GROWN UP DIGITAL. 
HOW THE NET GENERATION IS CHANGING YOUR WORLD (2009)

By Don Tapscott

Is the Internet changing our brains?  We know what our brains look like on drugs—-but do we know what our brains look like on the web?  Don Tapscott, one of the experts in the realm of Internet communication says that our minds have been improved by unlikely mechanisms, such as video games and the much-scorned Wikipedia.  Even though it is hard to imagine World of Warcraft as the implementer of intellectual prowess and the facilitator of social skills, today’s children and teenagers, the sons and daughters of Dungeons and Dragons players, are smarter than their parents.  For some educators, the news that their students have sharper, better developed minds than they do, will come as a bit of a surprise.  However Tapscott insists,

…what we are seeing is the first case of a generation that is growing up with brains that are wired differently from those of the previous generation.  Evidence is mounting that Net Geners process information and behave differently because they have indeed developed brains that are functionally different from those of their parents.  They’re quicker, for example to process fast-moving images…

What does it all mean? What are the implications for the future?  Tapscott’s book is an informative and insightful journey into the way the twenty-somethings—the Net Generation—think.  Despite the scientific data that suggests that the brain of a person who has been web-trained his or her entire life is different from the book generation, the main thesis of Tapscott is not so much brain change but power change.  He posits the Net Gen as the “Lap Generation,” the first generation to lap or pass their parents by possessing authority their elders do not understand: how to use electronic technology.  The result of the younger generation’s apparent natural mastery of all things tech, Tapscott thinks, is the end of hierarchies and the abolition of a centralized authority.  The author focuses on four areas, family, education, business, and politics. All of these entities are being faced with the Lap Generation and their egalitarian mindsets.

Family

The youth of today are better informed, more adept at technology, and savvier with the ways and means of the Twenty-first century than the adults who are still in charge of education, businesses, and governments.  What Tapscott’s book points to is a huge generations gap, a chasm as wide as the famous “generation gap” of Margaret Mead.  For the Baby Boomers, their parents’ pre-war knowledge and experiences were irrelevant and useless, making what the author refers as the authoritarian family structure of the era extremely frustrating for the Boomers.  The fathers, who acted like CEO’s, as Tapscott calls them, pontificated, but they had little of use to share and were unwilling to learn from their children.  After years of having to endure lectures on topics that were alien to teenagers in the Sixties, the Boomers escaped the home front, never to return to the clutches of authority.

In contrast, today’s parents, who are the Boomers grown up, are more open to listening and to allowing their children to show them how to log onto the Internet. The relationship between parent and child is more open and more nurturing.  Parents and children are close, so close that an entirely new kind of parent has emerged, “the Helicopter parent.”  As an educator, I am familiar with that kind of ever-hovering parent but did not know that these same parents will continue to hover.  They will go on job interviews after college, and will even confront the boss if their child is not well treated.  How are the parents so well informed about the office politics for their child?  The Lap Generation, the “boomerang” generation, making a strictly economic decision, likes to live at home.  There are no hierarchies, only equality, in this new family.

After reading Tapscott’s observation about the new family, it occurred to me that this new arrangement bodes well for the distant future when the Boomer parents are elderly.  For the first time in generations, it may be possible that the children will care for the parents.  The Boomers ran away from home and abandoned their parents.  Many Boomers today are facing the conundrum of what to do about an elderly parent or two.  It is not uncommon for the Boomer’s elderly parents to be abandoned—again—in a facility where they will live out the last of their golden years, unvisited, and will die, unmourned.  But the Boomers who have been respectful and kind to their children should expect better care from their children.  What else could this new kind of anti-authoritarian family offer to the future?

Education

Tapscott warned that

Educators should take note.  The current model of pedagogy is teacher focused, one-way, one size fits all.  It isolates the student in the learning process…. (Net Geners) will respond to the new model of education that is beginning to surface—student-focused and multiway, which is customized and collaborative..

Tapscott states that the Net Gen carries with it two sets of expectation when these students enter schools and colleges.  First, they are shaped by their experience with the Internet, which demands that they interact with technology, search for content, and socialize with their peers, long distance.  Second, they expect to shape and participate in their own education.  Rather than passively accepting intoned truths delivered from behind the lectern on high, this generation wants to participate and collaborate in what they expect to be a joint enterprise.  The author characterized current education as being a one-way model, that is one-person talks and another listens.  It occurs to me that, in fact, the educational system reflects the technology.  The Guttenberg technology, based upon the printing press, is a one-way form of communication.  The author writes and the reader reads.  The radio repeated this form of speaking and listening that reflected the print technology.  Then television came along and replicated the Gutenberg method once again.  Education is based upon the premise that an educated person, i.e. e. the teacher, is also a reader who has read and who, is, therefore, qualified to redeliver the written messages in an oral form, again repeating the model of one way communication.

Following my line of thinking, the real challenge to today’s educational model is the Internet, which is a two-way mode of communication.  In contrast the traditional Sermon on the Mount, the Web is participatory, non-authoritarian communication, a call and response format that is ignored and discredited by the authorities until they feel threatened by the sound of Other voices.  The call and response nature of the Internet—this new technology—means that education must become more participatory for the Net Gen students. Tapscott writes that the Net Gen students expect interactive teaching and learning.  If they cannot actively collaborate, they will tune out and get bored with traditional methods of lecturing.  Although Tapscott does not get into the weeds of pedagogy, I suspect that, contrary to their current teachers, this is a generation that would accept and welcome distance learning.  Today’s students are used to learning from the computer, an instrument that many of today’s educators view with suspicion.  On one hand the computer is a convenient tool, on the other hand, it challenges the authority of the teacher who wants to be the sole source of knowledge.

Tapscott describes the elders of the Net Gen, the Gen Xers, as being “aggressive communicators who are extremely media centered.”  But unlike the Gen X, the Net Gen grew up using the “programmable web.”  “And every time you use it, you change it.”  The author continues later, “On the Net, the children have had to search for, rather than simply look at, information.  This forces them to develop thinking and investigative skills—-they must become critics. Which Web sites are good?”  Tapscott rightly calls the model of education we currently use—-teacher lecturing and student listening—-as Industrial, but I think he may be off by a few centuries.  The model is more that of a pre-Gutenberg culture, before the printing press made it possible for people to read what they wanted.  I would agree with Jeffrey Bannister, quoted in Tapscott’s book, who uses the term, “pre-Gutenberg.

We’ve got a bunch of professors reading from handwritten notes, writing on blackboards and the students are writing down what they say. This is a pre-Gutenberg model.

I might point out in passing, to Bannister, that in attempting to accommodate multiple learners, it is considered good practice to write on the board for the students who learn by reading, not hearing.  Indeed, Tapscott also states that,

Students are individuals who have individual ways of learning and absorbing information.  Some are visual learners; others learn by listening.  Still others learn by physically manipulating something.

As early as 1967, as Marshall McLuhan, also quoted by Tapscott, said,

Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth-century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment, where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patters, subjects, and schedules.

The New Learning must be customized for each student’s needs.  Tapscott also quotes Howard Gardner, who called today’s educational model as mass production, a reflection of the industrial economy, which created assembly lines and Taylorism that forced human beings to work in tandem with machines.  According to Gardner, school is also mass-production.  “You teach the same think to students in the same way and assess them all in the same way,”

he says. True but this is how No Child Left Behind teaches, as it must, for the standardized test.  Even the best secondary schools teach towards to entrance exams so that the students can get the highest scores, not necessarily the best critical thinking skills.  The test becomes the teacher.   How are the Net Geners going to respond to a mechanism so crude and arbitrary as an SAT test?  Note that these standardized tests do not take into account the way that the test-takers, the Net Gen, actually think.  Change takes place at a glacial pace, especially when the entire educational system comes from a foundation based upon magical thinking: if the speaker says it, it is so. Education equals authority—unquestioned authority. How did strange combination of information without questions come about?  And how did such a procedure become labeled as “education?”

When Gutenberg invented the printing press, the Church was against this new instrument, because the sacred words, once intoned only from the pulpit would be distributed to the great unwashed, delivered by the voice of authority.  The Church feared, rightly, that the power of the printed word and of reading would allow the people to challenge the priesthood.  The authority of the Church was unquestioned and was based upon a far older form of disseminating information, an oral culture of story telling.  A culture of story telling is a logo centric culture, backed by the presence of the speaker who is the source of the story, information, and the truth.  God spoke to Noah, to the Prophets, etc. and the word of God was transcribed.  It was the task of religion to tell to those congregated the words of the Lord.  The Church inherited a largely illiterate society—even kings and queens often could neither read nor write–that had to be preached to.  Through years of standing for six to eight hours in cathedrals, hearing mysterious Latin, listening to sermons, and “reading’ the sculptural programs and the frescoes, the uneducated people under the care of the clergy were socially conditioned to listen to one voice (God’s) and one source of authority (the Church). The Protestant movement was proof that once the common person could read the words of the Bible, those people would take unto themselves the power to interpret God himself.

There are historically close ties between the Church and the University.  The first universities, the Sorbonne and Oxford, were affiliated with religion and, with the clergy the only educated group, the priests became the first faculties.  The traces of this history are clearly visible any graduation day with the procession of professors marching down the center aisle of the school auditorium, like the clergy files down the nave, in full “regalia,” wearing the long black robes, very monk like.  Further traces of the Church lie in the very practice of lecturing: the teacher stands at the head of the class and speaks alone.  The students speak only to ask questions and are expected to subside into obedient silence.  Just as the priests re-spoke the Word of God, academics re-speak the words of their precursors.  The very form of academic and scholarly phraseology mimes the sacred scriptures.  “As —- tells us,”  “As —- famously said,” and so on. Logos being handed down from authority figure to authority figure.  Academics depend upon the logocentric tradition and upon the mystical belief that the speaker is backed by the fullness of authority.  It is as if Moses descended from the mountain, bearing tablets written in stone—not to be altered—-after communing with the Almighty.

The assumption of a plenitude of knowledge, like that of the completeness of presence, is a false one but authority must be protected at all costs.  Another prevailing characteristic of education, inherited from the Church, is, paradoxically, secrecy.  Knowledge is guarded by the initiated, those who are learned in the ways of scholarship; knowledge is not to be given out freely, especially insider secrets. Like the Greek temples where only the priests were allowed inside the inner sanctum, only those inside the circle of the select are allowed to “speak” or be “present,” that is to publish, that is to “re-speak” the already spoken.  The Internet has changed all that.  The Net Geners are not readers, they are not listeners; they are iconographers.  As Tapscott notes,

Net Geners who have grown up digital have learned how to read images…. they may be more visual than their parents are…. (They) tend to ignore lengthy instructions for their homework assignments…

Tapscott points out that students of today learn better through images.  Indeed, this generation has invented a series of new hieroglyphs that function as signs such as happy “= (: and sad= ):”

Today’s students, Tapscott points out, will want to customize their education.  He mentions that “tinkering” has made a come back.  Indeed it has. The time of the mash-up has come.  In higher intellectual circles, we call the mash-up, or sampling, bricoulage, that is, taking the existing culture and making something else with it.  This is postmodern thinking, reclaim, reuse, remake, recycle.  The very same teachers who teach postmodern theories are those who insist upon “original” work from students who are what I call, the Mash-Up Generation.  The professors who eagerly and enthusiastically teach Postmodernism, or the questioning of the “metanarrative” of Modernism, will reject cutting and pasting and demand that the student cite “sources,” or the validating voices of authority.  The same professors find it hard to accept that a student has ideas of his or her own, attitudes that stem naturally from their own generation, for, although the Boomers may have resisted authority, they knew it existed.

If my generation got into trouble for questioning authority, this generation gets into trouble for leveling sources.   Every voice, every bit of cultural material has equal value and can be freely borrowed and re-used.  Net Gen seeks convenience and speed over venerated voices, who are often unwilling to make themselves available on the web.   Even more threatening to the traditional authority of educators is the declining value of scholarly knowledge, which is being by-passed and ignored by the mainstream undergraduate.  Every teacher knows that students think that Google is a database.  Students routinely ignore the expensive databases, paid for by student tuition, made available through library websites.  Getting into the date bases is a clumsy and cumbersome and often unrewarding enterprise, because the technology of these databases is antediluvian.  Naturally the student goes to Google’s fast and functional search engine to find information.  Like the Net Gener who gets a job and finds, to his horror, that the technology is twenty years behind the times, the student will not tolerate the ritual of multiple clicks and passwords and all the other paraphernalia that work to make knowledge inaccessible.  Even when forced to read a credible source, the students, accustomed to the all-purpose Net-speak, rebel at the insider jargon, written by scholars writing to scholars.

Net Geners want to be informed, not talked at.  They like to take materials they find helpful or interesting and remake it.  As opposed to always referring back to the authorities, the Net Gen likes to write its own material and to create its own content.  Tapscott indicates that the Web actually encourages creativity and productivity because the Web gives easy access to inventors.  From their habits of playing video games or participating in the virtual reality of Second Life, the Net Geners learn how to play their own game.  Speaking of video games, Tapscott says,

“This kind of play is deeply creative.  It involves trial and error, learning by experiment, role playing, failure, and many other aspects of creative thinking.”

None of this kind of creativity is allowed in education.  Play is forbidden and failure is mocked.  In contrast, the author discusses a thirteen year-old writer who contributes stories to a website where they are read by thousands of readers.  “Isn’t that better than writing on paper and hoping that some day it might get published?” Tapscott asks.  For today’s teachers and professors the Web 2.0 is something Roland Barthes would have loved: this new Web is called the “read-write” web—we read it and we write it.

Although there are many teachers who are eager and willing try more experimental student centered ways of making learning a collaborative enterprise between mentor and apprentice, they are constrained by a system that demands command and control.  Distance Learning still attempts to replicate a now-obsolete classroom format, by demanding assignments at set due dates, by demanding chat room appearances at a set time, and so on.  This is hardly learning the way the student needs it, customized, when the student can devote the time to it, at a pace that facilitates learning.  Even distance learning classes end after a set number of weeks.  Traditional classroom education is ruled by the physics of time and space: one teacher to a classroom, a certain number of students in a space, taught a common denominator course that must fit into a larger curriculum at a specific time.  Student centered education is evidenced by allowing students to speak more or to participate in class discussion.  There is no time for the teacher to waste.  S/he has a set amount of material that must be covered.

Students are increasing unwilling to learn in the traditional manner, because they assume all knowledge is available on the Internet. Why learn math when one has a calculator?  Why not teach how to use the calculator to find the answer?  Why plow through many books when Wikipedia tells you anything you want to know and, even better, you too can write the content.  Tapscott tells an amusing story about interviewing a young man named Joe O’Shea who stated that he never read a book—why should he?  All the information he needed is on the Internet.

“I don’t read books per se,” he told the erudite and now somewhat stunned crowd.  “I got to Google and I can absorb relevant information quickly.  Some of this comes from books.  But sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make sense.  It’s not a good use of my time as I can get all of the information I need faster through the web.  You need to know how to do it—to be a skilled hunter.”

Before you educators out there jump to your feet to explain the difference between “information” and “knowledge,” know that the punch line was that the young man had just been awarded a Rhodes scholarship.

Business

Tapscott describes a new world in which the consumers remake the product, as they are remaking education. Education, he suggests, should think like a business and respond to the consumers, but Tapscott also points out that the businesses, which do not respond with agility to the demands of the Net Gen can get into trouble.  The Net Gen, rightly, in my view, views businesses and corporations with suspicion.  Tapscott points to the empowerment of the NetGeners who like to be “prosumers,” that is, proactive consumers, who customize their products.  Young people have been prosumers for generations, but no one has named their practices until recently.  Little girls have always treated their Barbies to new hair-dos and teen-age boys have always modified their cars with after-market products and custom decoration.  This desire to contribute to mass-produced and mass marketed products has only recently been harnessed by companies such as Apple where “there’s an app for that.”

The users of Apple have often been referred to as a “cult” because of their devotion to the product.  The term “cult” is derogatory and comes from those who simply don’t understand how the Net Gen thinks.  Apple is thought of by the techies as an honorable company, which strives to produce a product that is beautifully designed and user friendly.  In addition, the company also works closely with its user base, from the Bleeding Edgers to the novice customer, asking the tech savvy to participate in the improvement of the function and design of the product and watching for the difficulties of the blunderer so Apple can make function more straightforward.  The reason why the flap over the iPhone4 and its broken antennae was so minor to Apple users is because those customers know that the company will fix and improve the problem with the next iteration of the phone.  The Apple user is invariably an Early Adopter who expects such glitches and enjoys participating in the fix.  This kind of audience participation is the Apple business model and it has won the company a devoted following. And we now have the iPhone6 and are test-driving the Apple Watch.

But all companies are not so accommodating to the customer base.  Witness the hostile relationship between music lovers and the music industry, publishers and those who write and read books, the car companies (Toyota) and those who drive.  The new generation of consumers wants to customize their experience with the product, Tapscott declares, but the corporate mind thinks in terms of profit not prosumer.  To the Net Gen, music and art and literature and knowledge, like information, should belong to no one and everyone.  Downloading “illegal” music is common practice, done without shame or remorse.  How can anyone own music?  Doesn’t art belong to everyone?  The Net Gen is forcing companies that want to survive to be transparent and participatory, Tapscott writes.  Older corporations do not want to interact with their customers.  Like the traditional media, the corporate mind insists upon a one-way communication: top down. As Tapscott says,

…the industry has built a business model around suing its customers.  And the industry that brought us the Beatles is now hated by its customers and is collapsing.  Sadly, obsession with control, privacy, and proprietary standards on the part of large industry players has only served to further alienate and anger music listeners…

Tapscott states that the Net Gen prefers flexible hours and “want to chose when and where they want to work.”

not only that these young people what their work to be “meaningful.”  “They’re not loyal to an employer; they’re loyal to their career path,”

he remarks.  Imagine the surprise of business types when the Net Gen shows up to “work.”  The Net Gen wants to play.   The Net Gen employee comes to a company for one reason—-no, not a job—to learn.  Once the Net Gen worker learns what s/he needs, s/he will move on to the next learning experience.  It is pointless to expect the Net Gener to be “loyal” to the company. The concept of loyalty that his grandfather may have enjoyed was broken when companies began sending jobs overseas in the Seventies.  Companies still expect the employee to commit to being a permanent fixture, while refusing to guarantee lifetime employment, much less health care. For the average corporation, human beings are a financial liability, but the Net Gener comes to play with the idea of contributing creatively.

Companies tend to create what Tapscott calls, a “generational firewall,”

which separates the newbies from the oldtimers.  This strange way of not utilizing recruited talent is not unfamiliar to me.  I have often asked, why hire someone who is then suppressed and under utilized?  Business runs on a hierarchal basis, those at the top give orders and the orders roll downhill where the underlings carry out the dictates.  The Net Gen employee, according to Tapscott, does not accept hierarchy and assume that they were hired for their talents.  If they cannot and are not allowed to participate as an equal, the most talented will simply move on.  Their attitude, quite properly, is: if you won’t listen to me, why should I stay?  Net Gen wants to contribute and needs to contribute to something meaningful.  As the parents of the Net Geners changed the modeling of parenting, education needs to change its traditional assignments and business needs to change its traditional models.  Show the Net Geners what’s in it for them.

Politics

That same attitude—-what’s in it for me? appears in politics.  Today there are two common questions in popular culture: “What would Jesus do?”  And “What’s in it for me?”  We assume that Jesus would not say, “What’s in it for me?” We like to think he would say, “What can I do for you?” “What’s in it for me?” is a business question and the answer has to be “profits.”  “Profits” is a business answer.  So when a politician promises to run the government like a business, that implies that the government will not be in the service of the people but in the service of profit making entities, like corporations. Imagine if government were run like a business, like, say an oil company or a music company. Tapscott is convinced that the Net Geners have a better way. The Net Gen voter is an active participant who, unlike her grandparents, is a volunteer or a community activist, Tapscott says.  Some of the Boomers joined the Peace Corps, some marched for Civil Rights and some protested against the Viet Nam War.   Others marched for women’s rights and demanded gay rights.  The Boomer’s children are the Net Roots who became activated by the prospect of being allowed to participate in the election of Barack Obama.

Tapscott discusses the Internet based campaign at length, and reading these passages, now that we are two years into the Obama administration, is enlightening. I think that much of what Tapscott writes is insightful and informative and I learned a lot from reading his book, however, I do think he is too sunny and too hopeful and too optimistic.  Politics is a case in point as the enthusiasm for Obama wanes quickly.  The Net Gen expected results.  When Obama promised “transparency,” they thought that the President was thinking like the open artless, and fearless sharing that takes place on Facebook.  The web is totally open and uncontrolled as a source of energy and information. The web is a place where things happen.  That is why so many people (like me) devote their time to contributing to it.  But the Net Gen quickly learned its lesson.  As Tapscott writes,

Most Net Geners believe that the mechanics of power and policy making are controlled by self-interested politicians and organized lobby groups…The Net Generation does not put much trust in politicians and political institutions—-not because they are uninterested, but rather because political systems have failed to engage them in a manner that fits their digital and ethical upbringing.

The Net Gen experience as Internet users has taught them that if they coalesce towards a cause they can make changes.  The fact that the Net Gen volunteers for Obama were so excited because they were “natural” Democrats, that is, they shared a cultural attitude that the government should work for the people, and that they—the (young) people could shape the outcome through their participation.   According to Tapscott, the Net Geners are not conservative but more open to change and new ways of thinking than any other generation.  But a Democratic victory did not bring the change they expected.  And now the Net Gen has turned their backs on the administration.  Why?  The problem is that the government is controlled by a group of middle-aged people who will not let go of power.  Just look at Congress on C-Span.  All old White Men.  No one under forty.  No poor people. Few People of Color.  Some women here and there.  No collaboration, no participation from half of the members of Congress, who appear to have abdicated their governing responsibility in the pursuit of political power.  The strategy of not participating—this is not the Net Gen type of thinking in Congress.

Things only get worse when one turns on to the news programs.  The gap in age is shocking.  Although there are some networks or news programs I do not watch, I do record at least four hours of news a day on TV to which I listen while I am writing) and read three newspapers a day. There are no young faces, no young writers (and therefore no young readers), no young voices, no young way of thinking. Only the Hill reporter, Luke Russert, the bright son of the late Tim Russert, stands out as someone under thirty.  An entire generation is being left out of the conversation.  The elders reflect back on their days with President Carter or President Clinton, prehistoric eras for the Net Gen, and discuss and debate raging political quarrels that are non-issues for the younger generation.

People—usually men—well beyond their childbearing years decide abortion policy.  People—increasingly women as well—who are too old to fight send their young generation off to war for their own political ends or their lobbyists needs.  People with lifetime jobs in Congress decide how much money the unemployed will or will not get. People with guaranteed government health care decide that others cannot have those same privileges and see no hypocrisy in their positions.  Those who are heterosexual (they say) decide the personal lives of homosexuals.   And so on.

Would results be different if the younger generation made itself heard?  As Tapscott points out, this generation is far more tolerant than their parents or grandparents.  It is their grandparents who are concerned about racial and gender equality, interracial marriage, “illegal” immigration, gay marriage, and other hot button issues.  For their grandparents, global warming is debatable, for this generation, raised on green values; a devastated planet is their inheritance.  If you asked a Net Gener which problem worried him more, the budget deficit or global warming, he would say, “global warming.” Always the optimist, Tapscott writes,

I’m convinced we’re in the early days of something unprecedented.  Young people, and with them the entire world, are beginning to collaborate—for the first time ever—around a single idea: changing the weather.

For the Net Gener, it is discouraging to see who is in power and to watch how they behave.  Partisan bickering and political game playing instead of collaborative game, negation instead of affirmation, blocking change instead of accepting it—all of this is alien to the younger generation.  Those in the government and those elected to office are one-way communicators, out of touch and out of date.  They allow the public to “speak” every two years at the ballot box.  And these are the people to whom the question of Net Neutrality will be turned over.  The corporations want to segment the Internet so that they can profit maximize what has been a free good, available to everyone.  The case of whether or not the net will remain the great equalizer will probably be decided by the Supreme Court, presided over by a Chief Justice who does not understand e-mail.

Not a wonk, I am probably better informed than some people and I value the facts over ideology.  So does the Net Gen. For us it is not Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, it is integrity, honor, and the desire to tell the truth.  For Washington D. C., it is sound bytes and talking points.   By selling the “War on Terror” the “War for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and the need to Bail Out the Big Banks to the credulous public, the government has created what a Bush appointee called, a “post truth” society.  How true.  For the Net Gen, truth matters.  The trust of the public in its leaders has been shattered, leaving a vacuum for the bloggers and talkers to fill.  Another authority has to be appointed and anointed.  For the older generation, still willing to accept one-way communication, sound bytes stand for wisdom, tweets become knowledge, and talking points are the truth.  The Net Gen finds it astounding when the politicians change their stories and refuse accountability, even when they are caught changing their positions or lying or fabricating stories. The Net Gen is used to trolling the Internet and finding the facts and cannot understand how their elders can lie, get caught, pay no consequences, lie again and so on.  No wonder they are disillusioned by politics.

The Future

Tapscott does not entirely ignore the real problems brought by the Internet revolution.  He points to the gap between the have-nots of technology and those who are active users.  His main examples are the poor or the third world, but there are other have-nots, closer to home, such as the poor, the elderly, or the close minded, or the technophobes who are getting left further and further behind.  Then there are the bad effects of the Web.  One of the odd and underreported facts of technology is that the Bleeding Edge is usually made up of illegal or questionable practices that become outlets for pathologies, including on line gaming, Wall Street derivatives, pornography, pedophilia, including on-line bullying.  It is these Early Adopters who benefit the Web by using it and creating new pathways, meaning that all these nebulous people are always one step in advance to the forces of law and order.   Parents protest the perfectly legal video games, such as the horrible Grand Theft Auto (which has awesome artwork) but forget that they watch and enjoy violent adult films such as Pulp Fiction. That said, the dangers of the Internet are real but, in the name of freedom, the Net Gen will defend the right of anyone and anything to prowl there.  One can only hope that the same Supreme Court that granted freedom of speech to corporations will see fit to allow the Net to remain open to all comers.

Tapscott believes that “Net Geners are quick to recognize that the best way to achieve power and control is through people, not over people.  Good lesson.  The Net Gen is intelligent enough to know that Obama cannot change Washington D. C.  There are too many entrenched interests.  The question has become not what can I do for you? but what’s in it for me?  All that hard work, all that dedication, all that Hope and no pay off, no results.   People go into politics to get things done, to make things happen and when nothing changes, you turn away. It’s like your last job: you learned something new and then moved on.  How sad. The problem for the Net Gen is that the fifty-sixty something generation of Baby Boomers have no intention of changing or of letting go of power.  They are impervious to the Net Gen.   “They” being the Big Banks, they being the Big Corporations, like Big Oil, are so powerful, have such a stranglehold on America that “They” answer to no one.  Big Business cares not about the Net Gen, neither as employees, nor as consumers.  By the time the Net Gen will have their turn to come into power, they too will be in their fifties, fully thirty years from now.   The Baby Boomers joined the Tea Party in their maturity.  What will the Net Gen do with their golden years?  Tapscott concludes his book,

The big remaining question for older generations is whether that power will be shared with gratitude—or whether we will stall until a new generation grabs it from us.  Will we have the wisdom and courage to accept them, their culture, and their media?  Will we be effective in offering our experience to help them manage the dark side?   Will we grant them the opportunity to fulfill their destiny?  I think this will be a better world if we do.

Suggested readings from Don Tapscott’s Bibliography:

Beck, John C., and Mitchell Wade, Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Changing the Workplace, 2004

Benkler, Yochai, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, 2006

Carlson, Scott, “The Net Generation Goes to College,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 7, 2005, chronicle.com

Gee, James Paul, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, 2003

Howe, Neil, and William Strauss, Millennials Go to College: Strategies for a New Generation on Campus, 2003

——Millennials Rising: the Next Great Generation, 2000

Keen, Andrew, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, 2007

Moglen, Eben, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday, August, 1999, emoglen.law.columbia.edu

Prensky, Marc, Digital Game-Based Learning, 2000

Roos, Dave, “How Net Generation Students Learn and Work,” Howstuffworks.com, May 5, 2008

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: Harnessing the Power of Mass Collaboration, 2006

Weinberger, David, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, 2007

Mentioned in his book but not included in his bibliography:

Carr, Nicholas, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Atlantic Monthly, July, August, 2008

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.
Thank you.

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