I feel perhaps how Yoda must have felt when a young 20 something "Luke Zackwalker" proclaimed how his generation was the first to fully embraced some form of technology or other.
"Eating custard still is, hmmm"
Hey .. Yoda and his like are using the same technology that the "current" generation uses, for example, watching The Doctor eating fish sticks and custard while talking to a very young Scottish girl all alone in a large home with a very mysterious crack in a wall on his iPad and then sending a few Facebook comments about the program to like minded souls.
I don't know, Zack. I would be hesitant to categorize a generation solely by the type of technology it uses. Technology use will always span quite a few generations.
The thing is, it should be clear by now that ZDNet has turned 20 years of age. I, on the other hand, am only 22. You can probably see the problem here.
By the time that ZDNet was rolling out the front door on the shimmering red carpet that was the World Wide Web, I was interested in mostly two things: jumping up and down, and throwing custard across the dining room table.
Not much has changed, to be honest. Those who know me best will relish the thought of me throwing custard at them across the dining room table.
But over the course of this 20 year period, it has been the double-decade of the millennial; the Generation Y and the iGeneration.
It’s hard to think of Isaac Newton being in a physics or mathematics lesson as a young child at school. Well someone must have taught him the basics for him to go on to be one of the foremost thinkers the world has ever seen.
Just as Shakespeare, Gandhi, Columbus, Einstein and Hendrix (I may be an ‘80s child but he had to be included), these great people must have started off life at a young age of naivety, immaturity and mischief -with no idea of the impact they would have in their lives.
Today’s children and youth are no different. There will be a great number of young people today, the generation of those who are just leaving compulsory education and heading into the workplace or university, who will change the face of the world we live in, and have already made a stark difference to how we view the world.
The future President of the United States will have a Facebook page. One of the upcoming Secretary Generals of the United Nations will have sent a sexually explicit text message to a random lover. The scientist who will have found a cure to cancer will probably have drunk-dialled someone at 3 a.m. because they were compelled to tell their best friend “how awesome this grilled cheese is”.
Just because a young person today acts like the stereotype does not mean for a minute they don’t have the potential to make the future world a brilliant place. But as more and more focus on young people shows them in a negative light it sets to cause issues for their potential employers.
To put it bluntly: the younger generation still has it, but needs help.
Two of the most common terms you may have heard are the ‘Generation Y’ or perhaps the ‘iGeneration’. The two are not mutually exclusive nor are they synonymous to one another; though do have unique elements to both.
The Generation Y represents the next wave of development for our economy, our employment market, governments and our societies.
The iGeneration also represents a change in not only methods, but attitudes and values also, with examples of social media and social networking developing from widely used yet experimental MySpace in the early 2000’s; though, losing out to Facebook towards the end of the decade.
One of the key factors of social networking was the increased growth of the web, finding its way into more and more households and especially to the younger generations as the result. The web was no longer limited to the business environment and grew to harbour more recreational activity.
A defining factor to the iGeneration is the progression from schooling and institutionalised academia into professional circles and environments. Because the iGeneration harnesses their knowledge of the importance of technology this enables them to advocate major changes to culture in their respective industries.
Industry has not been unchanged; it is rare to find a profession nowadays which does not harness technology to its fullest means.
