Paging Gen Y

The baby boomers. We grew up in the middle of an economic boom, we watched Neil Armstrong and "the other guy" take the first steps on the moon. John F. Kennedy met his end, and women got their freedom. After this, came the pretty much unremarkable Generation X, only to be followed by Generation Y. Generation Y grew up with technology, bad manners, promiscuous behaviour and atrocious grammar.

One of the best examples of how out of control Generation Y is are the Miley Cyrus scandals. Not only did the fifteen-year-old have half-naked photos of herself leaked once, she went on to have another round of photos somehow circulate the net, as well as a photo detailing a racist dig at Asians. Following this is pole dancing, a lap dance for a forty-year-old man and a topless photo shoot for Vanity Fair. Oh, and she dressed up as a prostitute for her seventeenth birthday.

Generation Y aren't stupid. In fact, on paper, they're actually quite smart. They can make friends with anything possessing an electrical current, and they can teach you how to send an email to your entire office – from your mobile. Their Baby Boomer – and Generation X, in the case of some – parents showered them with the best educations money can buy, and they know it. Theoretically, they could knock their parents out of the box and turn the world on its ear. So what went wrong?

So far, the wrap Generation Y is nothing but bad news. "They can be brats," Jo Nagle, the chief executive of Sydney based marketing company Let's Launch, says, "and they're very demanding." Ms. Nagle isn't the only one, with more and more headlines appearing, blasting Generation Y.

There's a cliché with Generation Y that they all have to be famous, and if you're not famous, you should be licentious. Or, better yet, aspire to be both. Clearly, Miley Cyrus is a Generation Y deity. Typical Generation Y girls are "very cheap and nasty" according to model agent Tanya Powell, and her favourite hobbies are: getting drunk, advertising that she thinks that "Tegan and Sara are a band only for lesbians" on a plethora of social networking sites and posting pictures of herself with her underwear half off and a bottle of Jack in her hand. There's nobody else she would rather share this with than her other, equally trashy girlfriends and her Generation Y male counterpart. They're all tools, who want "to be like their sporting heroes,"2 and binge drink because they "think it makes them look macho." Par for the proverbial course, neither sex will spare a single thought to anybody but their own reflection. Also another epidemic, the "one on one is more fun, anyway"3 plague.

Generation Y's childhoods coincided with the real effects of the "Information Superhighway" and their