Stereotyping is a short hand form of prejudice that relieves us of the duty of thinking. When Adam and Eve were turfed out of the Garden of Eden, the first stereotype was born.

The media has press ganged stereotypes in to service to make complex subjects appear simple.

Generational tension sells media and provides an easy short hand stereotype to brand young people. Part of the tension arises from objectifying an age cohort so that younger generations are often portrayed as selfish or unreliable, while the boomers are depicted as dithering idiots blocking the career ambitions of Gen Y or whoever.

These are consumer indicators, not predictive behaviour. Can we make sweeping generalisations about age cohorts? Has human nature changed so much from say the young people in Revolutionary France in 1789 to young people now? No.

Essentially people then were as people are today, with the same array of foibles and peculiarities so richly preserved in the novels of Dickens or Balzac.

A core change is the rise of consumer culture, technology and the mass media. These have created audience segments that display aggregations of demographic variables such as salary, disposable income, age, gender, level of education and professional status but none of these tell us anything about the attitudinal constructs of Gen Y, Gen X or the boomers.

They are flimsy typologies based on consumer behaviour – or rather – what marketing gurus would have us believe. A more interesting area is the processing and sense making of passing historical experience but that is another story.