The Generation Gap

There's always been a generation gap, it's human nature. My great-grandfather grew up in the country with no electricity. When my grandparents had his former home wired for electricity, he was amazed and annoyed. Why did they need that? He'd gotten along without it just fine.

My grandparents grew up on a farm, and moved to the city. They always had a huge backyard garden. When my parents took over the house, the garden went away and a lawn went in. My grandparents were scandalized. Why buy vegetables when you could grow your own? What were they thinking?

My parents grew up in the Depression. They saved waxed paper and aluminum foil and string, because they might need it someday. I thought it was insane. Why keep all that old crummy stuff around? If you need something, you can buy it.

Now I find myself on the other side of the gap. Recently I was in a meeting and a question came up about profit margins. I figured it quickly in my head while everyone else in the room was reaching for their calculator. When I announced the number, and their calculators confirmed my results, people were surprised. How did I do that so fast? When I told them that calculators hadn't been invented when I learned math, there was a very quiet moment while people tried to figure out just how old I was. For the thirty-somethings in the room it was inconceivable.

Now I face the gap between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants; and I see others struggling with the gap between themselves and digital anything. This has to be the biggest gap yet, a chasm that separates generations so profoundly that it confounds understanding. I'm in the middle between my mother, who was shocked to find out that there is more than one dot-com, and my nephew who recently asked why schools have libraries since you can find everything on the internet. I've worked in technology for more than 20 years, so I'm technology-fluent, or at least I was until a few years ago. Then I found myself on the wrong side of the digital divide, trying to catch up. Thank goodness for UCLA Extension and the great line-up of classes on technology so new that there aren't even textbooks to use. I'm working my way over to the other side of the divide, and it's no easy journey. Many of my contemporaries, especially friends with no children, have given up trying to keep up and are puzzled why I find the digital world so fascinating, and I don't even play video games. This week I sent a link to this blog out to a number of people, and I had a couple of responses along the lines of  "I've never read a blog before, what I am supposed to do?" These are not cave-dwellers or uneducated people, just friends my age who don't use anything more complicated than email and their ipod. It made me realize how much I've learned in the past six months, and how much more territory there is to cover. Now I know how much I don't know. What a burden.

I can't even imagine what kind of generation gap my nieces and nephews are going to face with their kids. The rate of change has gotten so fast. I can envision my nephew telling his kids that when he grew up there were big buildings all over the country that housed books. How could it be?

I'll never be a Digital Native (nor speak fluent French) but at least I can have an intelligent conversation, and stay relevant enough to relate. That makes it worth the effort.