Gen Y - iThink, Therefore iPad

By Mike Phillips on April 28, 2010

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We've heard the cliché about the baby born with the proverbial silver spoon in its mouth. The spoon has now been replaced with a tiny, cell phone-turned-portable-computer, the iPod, and its latest sibling, the iPad. The ramifications of their appearance, and the babies born along with them, are staggering. More than any other time in history, technology is advancing faster than our ability to assimilate it. As device after device appears on the scene, each a generational leapfrog over the one just before it, following Moore's Law relentlessly leads us down an ever expanding rabbit hole threatening to swallow our very humanity.

Digital Generation Gaps

Children of today look biologically much as they did years ago, at least in their birthday suits. But something very subtle and powerful is going on in these new tots. The rapid advances in technology to which they are exposed from an early age is affecting them to the core, and the net result is a larger generation gap than ever. Like compound interest, or a snowball rolling down a hill, the technological advances we are seeing are now coming at us with such speed that they effectively create smaller and smaller generations, or even sub-generations, of humans.

I will never forget the day I taught an introduction to computers course, and a 90-year-old man was attending. I explained to the group that if a computer was slow, it might take up to "a whole second" for a menu to open after clicking on it. The 90-year-old man looked at me, mouth open, dumbfounded.

"A second!" He replied, shocked. It was then that I realized what a second must be to a 90-year-old. I understood in that moment just how fundamentally different my outlook and expectations on technology are, compared to older generations.

Another technological passing of the baton occurred for me the day a younger student showed me something on his computer, and zipped around the screen 5x faster than I ever could. It was then that I realized that he and I were literally part of a different generation, with a digital divide between us. We had a digital generation gap, even though we were actually only a few "human years" apart.

Moore's Law and Digital Generations

This leads us to ponder whether we need to redefine human generations in terms of technology, instead of biology. While 10 years is a fraction of a true human generation, a ten year difference between people growing up with different exposures to technology effectively creates a whole new sub-generation. How different were children growing up in 1980, without computers, compared to those in the 90's, with the explosion of the internet and the digital revolution?

Perhaps using Moore's Law as a loose template, we can define a new human "digital generation" in terms of single decades rather than the traditional 25-30 years.

All of this leads us to that talented group of innocents that inherits this genius, those toddlers standing on the shoulders of great technology. These youngsters, by virtue of their position atop our technology, have a view that many of us older folk simply don't have. What can they see that we cannot?

What is the effect of having instant communication with almost anyone on earth, available in the palm of the hand, from toddlerhood? What type of mindset is created when one expects to be able to accomplish or experience anything, from business transactions to romantic relations to education, in fractions of a second? How does such ready access to power shape the human mind?

While we may not know the answers to those questions yet, we are about to find out. Introducing the iPad Generation.

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Gen Y - iThink, Therefore iPad

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