While driving home from work yesterday I heard part of an interview with Don Tapscott on The Afternoon Edition on CBC Saskatchewan. I found myself yelling at the radio.
Tapscott was talking to host Colin Grewar about the role of the “Net Generation” in the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. He defined this generation as being the children of the Baby Boomers and that they were born between 1979 and 1998.
Young votors turned out to vote in this election in numbers not seen since the 1972 presidential election (Nixon promised to end the Vietnam War) and a lot of them were involved at the grassroots level thanks to things like Facebook. I think that this surge in participation is a wonderful thing and I hope that it continues, but, Tapscott had to start throwing out concepts that I think are bogus and Grewar never challenged him on any of it.
Tapscott talked about the “digital natives” (the Net Generation) and the “digital immigrants” (the rest of us) and that “digital natives” have different brains than us old folks. Bull pucky. I heard Ian Jukes say the same thing last year at a conference and he supported his argument by comparing an MRI image from the brain of a teenager and someone in their 40s. Guess what, brains ARE different in teenagers than in people in their 40s in Every generation.
I grew up with technology that my parents didn’t have when they were growing up. I could not only program a VCR, but could also hook it up to my television; play video games; use a CD player; etc. This didn’t make my brain any different at 16 than my parents brains had looked when they were that age. My parents grew up in the first generation with television. I don’t think that made their brains any different than their parents who were of the first generation to grow up with radio and automobiles. Every generation has something new that their parents may have trouble figuring out (do those Boomers really find Britney Spears and other celebrities more shocking than their parents found Elvis or the Beatles?).
So that’s why I was yelling at my car radio.
For more on the “digital native” / “digital immigrant” thing, I recommend reading Rob Wall’s post The Myth of the Digital Native.
I’m not on point here but what I find interesting in a lot of these false generational comments in the context of voting is that Barack Obama is 47 years old. I’ve read how Gen X (me) is a cynical bunch. Gen We/Y/Millennial will change everything. Obama technically belongs to the same generation of cynics. His use of social media like Facebook and Twitter during the election tells me that there’s nothing ‘immigrant’ about his brain.
Janet,
Good points, but …
Obama is only Gen X according to some definitions. Others would make him a Boomer.
His campaign, and probably him, was smart enough to hire people like Facebook founder Chris Hughes. I think the fact that Obama saw the power of social networking makes it true that he is not a “digital immigrant”. This as opposed to McCain who had a senior campaign staff member suggest that McCain helped create the Blackberry.
What “net generation”? I’m 67 years old and spend far too much time surfing the Web, participating in newsgroups, and maintaining two different Web sites. My own Web pages deal with such subjects as Internet tools, the market shares held by various browsers, and the garbage produced by so-called Web page developers.
As for the recent U.S. election, I used the Web to locate where to send contributions to the election campaigns in five states and to the “No” on Proposition 8 campaign in my own state of California. I also used the Web to track election results — primarily because I can’t stand many of the “talking heads” on TV news programs but also because I live in a small community whose elections are rarely reported on TV.
Whenever I hear these assertions about younger generations being physically and mentally different than older ones, I ask “What does the asserter have to gain by saying so?”
Both Jason Frand and Diana Oblinger have gotten a lot of mileage out of such claims, with little substantiation last time I checked.
While people may be communicating and learning by different means these days, they are using the same processes as they always have to do so.
DD
I’m glad I didn’t hear that interview, Heather, or the radio might have been forcibly removed from the dashboard then defenestrated. I think that Tapscott does have a substantial potential to benefit from his claims. He has recently published a book called “Grown Up Digital”. I haven’t read it, but I did start his earlier book “Growing Up Digital”; it was only started because I didn’t want to read any more of his ludicrous claims about the Net Generation. It seems that he is stirring the pot with some half-baked claim so that he can profit by speaking and consulting.
Thanks for the link to my blog post, by the way. For anyone interested in learning more about the digital native myth and how it is threatening our educational, political and economic systems, I’d be happy to speak to your organization. Contact me for my rates. 🙂