In an age of 24/7 information, where there’s pressure to stand out, and a general expectation that we should react to news in real time, we need to say something as quickly and emphatically as possible – so we say it with gifs. In a medium where words might be limited, the emotional impact of gifs should be similarly direct: “They’re lingua franca,” says Dr Sarah Thornton, a San Francisco-based sociologist of culture, “They’re not determined by linguistic boundaries, and they are so simple that a child can understand them.”

Price and Thrall both pointed out that millennials are not just the largest generation in the United States, but the largest in many regions of strategic interest to the U.S. […] “How American millennials respond to that is going to be one of the defining features of American foreign policy for the next fifty years,” Thrall said.

While refugees poured across the border to China telling stories of starvation and torture, in the other direction — thanks to the merchants — came foreign films, television shows and music stored on DVDs and USBs, a link to the prosperity and ways of the outside world. These shifts gave rise to North Korea’s very own millennials, a generation born in the 1990s who are independent, pragmatic and less politically attached than their predecessors, says Park. They’re also known as the “Black Market Generation.”

A new survey shows the youngest bloc of voters is decidedly progressive, nervous about money—and not especially energized about voting.One big takeaway is that Millennials are strongly supportive of governmental intervention in society on a wide array of social issues. The survey also suggests Millennials place a high value on equality.