In the book “Born Digital,” John Palfrey and Urs Gasser take a close look at “Digital Natives,” or people born after 1980, natives to the digital world. They argue that post 1980 generation relates to the world in completely different ways. For example, often times our generation meets online before meeting in person. When I moved into college, initial meetings with future roommates and classmates occured online. We used instant message and examined each other's profiles on our college's directory of people. I even met my boyfriend online before I met him in real life—my cousin introduced us via a Facebook message one day to tell me her friend was moving from Pittsburgh to New York City and encouraged us to ‘friend’ each other on Facebook. The rest is history.
Our identities are completely tied up in the way we portray ourselves online. Most of us have social networking profiles. For many of us, these profiles are the image we wish to project to the world. We chose to show certain pictures and share information as we see fit. This is our ultimate way of expressing ourselves to the world. Our online presence is crucially related to how we perceive ourselves, and how others perceive us.
I would like to take Palfrey and Gasser’s point on being ‘fluent’ in the digital world one step further by saying that 20-somethings have a particular advantage: We learned technology at a young enough age to be “fluent”, but we also had sometime to understand the ‘analog’ or offline world through our early experiences simply because we did not come out of the womb and onto computers. We were born on a cusp. This gives us a leg up--we are able to relate to both worlds --the one of our even more saavy younger brothers and sisters, and our parents’ world. It's a lot like speaking Spanglish--a hybrid language in which people fluent in both Spanish and English switch back and forth between the languages without realizing they are doing it. Our online and offline lives are interchangeable and hardly distinguishable--we'll often get invitations online for "real world" things (like a birthday party), and then take photos at the event, meet new people. The next day, we can solidify our new relationships by connecting with these people online, and we can post pictures of the event. I would suspect that these social interactions are a bit befuddling to most 50-somethings, yet not completely incomprehensible to the more astute.
This is especially advantageous for the more entrepreneurial 20-Somethings. Our ability to connect the online and offline world will be benefit us and others economically and socially. It certainly worked out well for Mark Zuckerberg. A social entrepreneur can do a lot online (such as fundraising , researching, planning), that can make a huge tangible difference in the offline world (like bringing fresh water to countries in need--Google “Charity Water”). As the world continues to develop and more people throughout the world are introduced to the global network of the Internet, we’ll be able to be mediators between old and new.
The Internet has also changed the lives of 20-somethings is the world of work. Jobs have been rendered obsolete because of the Internet-- people can now easily do their taxes online, communication is easier, research is easier. Jobs are being replaced by a few clicks of the mouse. The Internet saves an abundance of resources too (teleconferencing instead of face to face meetings, email instead of snail-mail, Google instead of researching in the Library). Unfortunately, one of these resources is man-power. Many 20-somethings need to keep ahead of the curve and must learn to adapt to the job market at a breakneck speed to keep up with the rapidly changing job market. We are forced to be more transient than ever before as we move between jobs (that is if we're lucky enough to find one). Unlike our parents, most of us won't be able to stay in one job for 35 years. In fact, for many of us, it wouldn't be wise to do so. We are required to wear many hats in order to remain employable. We must go wherever someone will pay us. This makes it more difficult to have any stable commitments (a spouse, a mortgage, a child). Of course these things are not impossible to achieve, but we do face a lot more barriers to making commitments than people did 30 years ago.
Some of this change is good, some of it’s scary, some of it will make us nostalgic. It certainly has helped to change the standards of adulthood (which I'll address in another post). But regardless of all this--the World is moving forward at a rapid pace, and 20-somethings have the daunting task of mediating between the old and the new. Don't worry, we are taking care of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment