ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by considering the way that – despite the global financial crisis of 2007–8 – young people continued to represent a key commercial market, with the term ‘millennials’ coined to denote what some observers saw as a new generation of young, relatively affluent consumers. It examines the impact of such developments on contemporary youth culture. The chapter surveys these changes, and critically reviews theories which cast the shifts in terms of a generational transformation – that is to say, as a shift marked by rise of a new cohort of youngsters who are uniquely immersed in new media technologies. As Millennials Rising became a bestseller, the term ‘millennials’ passed into popular usage as general moniker for those entering young adulthood during early twenty-first century. The chapter concludes by considering how far these changes have taken place alongside the emergence of a new, distinctive period in the life course – ‘emerging adulthood’ – that separates adolescence and full adulthood.
