This morning, I heard a conference keynoter say the following:
The biggest difference between the youth of the 80s and 90s and the youth of today is the introduction of technology.
This is a pretty common characterization of today’s technology as something new. I’ve argued with myself before about whether or not we are in an era of technological revolution as it relates specifically to the internet. In the moments that followed the delivery of the above statement, however, I had an epiphany. Here it is.
The biggest difference between the youth of today and the previous generations of youth is not the introduction of technology. New technologies have been introduced during every generation’s youth. What is different now is the ownership of the technology. The emergence of personal computing is the first technological advancement that is owned by the younger generation. That ownership is literal and figurative – the youth not only own the physical devices, they own, almost exclusively, the knowledge to operate them. Even further, the younger generations, for the first time, own the attention of the manufacturers and marketers of the technology.
The television, the radio, the telephone were all household technologies own by the middle generation – the power generation. They were introduced to homes by the owners of those homes – the parents. The children and youth were exposed to these technologies not on their own terms, but on the terms of their parents. The technologies were owned not by the youth, but by the adults.
So let me say all of that again succinctly for you.
ShareThe revolutionary aspect of today’s technology is not the technology itself. What is revolutionary is that the newest technologies are owned, both literally and figuratively, by the youngest generations.
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Tags: household technologies, middle generation, technological advancement, technological revolution, youth of today
Children have always learned the technology of the day pretty much from birth – be it the stone axe or the iPod, but one has to wonder how the old fogeys felt about the move from bone to stone, and whether there was any difference in how quickly the young men and the old ones adopted the change. Probably not, because the change wasn’t terribly complex and the fogeys weren’t much older than the young fellows anyway.
Things obviously began changing more quickly at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and I suspect that at that point you might have begun to see a slight tendency for the early adopters to be a bit younger (always allowing for the fact that they still needed to be rich and powerful enough to own, say, a cotton mill). At the time the radio was introduced, the fogeys were still probably mostly fairly quick to adopt – after all, a radio isn’t terribly complex to operate, and there was a kind of excitement about this new frontier – but it was the young lads who started making their own crystal sets, so the gap began to be more obvious. Things were beginning to pick up speed, and of course that accelerated insanely at about the time computers shrank to something smaller than the size of a garage. So today, the trend you note (younger ownership/adoption/competence etc) is very noticeable. Still, the really young ones (Hannah, et al) still have to learn – initially probably from someone in the younger-middle set like yourself, though later from each other – and they don’t yet have their own computers, except for the chips in those annoying toys. But the trend is definitely there, and it will be interesting to see just how far it will go.
You have said it well Colin, as usual!
Very true, and well said! My grade three students have reading buddies with our JK/SK class (3,4 and 5 year olds). Last week I watched as they taught the little ones how to use SMART tools. I use this program with the SMART board in my classroom and my students are pretty adept with it. Watching the little ones take over and ‘print’ their names using the mouse and the SMART pen was amazing–literacy in action. I didn’t teach them; their parents didn’t teach them; their peers did. Now, should they go home mention this cool program, someone at home googles it, perhaps downloads it, who will be the teacher? I can hear it already– “no mommy, click HERE to use the SMART pen!”
As a sidebar, Colin, I would ask you to consider the DVD player and VCR . . . how many of us in the ‘middle generation’ have had to set the timer and or clock for our elders ;) The VCR of a certain senior in my life blinks 12:00 perpetually, and the new TV turned off ‘mysteriously’ on a regular basis, until I turned off the timer function.