Time Magazine Cover: Me Me Me Generation

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About

Time Magazine Cover: Me Me Me Generation refers to the cover of the May 2013 issue of Time Magazine featuring a photograph of a young woman holding an iPhone, which inspired many photoshopped variations mocking the cover's premise.

Origin

On May 9th, 2013, Time Magazine^[1] released the cover for their upcoming issue titled "The Me Me Me Generation," featuring a photograph of a young woman taking a picture of herself with an iPhone (shown below).

"Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.”

Spread

Shortly after the cover was released on May 9th, 2013, a Tumblr^[3] blog titled "The Millenials" was launched, which highlighted various photoshopped variations of the cover. The same day, the finance blog Billfold^[2] mocked the Time article's accompanying video, featuring writer Joel Stein attempting to live like a millennial by using social media excessively, sexting and wearing a rock band T-shirt (shown below).

Hours later, The Week^[5] published an article listing several notable reactions to the cover and pop culture blog The Awl^[6] sarcastically praised Time for "trolling". Also on May 9th, the video game blog Kotaku's staff editor Chris Person (@Papapishu) tweeted a photoshopped version of the cover with the title "The Unemployed Generation," which received over 2,400 retweets and 1,300 favorites within 48 hours. On the following day, Redditor IamSlammaJamma submitted Person's image to the /r/funny subreddit,^[4] where it received over 620 up votes and 60 comments within two hours.