Mind the generation (and technology) gap
February 26, 2008
Wayne Turmel tells a fascinating story about the technology gap in his home. At the grand ol’ age of 46, he feels old, especially when seeing how his daughter tackles problems the Generation M (or is it Y, Z…I’ve lost track) way:
My 14 year old daughter and her cheerleader friends were in my living room working on a routine. They had very short time to get everyone up to speed but there was only a third of the team present. What did they do?
Well, one downloaded and edited the music on her laptop while the others worked on the moves. As they invented new moves, one recorded it on her cell phone. Then they downloaded it to YouTube and text messaged their friends and told them to check it out before practice tomorrowI stared at them like they’d just invented fire and angered the gods.
Wayne then goes on to describe how is wife is, by comparison, barely on nodding terms with technology. The story speaks as much to changes in the social landscape of America as it does to the current generation of teenagers. the same could be true in the UK. It’s fascinating to see how an entire cadre of children are growing up who are just technology and networking savvy.
I remember experiencing this first hand a couple of years ago when my (then) 15 year old son came to visit. Flitting between MySpace, multiple instant messaging instances, music sites while barely touching email and yet talking to friends in SMS speak, I was amazed at the way he’d taken the power of opposable thumbs and turned the computer into a dazzling light show. At least it seemed that way from four feet distance.
As these children move through the education system and into business training, I wonder how much of this kind of behaviour will be knocked out of them. I sense very little, at least before the end of higher education. Why?
I received an email today from Shani Lee on behalf of Toby Moores who runs CreativeCoffeeClub. It is about a two day conference announcing the NLab Social Network Conference at De Montford University being held 19-20th June. This is a conference aimed at small business and includes both academics and business people. The line up is certainly impressive and is one of an increasing number of similar events I see springing up at UK universities.
The big question is what happens when students graduate and move on to professional training. So far i’ve seen very little understanding of what the real impact of these technologies is likely to be in the workplace. I absolutely don’t buy the blanket and ultimately narrow marketing emphasis put on by people like Jeremiah Owyang. Social computing is a lot more than that and if anything, I see the marketing ’schtick’ as a minor part of where this goes.
The whole notion of social computing is about re-forming the relationships that govern the way we interact with our peers, staff, business partners and customers. It’s a big topic area with many nuances but with the ultimate goal of tapping into the collective knowledge that is shared among those ecosystems of people and processes. Sadly, I don’t see it being addressed in anything like a coherent manner by the professional institutions. I see ‘bits’ being chewed off, which is a start. What I don’t see is a vision for the future.
If our professional institutions don’t address this issue soon, they will find it very difficult to attract the kind of people needed to make social computing a reality. They will in fact be sidelined by others who do ‘get it.’ We can argue that professionals will always be needed to keep the transactional lights on, but that will count for nothing as human intervention is squeezed out of transactional process steps.
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4 Responses to “Mind the generation (and technology) gap”
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I loved (and feared) your story about the 46-year-old with the teenage daughter. I’m 43, with a three-year-old daughter, and while I don’t feel blown away by her mousing yet (which she’s got down cold, I proudly add), a lot of the past few years I’ve spent more time offline as a result. While I “get” movements such as social networks, I spend so little time with it that on many levels I feel hopelessly behind the curve and fading fast.
On the bright side, I assume the age at which one is over the cyber-hill is pretty low. Not professional gymnast low, but pretty close.
@Rich - fear not - I’ve got +12 years on you. As my dad says: ”you’re as young as you feel.” Tech toys keep me ‘young’ but not as agile. The mind is willing but the body doesn’t want to know.
There are many social networking services operated like http://www.orkut.com, http://www.myspace.com, http://www.facebook.com etc. Orkut.com is being operated by http://www.google.com. MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends. These are popular sites especially among youths. We can judge the popularity of these sites by seeing their ranking in http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....ehotels.in Alexa. Orkut has been steadily rising on the Alexa charts but MySpace is still significantly bigger than Orkut.com.
Dennis, A great post and so pertinent. Most corporations are in the Dark Ages when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. It’s going to be so interesting to see what happens when the irresistable force of the Generation Whatever meets the immovable object of ‘Enterprise 1.0′ head on.