In his book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World*, Don Tapscott examines how technology has affected the "Baby Boom Generation" (born 1946 through 1964) and the "Net Generation" (born 1977 through 1997). My father, a Boomer, and I, a Net Genner, have always been heavily involved in technology, and this book echoes many of of our conversations about how we approach technology differently. In particular, the themes from the book reminded me of three stories: one about how ubiquitous technology becomes unremarkable, another about text versus voice communication, and a third about the shift from broadcast (i.e. television and newspapers) to participative media (i.e. the web).
It was around 1998 or 1999. My father, who has always been my family's technology evangelist and sysadmin, bought a WebTV for my grandmother, and I got to test it out at home for several days. I found out years later that most people hated the system due to its clumsy interface and poor website rendering, but at the time I greatly enjoyed surfing from the couch. When my parents asked what I thought about the gift, I remember saying, "she might find it useful, but, really, having the internet isn't such a big deal." I quickly rethought this statement. Even in those pre-Google, pre-YouTube, pre-blog days, my family already checked the weather forecast, read product reviews, and downloaded software updates online. I did not intuitively grasp the novelty and power of having instant access to a world's worth of information. In Grown Up Digital, Tapscott relates several similar stories in which technology has become "like the air", an unremarkable feature of the Net Generation's environment.
One such "unremarkable feature" is the mobile phone. Last year, half of the world's population carried a mobile phone. When people leave their home, all carry at least three things: their keys, money, and mobile phone. Because of this amazing growth, I always find it jarring to watch older movies in which the protagonist must find a pay phone to warn another character of impending doom. Similarly, the information systems in classic science fiction stories (say, pre-Neuromancer) seem faint and attenuated compared to today's dense and ubiquitous media. Interestingly, this seems to contradict the Net Generation's preference for text (i.e. short message service, instant messages, and email) over voice communication. Why do we communicate through low-bandwidth channels despite having high-bandwidth methods available to us?
Grown Up Digital mentions this tendency only briefly, but it is a characteristic I have noticed often and in many contexts. I think it appears because the web is inherently built around text, URLs, pages, and XML. To illustrate, I recently got a call from a friend I had not spoken to in several months. She and I talked for several minutes. During the conversation, I mentioned two YouTube videos I had seen, and she described her rock climbing club whose website she promised to send me. Then, the topic switched to a mutual friend who, since I had my laptop next to me (natch), I noticed was on AIM at the time. I suggested we hang up and resume talking online in a chat room I started. There, I sent her links to the videos, she sent me the club website, the mutual friend entered the conversation, and all three of us continued chatting for several times longer than we had been on the phone.
Just as person-to-person communication has been transformed by mobile phones, instant messages, and email, broadcast media is being supplanted by participative media such as websites, blogs, wikis, and aggregators. I find this the most exciting aspect of new media, and Grown Up Digital spends several chapters describing its effects on learning, institutions, business, family, and politics. One important effect has been that the Net Generation watches less TV than the Boomers (17.4 hours per week versus 22.4). The difference instead goes toward online activities. Clay Shirky calculates, for example, that Wikipedia alone required something like 100 million years of human thought, cognitive energy that would have otherwise languished watching sitcoms.
The same shift appears in my family's living room. I rarely just sit and watch. Instead, I usually have my laptop open, and my sister and I often IM silently across the room while my parents sit unaware. When watching a movie, I check reviews and trivia on IMDB; when watching a nonfiction program, I read about related topics on Wikipedia. However, I work better when I can devote my attention to a task, so when I need to focus, I, unlike many Net Generation multitaskers, tend to work in silence with my email and IM clients closed.
Grown Up Digital is filled with many other stories that resonate with my personal experiences. Further, it is all backed up with deep quantitative research and detailed citations. Its breathlessly positive assessment of the effects on society are reassuring, though I am surprised that the only major downsides voiced in the work involve online bullying and risks to privacy. What about the risks to content providers not from piracy but from an economy built on advertising? How can we ensure that the "Non-Net Generation" and those without access are not left behind? Nevertheless, I cannot wait to see what all generations can accomplish online.
* Forgive the Amazon affiliate link. It is something new I'm trying. If you click the link and buy something—it doesn't have to be Grown Up Digital—I get a small percent of the purchase price. And you get my gratitude.