, true millennials can be identified with two simple behavioral questions. You already know the first one. Did you have high-speed internet at home in high school? The second one might surprise you. Are you still on you parents' cell phone plan? You might think I'm joking here, but I assure you I'm not. In our recruiting screeners from market research studies, these two questions have proven time and again to be reliable in understanding if someone in this age group behaves closer to millennials or skews older. The takeaway here is that a generation is not just a number. It's a group of people within the population who have shared experiences and the collective sense of history that influences how they think and act today.