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Originally Posted by teadonkey
Kind of off topic, but where did the term "Silent Gen" come from? I'm guessing the G.I. Gen takes it's name from the G.I. bill? I find generational studies fascinating, but I've not really heard those terms before.
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G.I Gen is the people that grew up during the Depression and fought in WWII and at the time soldiers were referred to collectively as G.I. Joes. (Which the toy and later the TV series adopted.)
G.I. = Government Issued.
The Silent Generation refers to the folks that grew up in the war years, the chohort between the "Greatest Generation" and the Baby Boomers because they were neither great heroes (collectively-speaking) like their older siblings or troublemakers like their nephews or children.
The first time I ran into the terminology was in the 1992 book: GENERATIONS, by Heil Howe and William Strauss and its followups.
http://www.amazon.com/Generations-Hi.../dp/0688119123
These books present a sort of PsychoHistory Theory of American Society complete with "Seldon Crises" and all (though they don't use Asimov's terminology) and offer an interesting Insight purporting to predict the general strokes of the near term future. Both GENERATIONS and FOURTH TURNING have made some pretty accurate "predictions" about the decades that followed and the road the "Culture Wars" are taking the country in. Very good reads but alas only the latter two volumes are available in ebook form, not the original. FOURTH TURNING spends less time dissecting the past and more analyzing the Generations so if they theory sounds intriguing it's not a bad place to start.
Anyway, on the chart itself, the spike in usage among younger boomers might be due to the fact that most are still working and thus have more disposable income than their retired cohort-mates and aren't as Internet-inmersed as their kids.
To me what stands out in the (expected) uniform growth in penetration of gadgets across generation is desktop computers which is declining, game consoles which is leveling off, and ebook readers and tablets which are probably too new for any long-term patterns to have established themselves. Thus the spike.
In other words: take the chart with a grain of salt because it is too early in the mainstreaming of both categories to say much about how they appeal to people. For example, if anybody actually manages to create a viable academic ebook reader the current distribution can be overturned overnight.
The most that can be said is that younger folks have less time available for reading-based devices, what with their greater focus on gaming and other forms of entertainment than their elders. And even that is a reach.
Nice chart, though. They do know their demography.