A Generational War Is Launched with The Birth of Ok Boomer in The Digital Age

This study examined recent virality of “Ok Boomer” in the United States. The term of Ok Boomer gained overnight momentum in the public sphere as the symbol of a generational war. While previous research has primarily examined racial and gender tensions, this study introduced a new phenomenon of the generational conflict between “Ok Boomers” and “Baby Boomers,” in which social media originated the term of Ok Boomer and traditional media diffused it with framed meaning. Diffusion of Innovation theory was used to better understand the path of how “Ok Boomer” as a catchphrase, hashtag, noun cluster or trend resulted in attracting a massive amount of media and public attention. Relying on Node XL, Google Trends, and Nexus Nexis for data gathering and analyses, this study categorized four themes for a word, or an idea as an innovation to be publicly acknowledged: collaboration of social media and traditional media, public figures’ involvement for debate; confrontational social issues, and media-framed agenda. In sum, this study argues the term of Ok Boomer symbolizes the advent of a generational war in society in line with the long-standing race and gender wars in the media coverage.


INTRODUCTION
Communication is fundamental to human existence. There is a link between quality of communication and quality of life (Srivastava 2012). Human potential develops through close, supportive and interpersonal communication.
Human beings are in essence relational thus in need of contact with other human beings. During interpersonal communication people make contact with others as persons, thus reinforcing their own humanness (Helsper and Enyon 2009). Mutual communication means recognizing another human being's humanness in a world shared together. Meaningful interpersonal communication looks at how two people interact as a dyad treating each other as unique individuals who are irreplaceable. In other words they have an impact on each other's lives (Venter 2017). Time magazine announced in December 2019 that Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen activist who became the voice of a new emerging generation with a concern over climate change, is the magazine's 2019 Person of the Year.
Thunberg, 16, is the youngest person to ever be named with the accolade, which lauded her great impact on "the news and the world". Influenced by Thunberg's media-attention-grabbing activities, U.S. media covered her every move and word by portraying her as the poster child of new values for a new generation that integrates millennials and Generation Z. In accordance with Thunberg's rising fame, a new conceptual term that combines millennials and Generation Z was introduced to the public in the social media community. The term is Ok Boomer, which went viral online first. As U.S. mainstream media, such as the New York Times, CNN, NBC, and the Washington Post, popularized the conceptual term of Ok Boomer with their initial coverage during late 2019, the reactions of the American public appeared to have constructed two divisive and hostile groups of generations: Young vs. Old. The former is represented by the new generation of "Ok Boomer," and the latter is represented by the old generation of "Baby Boomer" (Parment 2013).
Baby Boomers America born between 1946 and 1964 represent the largest generation of Americans (Iii 2016). Australian study may have wider applicability in indicating the limits to consumption among the boomer generation boomer generation perception of the boomers as the "lucky generation", happily pioneering a trend towards the end of retirement, is simplistic and misleading. The popular idea that baby boomers are the "generation that will never retire" is one conditioned very much by the expectations of wealthier boomers. It may be true to say that the traditional notion of retirement is now aspired to only by the working class. The reality for most of these lower income earners is worry about how they will fund their retirement, and this is leading them to delay retirement (Phillipson, Chris, Leach, Money, and Biggs 2017).
The baby boomers are not a cohesive group. Rather, that generation comprised a series of cohorts whose life experiences have differed due, in part, to the sociohistorical context in which they were raised (Winston, Barnes, and Winston 2008 Whereas the generation of "Ok Boomer" is relatively a new concept and has been gaining its public recognition, it is not certain whether the term of Ok Boomer becomes a socially widespread concept or norm that could make it into print such as baby boomers and millennials. As human language grows with The theory of Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) since the publication of Everett Rogers' (Rogers 1962) seminal text demonstrates the path of how people adopt innovation in a specific social system. The key term diffusion is defined as

Lim : A G e n e r a t i o n a l W a r I s L a u n c h e d w i t h T h e B i r t h o f O k B o o m e r i n T h e D i g i t a l A g e | 5
"the process in which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. Diffusion of innovations describes the diffusion process of a new idea, technology, or product through a social network. The rapid developments of communication, transportation technologies, and social networking services are making connections between people denser and more complex, and so the mechanism of diffusion of innovations is becoming more and more complex (Choi and Yu 2020). From a communication perspective, DOI illustrates the process of how a product or an idea gains momentum until the public recognizes it through a specific process that is invigorated by the media. In a similar vein, Roger's innovation diffusion model has four basic features, related to the widespread adoption of technologies (Rogers 2010). The four features are compatibility (an innovation is considered to be consistent with the needs of potential adopters), complexity (a complicated innovation negatively affects its rate of adoption), trialability (an innovation can be experimented upon for a limited time period), and observability (an innovation leads to an easy understanding and observing for adopters).
Researchers have found that people who adopt a specific technology or ideologic innovation early show different characteristics than people who adopt it later (Atkin, Hunt, and Lin 2015). For marketers, advertisers, and public relations practitioners, it is crucial to capitalize on such characteristics of adopters at different stages with the goal of promoting a product or an idea. The adoption of innovation varies throughout the course of the product-life cycle, and adopters can be categorized into the five groups of target audiences (Rogers 1962) as follows: Innovators -Be the first to try the innovation by taking risks. Early Adopters -Be opinion leaders spreading their evaluation on the innovation. Early Majority -Be adopters of the innovation before the average person. Late Majority -Adopt an innovation after it has been tried by the majority. Laggards -Be skeptical of the innovation by upholding tradition.
While the early developmental phase of DOI focused on the application to the effects of mass communication such as television, newspapers, and radio, more current researchers are finding DOI applicable to social media's innovation to a target audience (Bianchi, Benedetto, Franzò, and Frattini 2017).

METHODS
Twitter provides speed and informative content with the function of simple interface, which results in low complexity and a higher rate of adoption (Hall, Tinati, and Jennings 2018 Boomer" and portrayed it as a provocative phenomenon for a generational war. Tweets and news articles were analyzed using the constant comparison method by researchers who also used qualitative content coding scheme, based on a suggested set of Twitter characteristics. Twitter coding is aimed to figure out whether content might go viral, including humor, novelty, resonance, and quality in categorization (Schiavone and Simoni 2019). Among over 5,000 tweets, the researchers randomly chose 500 tweets to categorize their characteristics for virality of #OkBoomer. In addition, this study investigated Top 30 most influential Twitter accounts that sparked the emergence of the term of Ok Boomer.
The 24 major news articles about the term of Ok Boomer are also analyzed to identify any specific paths for the new word as a noun cluster to gain overnight popularity by the broad spectrum of the public, who got into the disruptive generational conflict unlike traditional conflicts such race and gender.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The content of twitter virality themes. RQ1 explored how the term of Ok Boomer was socially recognized and widely accepted by the public as a new generation. Two themes were identified: (1) Twitter virality and (2) (Taneja, Wu, and Edgerly 2018). Popularity of social media may have also contributed to more commonalities than differences in patterns of news usage for the term". In less than three weeks from October 15 to November 3, the term of Ok Boomer emerged as one of the most essential terms for the public to recognize as an ongoing glossary for 2019 life online, according to the Washington Post (Ohlheiser 2019).
RQ 2 sought for a path to identify how a new term with its birth suddenly was likened to a specific symbol of meaning in society. This study found that the special meaning for a word or words can be manufactured and framed by the media, which have the power of circulating tailored and inferred information to the public. The major media outlets obviously played a primary role in distributing the information of "Ok Boomer," while setting a national agenda to energize the public's attention for the specific conflict between young generation and old generation. Furthermore, the media presented the term of Ok Boomer as a confrontational public issue, based on the narrative paradigm of why the younger generation antagonizes the old generation. As a result, the public understood the two-word catchphrase, "Ok Boomer," as the symbolic meaning of generational war, which implies conflict and animosity between the two generations. The media apparently pushed such a hostile meaning via their reports. Below is some evidence of how the media portrayed "Ok Boomer": • Now it's war: Gen Z has finally snapped over climate change and financial inequality (New York Times). media by influencers and framing of traditional media by opinion leaders can give birth to a new word or term with social meaning.
The case of "Ok Boomer" clearly exemplified. This study also shows that the collaboration of both social and traditional media is likely to make an idea, or a concept go viral in the digital age, in which new words can wax and wane online in a few days. The term of Ok Boomer will not be easily forgotten; rather, it will spark more social debate as it has been acknowledged as a generational war to the public. More important, this study demonstrates that gaining momentum on an innovation still requires traditional media coverage from television and newspapers. The media still have the capability of setting public agenda, framing issues, and diffusing information to the public.

CONCLUSION
All in all, the social impact and the meaning of "Ok Boomer" need more in-depth studies that connect the link between different social variables, including political, cultural, and legal paradigms. Providing a usable framework to investigate the emergence of the OK Boomer generation is an ongoing challenge for many nations with capitalist economy. Fortunately, because of open Twitter and media data online, this study is able to identify and illustrate the new generation of "OK Boomers." This can guide further research to predict how the new generation activate social changes for cleaner environment and fair opportunity.