The Trend On Facebook Where Millennials Pretend To Be Baby Boomers

09/07/2019

The internet is full of people of all ages. From parents creating social media accounts for their children (even babies), to much older generations like the silent generation with ages 80 and beyond.

A Facebook group called ‘A group where we all pretend to be boomers' experienced massive increase of membership to more than 5,200%. Here, the members who are mostly millennials, are pretending to be baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964.

Besides millennials who were born in the early 1980s, the group which has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and created in mid-May, also has many members from generation X (born in the 1960s), and generation Z (born in the 1990s).

They enthusiastically share personal news, GIFs, copy and paste alarmist posts and hoaxes, create posts with typos and all capital letters, and comment of friends' profiles to tell them to say hi to family members.

Just like the typical baby boomers who were late on the internet. And these younger generations are doing that just for fun.

‘A group where we all pretend to be boomers'
‘A group where we all pretend to be boomers' is created as a closed group. To join, users need to complete a survey that asks some basic questions to be reviewed by the moderators.

"It’s definitely been a lot more successful than I expected, and I think a lot of that can be attributed to the relatable nature of how boomers post,” said the group's moderator Robert Snyder.

As these younger generations use Facebook similar to how their older relatives do, they thought that it would be fun to satirize the older generations they grew up with.

However, the group somehow also appealed some baby boomers who wanted to get their share of fun.

"I deal with people who sound like this on my page,” said 61-year-old Lauren Perrine. “I am a boomer … and I find this fking [sic] funny,” she commented on one of the group’s posts.

'A group where we all pretend to be boomers' is created as a closed group. To join, Facebook users need to complete a brief survey that asks some basic questions to be reviewed by the moderators.

But putting the fun and comedic value aside, there are reasons why younger generations may want to pretend to be baby boomers.

Some said that it's because baby boomers experienced a more affordable college tuition, had better chance of home ownership, and easier entry to professional and high-paying jobs.

What this means, there is somehow an envy from these younger generations to their baby boomer counterpart.

The fact is further tied with the stereotypes struct with younger generations, predominantly millennials, who have long been labeled as lazy, selfish and feckless by their elders.

"I think that recognizing that, even when we are poking fun at another group in relatively good taste, it still perpetuates stereotypes," said Dr Kelly Weeks, who has researched generational characteristics at Rhodes College.

"A very common reaction to stereotyping is the denigration of the other,” explained Dr Elissa Perry, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, suggests that the impulse to satirize boomers may be a reaction to negative stereotypes younger cohorts face about themselves.

"It’s playful at first, until it’s not," Perry cautioned.