This site is inspired by the Internet generation - an emerging term in theoretical and popular discourse to denote the American sub-generation branching off later-born members of Generation Y and early born members of The New Silent Generation , immediately following the Echo Boom Generation. Born since the explosion of the home computer market in the mid-to-late 1990s, the defining cultural-historical event to distinguish this cohort is that its members spent their formative years in an age of the rise of the World Wide Web. Thus, the Internet Generation usually has no recourse to a memory of (or nostalgia for) a pre-Internet history.

The "iGeneration"  or "MySpace Generation" , as it is also called, takes the Internet for granted as part of the 'natural order of things,' accepting the utility of services such as internet forums, email, Wikipedia, search engines, MySpace, Facebook, imageboards and YouTube.

This emergent media ecosystem is a key factor in the historical formation for this cohort. One can compare this situation to those who grew up with TV versus those for whom TV was a new development (which they could choose to watch or ignore so that the statement "I don't watch TV" becomes a relevant identity marker). Emerging within a paradigm shift that changed how humans relate to each other and how both virtual and real communities form within globalization, the Internet Generation therefore cannot be lumped together with previous generations. The term "iGeneration" (a phrase said to be coined by underground rapper MC Lars) draws from the popularity of technologies such as the iPod and connotes the paradoxical simultaneity of both 'ear bud insularity' and relatively blasé attitudes about the loss of private space since the rise of the Internet and, in particular, YouTube, where Andy Warhol's '15 minutes of fame' prophecy has been literalized. Tellingly, "You" was voted Time Magazine Person of the year for 2006 while You Tube was named Invention of the Year.