Information Is Power

Since I had a very young age, technology was evolving- practically with me.

I had always known that my generation used technology more often than the previous ones. I also know that my generation is stereotyped as lazy, less aware of what was going on, and that we loosing our life on our computers.

After hearing Don Tapscott 's lecture 'Grow up Digital', the contrast between the previous generations and my own became pretty clear.

In his lecture, Don Tapscott spoke about this subject brilliantly and proved wrong all of those stereotype. 

The older generations, generation x use to work with an Internet called Web 1.2.       Us, generation y, are working with Web 2.2. The main difference between both of them is that the newer generation have control over the information of the web and we are able not only to control it but also to change it.

As he explained, when the generations of ''baby boomers'' were our age, they spent more time watching television. In their times, everything took way more time then it does today. They didn't use as much technology on regular basis. For me, it's almost not a choice, but a necessity. Most of the information needed for school can be found through the  internet. Instead of having to look for hours in books, we can use our internet browser. We can now find newspapers and even all tv shows on the internet. The amount of hours possibly spent on the internet obviously increased. This made us ''faster''. We can multi-task  easierly than our parents, and we can do everything in a shorter amount of time. Don gave the metaphor of a running track. The older generations would be placed on the outside track, and my generation are not only on the inside track, but we are running way faster then the older generations. But is that necessarily bad? We like seeing things move faster, and see a certain growth. Everyone sees this as a bad thing..(!)

As we outrun them so easily, even some ''outside runners'' tried to catch up and understand our way of living. It was almost impossible for many. Eventhough one would try to fully understand our way of living with technology, it is a difficult task, since they have to catch up to a lifetime full of learning. Another thing Don said was that  ''we fear what we don't understand''. As more individuals from older generations failed to understand the newest technologies, most of them closed their mind to it. In fear of having to admit they did not have the potential to understand our daily routine, they have created assumptions based on what the image that my generation projects. Which explains the ''lazy'' and ''less aware''.  I guess they didn't understand that we can do everything they can form the use of a simple computer.

What I found very true that parents still fail to see, is that we have, like Don said, a ''Bs detector''. The internet has so much of it that my generation has learned how to filter it and to pick up the truth. This ''detector'' can be applied everywhere. When my generation sees something, we're going to wonder is thats the truth, and how it was modified. He took the example of his daughter and him looking at the same picture on a magazine. If its a woman, Tapscott will think about his opinion on how she looks (woman on the magazine cover), but his daughter will wonder how she has been  photoshoped==> Bs Detector!

There's also this stereotype that offended me. When people say that we supposedly 'don't care about anything'. I think it would be interesting to see those peoples reactions when Don mentioned that 89% of graduates in the USA have volunteered to do something in the past 3 months.

If I had to conclude what he said in one sentence it would be :

Information is power, and right now, the newer generation, have more control over information than generation x, which scares them allot. This has caused them to not only close their minds on my generation but also to but false and negative assumptions onto us. Thanks to Don, this was cleared up!