Out of the mouths of babes...

Two people who I have a lot of time for: Dale Vile and Dennis Howlett have posted, at different times, about watching the next generation in action.

Children are not constrained by older people's thinking. Dale mentions the fact that his son had been on a Skype call for nine hours. Unlike the older generation who make a call, do the business then hang up, his son and his mates open a conference call as soon as they log in and chat when they feel moved to. A lot of the nine hours was silent.

Dennis was watching his grandchildren at play and learnt that, among other things, they are ad-blind when it comes to online services. And one of them reckons he has 800 friends in MySpace. ('friends', really?)

The point is that this stuff is part of the weft and warp of these kids' lives. It will continue and strengthen through university and then what happens when they hit the 'real' world? Unless they're very fortunate or business wakes up more than it has so far, they're going to find it weird shoe-horning themselves into ineffective corporate behaviours.

Here's a quote from IT services specialist Susan Scrupski:

"On the one hand you have frustrated middle management users who’ve been hamstrung by lagging IT departments, dictatorial edicts for clumsy (and expensive) collaboration, and limited desktop solutions. On the other hand, you have the “MySpace” generation pouring into the entry level positions of every major corporation of the G2000. Today’s generation of hotshots are impatient; they’re all about instant gratification. To impress their bosses and peers, how long do you think it will be before they’re investigating their own self-styled DIY apps or Lord knows, situational enterprise mashups?"

Hole-in-one, Susan.

And thanks, Dale and Dennis, for providing the backdrop.

Comments

[David Tebbutt]

You're absolutely right Tony.

And, before anyone else accuses me of inconsistency, here's a blog post where I commented on this very subject:

My point (not well taken, as it happens) was that whether people need to use this stuff depends on their job.

I admit it wasn't one of my most tactful comments.

[Tony Quinlan]

Tebbo, the phone conversation reminded me I meant to comment on this one:

"what happens when they hit the 'real' world"

I don't think it's as big a problem as we self-selecting few believe. Two reasons:

Firstly, isn't that what every new generation of workers has come up against? It certainly has been for the past two decades. Initially with PCs, then email, then the web, the intranet, etc, etc. Isn't this just the next evolution of that?

Secondly, we are technologically literate and use this medium regularly. That's our pattern and our perspective - but there are plenty of people who don't view it the way we do. In old terms, blue-collar workers in manufacturing don't care about this stuff and wouldn't use it. Plenty of others have little use for these new technologies - and I'm not convinced that that will change.

There will, of course, be people coming in to the workforce who are far advanced of their organisations, but that's a positive thing. It's what got the IBM Greenock intranet going, after failed attempts to do it officially. New recruits to the HelpCentre just appropriated a server and set it up. Then manufacturing engineers added pages for their managers to monitor realtime manufacturing. While higher-ups wondered what this "Internet" thingy was.

[dave Snowden]

I think the statement from Cornelius that each generation consumes more media that the generation before needs some challenge. We may consume more types and in large volume in terms of sensory input. However in some ways the range is less and the level of conversation outside of a peer group far less.
My parents generation were better read than mine, and mine better than my children in terms of actuality and in practice. We were also expected to discuss what we read accross and between generations (remember family meals) and even with the advent of television, the programmes were watched collectively and were therefore subject to discussion from multiple perspectives.
As far as I can see the new media not only limits range of content, but limits the perspectives through which people filter data.
I raised one set of concerns to which David has already referred, but there are more pernicious ones. For example: http://www.cognitive-edge.com/2006/08/cults_village_idiots_and_the_b.php

[Cornelius Puschmann]

Do we really ever *consume* media? I'd argue we a) create content (audio, video, text) which is distributed through channels (or pipes, in the case of the internets) and b) use technology to communicate, sometimes using the same channels.

Communication is obviously an active process but I'd argue that the same thing can hold true for media "consumption". Reading a book is by no means passive. Words evoke different ideas in different people; they can be misunderstood, put into a different context and many other things. And even images lead to different associations and interpretations. Perhaps there's no built-in mechanism to respond in these forms of media but that hardly makes them passive.

When you're playing World of Warcraft while skyping with your in-game friends are you "consuming" media? Or when you blog about how great Snakes on a Plane was (sic)? Or when you -illegally!- promote a band that you like by playing one of their songs on your podcast? Perhaps the coming generation will be the greatest consumers of media to date but then didn't the generation before that one consume more media than those who came before it? And that is considering they did not have the option to both consume and (re)produce, like we do today. Obviously we're producing more and more stuff to consume, especially now that everyone is a potential creator of content. But I think the whole consumption analogy is flawed. Consuming means "using up" (doesn't work for digital stuff) and it also evokes the idea that media content can be bought, sold and transferred in the same way physical goods can. And we know that's a tricky issue.

But let me get back to one thing David wrote before I finish my rant 2.0:
"Unless they're very fortunate or business wakes up more than it has so far, they're going to find it weird shoe-horning themselves into ineffective corporate behaviours."

Except that the CEOs of tomorrow (or perhaps the day after that) will also have had a MySpace profile and a blog. And it's unlikely that they'll be willing to give up these things and the freedom to communicate they provide, especially when the customers, the clients and everybody else is doing it.

[Al]

Interesting point Ian but for me whilst I think he will do those things, maybe:

read a book, watch a DVD, or listen to CDs. Or, of course, watch YouTube videos, read blogs or listen to MP3s

I suspect he will do them whilst playing a game or listening to music or discussing it live or blogging about it or mashing it into something else...and so on.

I think your point is that consuming media by its nature is passive...you have to sit still and concentrate whilst doing it...but kids make their own entertainment and will make their own distractions equally I think.

My counter would be that we are clearly entering a phase where attention is valuable by its very scarcity...not its ubiquity.

But they will be the biggest consumers of media for sure so far...

Namaste

Al

[Ian Betteridge]

"He will never know passive media."

This also implies that he'll never read a book, watch a DVD, or listen to CDs. Or, of course, watch YouTube videos, read blogs or listen to MP3s.

There's a lot of mistakes made in the whole "what the kids are doing" debate. The assumption is that they're not consuming media, which is simply false - what they're doing is consuming different media, at different times, on different platforms.

I have a hunch - and it's no more than that, yet - that in fact kids today consume far more "passive" media than their elders did as children. Far from being a generation of creators, I suspect that we're breeding the greatest consumers of them all.

[Al]

Good post Mr T...

I realised recently that my 10 month old son will never ask me for a TV, he will ask for a laptop instead. He will never know passive media. The world is changing and as usual our generations will find it hard to keep up.

I suspect that we will find more and more people working for themselves, disintermediated to the outside of corporations due to corporations requirement of passivity. People will make lemonade with all their lemons. Business will find it hard to replace the drone culture it has strived to create. Many businesses will fail to adapt quickly enough. If we thought the last 10 years were exciting, the next 10 years will be even more.

In the future I expect we will see much more cottage-industry activity (mouse-industry?) and broader projects like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Business as unusual indeed.

Thoughts?

Namaste

Al