As technology improves, the gaps between generations grow 2010-Jan-11 at 23:13 PST
Posted by Scott Arbeit in Blog.Tags: generations, Technology
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The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s, by Brad Stone, 9-Jan-2010
Researchers … theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.
“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”
No big surprise here… as the pace of technological change increases, the time it takes to create differences between older and younger will decrease. This probably continues until there are noticeable differences in groups as close as only two years apart.
Children born today in the United States likely won’t remember a time when monitors weren’t multi-touch, when video games didn’t respond to voice as a matter of course, or when animated movies weren’t all 3-D (among lots of other trivial predictions).
The Dawn of the Integral Age 
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