Talking About my Generation?

Just thought I'd start this before running off to dinner... I was in class today and the professor asked us if we were Generation Rx, a question that sparked basically the largest digression from discussion in the history of that class, and launched us into repeating every label our generation's encountered so far. These included:

Generation Rx, apparently
Generation Y, or "why?"
Generation Me
iGeneration
MTV Generation
Generation 9/11
Echo Boomers

This is interesting to me for a couple reasons. One, when do we become generationally situated? Or how much time has to pass for one of these generational namesakes to stick? We have Generation X before us, and the Baby Boomers before them-- those are pretty solidified. I also wonder if other generations have also had the same amount of attention paid to them; I think part of the reason we got slapped with the Generation Me label is because as we were growing up, so much of the media's focus was on us. For the most part this attention was paid for commercial and economic reasons as advertisers began to realize that teenagers, too, possessed disposable income (jobs, allowances, etc) and had nothing they needed to spend it on, leaving them with an enormous amount consumer purchasing power. The media coined new words for a number of our issues, experiences and habits then-- remember when "tween" was suddenly such a buzzword? I think the number of terms coined for our generation is one example of how focused the media was on us. It's interesting to see the economic roots of this too: in nearly all of the generations we named in class there is a reference to a material or commercial product.