In defence of my Xennial meme
Well it’s been a very crazy week, which has moved at both fibre-optic speeds and as slow as AOL dial up. On Monday morning I woke to discover, purely by chance, that a meme I created and posted on my Instagram account called ‘What is a Xennial?’ had not only gone viral but had led to a piece on popular women’s website Mamamia and which subsequently led to Xennials going mainstream. I was slightly annoyed — a) that I had somehow missed the fact that my post had gone viral and b) that I didn’t watermark it with my web address, hence the post going largely uncredited on numerous websites. I’ve been trying to rectify that where possible but it’s left me feeling like a donkey chasing it’s tail and trying to eat the dangling carrot at the same time.
So how did this happen? Okay, in a nutshell: I first wrote an article on 2 April 2014 called ‘Gen X or Gen Y?’ on my old website, phdavies.co.uk (no longer online) which talked about being disgruntled at straddling two generations without really belonging to either (I will be writing in more detail about my original article in a future blog post). This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, although I was unaware that others had already been discussing this same generational discomfort. Doree Shafrir had already identified this cusp-generation in a Slate article and used Danielle Nussbaum’s term ‘Generation Catalano’ to describe it, after Jordan Catalano in My So-Called Life, the ultimate Xennial TV show cancelled by ABC in 1995.
Anna Garvey subsequently wrote an article for Social Media Week, using her own term the ‘Oregon Trail Generation’ after the popular computer game kids played in the 1980s. The problem was, outside of America, no one really knew what the Oregon Trail was and it’s unsurprising that it didn’t stick. Prior to this, Sarah Stankorb wrote an article for GOOD Magazine coining the term Xennials, a portmanteau of Gen ‘X’ and Millennials. It was early in spring 2017 when I first came across the term (not in Stankorb’s article but another meme by Jen X) and it resonated so strongly with me — it felt like after years of being shunted between two generations that didn’t define my experience, someone had come up with the perfect term, one I felt I could adopt and use as a framework for writing about my experiences unique to being a Xennial.
And so I started this blog site, xennial.co.uk, not quite knowing where it was going to take me. On 23rd May I created an Instagram post distilling all the various articles I had read about this cusp generation called ‘What is a Xennial?’ It was designed to be a pithy, short guide to the main characteristics of our micro-gen. Given that I only had about 500 followers at the time I didn’t really think much of it and unlike all my subsequent posts, I foolishly didn’t watermark it with my web address or credit Stankorb as the person who invented the term. Fast–forward to this week: I discover that a US-based Facebook user called Charger Stone had copy and pasted my post without credit and this one post alone was shared on Facebook almost 100K times (he’s since deleted it, at my request).
My Instagram post had become a meme and like most memes, no one knew who created it. Due to the viral success of the post, Mamamia picked up the concept and wrote an article about it. They spoke to an Australian sociology professor, Dr Dan Woodman at the University of Melbourne, who elaborated on the concept. This article incorrectly identified Woodman as the brains behind ‘xennial’ (Woodman has been clear this was a mistake by the publication and has emphatically denied coining the term) and they also posted my meme, again credited to the Facebook guy. The Mamamia article sent ‘Xennials’ into the stratosphere and there have been posts in many mainstream media outlets and I’ve spent the entire week ensuring that if they include the meme, they credit it to me. Why get so upset about it? I guess because I’m old-fashioned in the belief that if you take something someone else created online, you at least have the courtesy to credit them.
That’s probably where the story should end, but then a rather salty article by Sarah Stankorb appeared yesterday on Vogue.com laying claim to the word ‘xennial’ — which is fair — but then went on to attack both Woodman and I because of our gender. She writes, ‘it’s been hard not to feel like the woman in a meeting who shares an idea and watches credit evaporate.’ I totally get that — I’ve been in meetings when I’ve seen this happen — but I get rather short shrift in the article, reduced to one characteristic as ‘a man’ (thanks for that, like I don’t exist beyond my gender) and questioning why I would get upset because I created a meme that popularized the term and didn’t get any credit for it. I never once said I came up with ‘xennial’ and I’m not trying to take credit for it either. It’s the mainstream media who are at fault for not sufficiently checking their sources when they report.
Anyway, it’s all been a learning curve, I guess. The fact is, I believe the meme went viral because there are millions of people for whom this resonated and yes, there are some who hate it and think the term ‘xennial’ sounds like a new anti-depressant. And that’s fine, we can all disagree. Others have suggested that my meme went viral because I made a link with Star Wars (the birth years aligning to when the original trilogy was released) and I’ve started to see the term ‘Star Wars Generation’ crop up in articles. As the dust settles I think Stankorb will get the credit for coining a term that I believe is here to stay, largely because of the huge response it’s received in just one week. And while someone else coined the term, I don’t believe anyone has ownership of the experience. Remember, Douglas Coupland didn’t come up with the term Gen X but everyone thinks he did because he knew how to explore and articulate it.
