Let me say I was born in the Stone Age, 1959. And, for better or worse, my wife and I have raised 2 millenial sons.
After 20 years of observing them, and their friends, I've come to a couple of general conclusions about our children.
First, they have a far greater sense of entitlement than we grew up with. Bad enough that we ourselves have a greater sense of entitlement than our parents, many of whom grew up in the Depression. I'm not saying they won't work for things; but they seem to expect that they deserve great things for rather mediocre effort.
Second, their sense of wonder is atropied. Audio-visual media has turned everything into just another special effect. They only take notice if the sounds are louder, the lights are brighter, the stench is worse, etc. Why try to discover anythng new when everything worth discovering has already been discovered?
Finally, their ability to dig deep into things seems lacking. Maybe it's that 10 minute maximum attention span due to schools and television. How many millenials do you know have the willingness and drive to tear down and rebuild a car? Design and build a home? Plan and landscape a yard? Do a real thesis and not just a web cut-and-paste? Participate in a local election?
This sounds awfully negative, I know. But I'm afraid that our children are not going to be the ones able to answer the problems our generation are preparing to pass on to them; to their detriment and ours.
What were you doing 20 years ago? A lot of you were probably teaching. Others, I’m sure, were in private industry, with just the smallest seeds of Dilbert-esque angst that would ultimately lead you to leave a lucrative career for one in public education. Some of you may have only recently been born, although readers of this column tend to at least be a little bit older than that. I was wrapping up my freshman year in high school, already thinking about college and leaving what would be a relatively unpleasant four years behind. And ZDNet, like a few of my readers, had just been born.
That’s right, ZDNet is turning 20, which, in Internet years, is practically forever. It’s gotten all of us ZDNet bloggers thinking about where we were, what we were doing, and just how much things have changed since 1991. That was, after all, the first year I ever had the privilege to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS as I helped write my school newspaper. We’d type up stories in WP, print them out on one of the school’s 2 laser printers, and then cut and paste the columns onto big sheets of graph paper for printing.
If I had been born in 1991, however, the idea of a “word processor” wouldn’t have been quite so novel. Obviously, word processing software had been around for a while by then, but as with most things technical (even today), it took a while to become mainstream in K12 education. If you were students in 1991, how often were you required to type your work? And if you were a teacher, were you accepting that work via email, your SIS, or a social learning tool? Probably not.
Generation Y, or the “Millennials” are defined chronologically in many ways, but are essentially those kids born in 1991, +/- 10 years. I’m from the latter part of Generation X, but experienced the explosion of computer technology (personal, business, enterprise, and Internet) in very different ways from my Millennial successors. We often throw around Prensky’s “Digital Native” term: today’s Millennials were the first who could actually qualify to be Digital Natives, to take personal and networked computer technology for granted. Many sociologists, in fact, refer to 1991 as the first year of Generation Z, synonymous with the so-called Digital Natives.
Chances are, none of these young people ever checked their email using Pine. The youngest of them may, in fact, never have checked email at all, opting instead for social media and instant messaging. The years since ZDNet opened its virtual doors constitutes an entire lifetime for the average Millennial, meaning that their experience with technology began in the time that ZDNet set out to chronicle and explain.
Much has been made of this generation and the impact that it has only recently begun to have on business, but it’s important to remember that a majority of this generation, with sensibilities and assumptions that even those of us in our mid-30’s don’t necessarily share, is still in high school and college. Their approach to knowledge access and management, collaboration and teaming, and even interpersonal relationships may not mesh well with those of their future teachers and employers. How many of us used Facebook to coordinate and prepare a group project in school? None of us - because it didn’t exist yet. I know I have a few teen and 20-something readers, by the way. I don’t mean to exclude you. But the vast majority of us simply didn’t grow up with the Internet as the social tool that you have. It may have become that for us too, but it certainly didn’t start that way.
The pace of technological change in the last 20 years ensures a different sort of generation gap than anyone experienced in the 50’s and 60’s when the term first became popular. This isn’t to say that plenty of 30, 40, 50, and 60 year olds in business and education aren’t brilliantly adept with technology. However, when your first experience on a computer is a social one, rather than a utilitarian one, it makes for a very different perspective on what computers should do and be.
