For most of human history, people were more or less the same, decade after decade. Time moved slowly, and what we now think of as cultural traditions came into being, largely because when things don't evolve quickly, what you do is what your great grandparents did. Then came the printing press, and everything began to move faster. Knowledge and ideas could spread quickly, and if someone had a thought and access to a press, they could communicate that idea nearly anywhere in the world, in any language.

Following on the heels of the printing press: The Enlightenment, The Industrial Revolution, the World Wars. Then came radio and television. Radio and TV were different in that they were more supportive of a mono-culture wherein everyone knows the same stories (watching the same TV shows, etc.). Still, as of the 1990s, the Internet (more specifically the World Wide Web) came along and made information travel even faster. Now, the specific year one is born will likely determine much of one's outlook even more than the decade. The partitioning of media means people can go deep into a subculture while being deaf to everything else that happens in the broader culture. Thus, since TV and radio, the Web and now the smartphone, the decade of one's birth marks one out. Take this quiz, and we'll guess which decade was the one in which you were born!