Individual Me Vs. Group Me.
Depending on your periodization, I'm a young member of Generation X or an old member of Generation Y. My outlook is firmly postmodern in most regards. For the most part I experience life as an individual. When I do relate to others it is often in a different manner than previous generations did. Technology allows me to build and maintain relationships that would not have been possible even 15 years ago.
These new ways of relating have led to increased individualism. However, the tradition of interpreting people through their relations has yet to change. Beyond basic physical attributes, when we define an individual it is almost always a definition which describes their various relations. We feel that by knowing how they fit into a number of groups we thereby know the person. Their familial, ethnic, national, and social relations act as identity creators. We lack a tradition of identifying people as individuals.
The new Western postmodern generations will require a new vocabulary of identification. Those people who spend the majority of their time individually and maintain a significant proportion of their relations through electronic means necessarily have a different interpretation of group identity. That interpretation informs their own self-identification and thereby makes examining their identity different than the way one would examine the identity of a 1950s high school student.