Since I joined We Are Social and got an iPhone (the two are unrelated) I’ve been spending quite a lot of time on Twitter.

I’ve been sharing my geeky tweets about life, the universe and everything, documenting my daily adventures in London and Europe, sharing “worthy” links and been keeping in touch with friends.

I’ve started following some interesting people, people who have something to say about the things that fascinates me.

On Saturday I came upon a link from @carol_phillips, a marketing professor at University of Notre Dame and her blog http://www.millennialmarketing.com/. Carol is a specialist in the Gen Y, otherwise called the Millenials.

I was somewhat familiar with the idea of Gen Y but surprisingly I had never studied it in depth when I was in gradschool, which to be honest seems like an aberration considering that

1) I was in a business school

2) my speciality was e-marketing

But anyway, we can’t all be perfect and it’s never too late to learn.

Carol links to a bunch of interesting articles about Gen Y and the various studies that have been published on the subject but there is one article that I’ve been mulling over and over since Saturday and it is the New York magazine’s article What the class of 2009 Graduates think about the world they inherited.

Obviously this is an important issue, especially for someone like me who was born in 1984 (as a reminder, Generation Y is the generation following Generation X, especially people born between 1980 to 1988). Oh and to answer your question yes I graduated in 2009.

During its limited years on Earth, the Class of ’09 has endured more than its share of insults from the older generation—condemned as MySpace narcissists and entitled lazy-asses, not to mention hookup addicts and/or rainbow-party attendees. Worse, having come of age traumatized by 9/11 and the ugly war that followed, they are graduating just as the economic bubble pops. Who could blame these new graduates if they were, as a demographic slice, feeling put-upon, even downright bitter?

New York Magazine puts 9/11 and the war that followed as one of the key event to understand the Gen Y. And I do agree that my generation became of age when these events were broadcasted on our tvs or to be more accurate on our MySpace/Blogs/Favourite Bitorrent client but is that really true for the European Gen Y?

The class of 2009 European graduates grew up in a world where the key event was an expanding EU system. I was a teenager when Schengen was put in place, I had just graduated high-school when we started using the Euro, I was given the chance to leave my university and go study at University of Sussex for a year because of the Erasmus system. Some of my friends now work all over Europe in European institutions and it only seems natural for me now to be living abroad and go travelling all over Europe whenever I have a free day.

But is that sufficient to define us? We don’t really have anything else specific that could set us apart from the other generations…

We grew up in mixed economic times: of course we had the digital bubble of the early 00’s but apart from that it was always: unemployement-unemployement-unemployement. We grew up in a time when the West/URSS divide had already collapsed, a time when some major achievements had already been… well achieved, where naive optimism and younger rebellion were frowned upon (come on… 68 already happened, what else new could we have to bring to the debate?).

For me Generation Y is probably a nice way to label the people we can’t really define, the one that are between generations. We didn’t grow up in a time where technology is as natural as everyone claims it to be (that is going to be for the next generation, for example my little cousins who are 12).

Of course I recognize myself in some of the traits defined by the articles about Gen Y. Yes I think we have a short-attention span, that companies need to be more flexible to adapt to the way we are functionning and yes I’m close to my parents and don’t mind spending time with them.

But what results from these musings is that Gen Y is a generation that need to be told it matters.

We were brought up in a conflicting post-Dolto world where we’re everything to our baby-boomers parents but where the rest of the world didn’t really care. We’re exposing ourselves all over the internet, sharing our lives on Twitter, Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, making friends on Social Networks, ranking them and basically sending the message across:

Tell me I matter, listen to what I’m saying, are you interested… am I interesting enough?