I don't think there are "15-year cohorts" so much as "era-defining bookends". I don't think anyone doing research (such as it can be called in a soft-science) seriously thinks there are clear, unfuzzy lines of demarcation.
Lenin supposedly said "There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen."
I'm ostensibly in this Oregon Trail generation, though as a non-American I've never seen an Apple II in the flesh, and the first time I heard about this game was as the name of a generation. I'm some years older than my wife, and one difference between us is that I have much clearer memories of the 90's as a time of apparent progress and optimism, and just how big a change the September 11 attacks were. She remembers them of course, but not as a point of abrupt change. She did not become politically aware until some time after, when the war of terror was in full swing.
There's a bit in Coupland's Generation X where one of the main characters talks about remembering the Vietnam war being constantly in the news until one day it just disappeared, but his little not remembering it at all, to him it was just history. It feels kind of like that, in the inverse, in a way.
Is a period of relative peace (except for the first Gulf War, the Yugoslavian conflict, etc.) and prosperity non-history? Is a time more historical the worse it feels, just like an event is more worthy of news coverage the more death or suffering it causes? What a terrible thing history must be if it is only the story of pain.
I'm ostensibly in this Oregon Trail generation, though as a non-American I've never seen an Apple II in the flesh, and the first time I heard about this game was as the name of a generation. I'm some years older than my wife, and one difference between us is that I have much clearer memories of the 90's as a time of apparent progress and optimism, and just how big a change the September 11 attacks were. She remembers them of course, but not as a point of abrupt change. She did not become politically aware until some time after, when the war of terror was in full swing.
There's a bit in Coupland's Generation X where one of the main characters talks about remembering the Vietnam war being constantly in the news until one day it just disappeared, but his little not remembering it at all, to him it was just history. It feels kind of like that, in the inverse, in a way.