An excellent definition of the Digital Generation
From a bright new* star in the blogosphere, JP Rangaswami (*well he’s not exactly new to the blogosphere but he finally! has his own soapbox…), an excellent description of the Digital Generation that is one of the key pillars of my paradigm:
What inverted? The age of the early adopter changed, which moved startlingly from 35-40 years old towards 12-21 years old. When you look at mobile phones, texting, instant messaging, downloads, Skype, the iPod and iTunes phenomena, multifunction devices, the standards for these are all set by youth. And this trend is now moving towards changing the functionality of “established” web firms such as Google and Amazon, eBay and Yahoo.
It was this shift, when youth became the early adopters, which signalled a real change from institutional to individual capitalism; not having been exposed to how organisations worked and not caring about how governments operated, youth began to set the agenda.
Peer respect became more important than the power of hierarchical authority; relationships and trust returned to prominence after a long time in the wilderness; there were no longer any taboos about asking why things were the way they were, and challenging the status quo.
Today is their Sixties. And, in a vicarious way, ours too; The Age of the Individual.
Empowered and free from hierarchy, jealous about personal time, keen on relationships and trust, inquisitive about values and ethics, with the power of the web to change their perceptions of time and distance and organisations and government.
Read the whole post here. Inspired by this I have created a wikipedia entry for the Digital Generation.
February 28th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
It’s classic Coupland, Generation X stuff - see this description at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X.
“The term Generation X is now popularly associated with the people born between the early to mid-1960s and the early 1980s [1], although this is disputed. Generation X has also been described as a generation consisting of those people whose teen years were touched by the 1980s, although many who are considered part of this generation had their teenage years stretching into the 1990s.
Gen X’s attitude towards technology can be summarized by noticing that most were either born after the 1969 moon landing, or were very young at that time. Therefore, to Gen Xers, “anything is possible”, as long as you’re willing to throw enough money at it. Thus for Gen X, success is much less a matter of if one can accomplish something; and more a matter of should one accomplish something: a “so what” factor. Gen X may be all about choosing one’s priorities (and then maintaining the will and discipline to follow through with them) rather than dreaming of the Possible (especially false utopias, per Nineteen Eighty-Four and other literature in Gen X required school reading). Gen X knows we landed on the moon, from reading the history books; but didn’t live through and feel the national pride; it’s a “so what”.
Technology-wise the Defense-created Arpanet became and spread as the consumers Internet. Communication mediums changed. An early characterization is this: Face-to-face communication would become secondary, books beside the point, near-infinite knowledge on hand at all times, and tech-related jobs a hot commodity. However, one-to-one inter-personal interactive communication (just not always face-to-face) may actually have grown; e.g. newsgroups and chatrooms, directly emailing a bloggers versus the mass-receive-only of newspapers, individual cell phones rather than the household (and the rural group line where your neighbor could listen in). In jobs, they embrace risk and prefer free agency to loyal corporatism.”
I think the book did Gen-Xer’s a disservice. It’s not a slacker generation at all. It’s a shaper generation. With a not radically different agenda to our parents, just a more determined sense of achievement.
June 27th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
[…] Anyhow I guess I’m GenX. And even if I try really hard (what’s the geek equivalent of buying a Ferrari in some sort of mid-life-where-have-the-years-gone-existential-mini-crisis? and don’t say writing a blog…) I’ll never be a native member of the Digital Generation. Now I’m not old by any stretch of the imagination, but when I went to university you had to go to the computer lab (and that was considered normal) if you wanted to work on a computer. Hell the web browser wouldn’t even be invented until after I graduated. […]