Generations@Work

We all have those weeks when it seems like everything you hear about or come in contact with is related. I believe this is called “synchronicity.” Well, I’ve had one of those weeks. So I am going to connect a lot of dots that just seem connected to me.

For those of you who do not want to wade through this meandering post, let me mention the connections first; for those of you with more time, please read on.

Sequence — Monday: PEW Internet Project releases new report on social networks; Tuesday: Steve Jobs shows off iPhone; Friday: PBS broadcasts documentary “Generation Next,” an interesting look at young Americans. And to round out my thoughts I am going to refer to an interesting web site from MIT and an equally fascinating, to me, article (Where Protons Will Play) about protons in Sunday’s NYT online.

Here’s my story line. Some powerful new technologies, the social kind as well as the hardware kind, at this very moment in time are converging — particularly in the hands of a potentially powerful generation — in ways that are very unpredictable, BUT in ways that we all will need to pay attention to and learn from.

If I had written this post when I had planned to, I wouldn’t have the following to refer to, but this article just seemed to sum things up beautifully. “Where Protons Will Play” by Jim Holt begins in the French Alps on the Swiss border. Here most of the world’s particle physicists are eagerly awaiting the inaugural proton race inside the world’s first supercollider. Quoting the author, this supercollider

…is called the Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C. for short. Its shell is a more or less circular tunnel, some 17 miles in circumference and buried several stories underground, that straddles the Franco-Swiss border. Within this tunnel, a sort of racetrack for protons is being created. (Protons are, of course, usually found in the nucleus of an atom; they are members of the “hadron” family of subatomic particles.) The L.H.C. is scheduled to be up and running by the end of this year. When it is, flocks of protons will be made to zip around the tunnel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. Then they will be forced to crash into each other, with (it is hoped) spectacular results for physics.

And why are these folks so excited? Again from the article:

And what will they find there? At the very least, the violent proton collisions in the shadow of the Alps are expected to conjure into existence the all-important Higgs boson, a key to understanding not only the masses of the known elementary particles but also the early history of the universe. (Some pessimists fear that this is the only discovery the L.H.C. will result in. If so — pas mal.) Then there are more exotic possibilities: quantum black holes (sound dangerous, evaporate quickly); “dark matter” particles; Kaluza-Klein particles that flit off into higher dimensions; particles like the gluino, the squark, the slepton and the wino (pronounced WE-no) — which, though silly-sounding, could furnish badly needed evidence that there might be something to string theory. Beyond all that, there is the exciting chance that something utterly undreamed of will be found — a not-uncommon occurrence when physicists ascend to new levels of energy.

I wish I had taken science a bit more seriously.

A week ago the PEW Institute’s Project on the Family and the Internet published a new report on social network use. For those of you still a foggy about social networks you can download a brief article about networks from this blog. Here is what the Report tells us in summary form:

Among the key findings:

• 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.
• 66% of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users. They limit access to their profiles.
• 48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often; 26% visit once a day, 22% visit several times a day.
• Older girls ages 15-17 are more likely to have used social networking sites and created online profiles; 70% of older girls have used an online social network compared with 54% of older boys, and 70% of older girls have created an online profile, while only 57% of older boys have done so.

Teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.

• 91% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently, while 82% use the sites to stay in touch with friends they rarely see in person.
• 72% of all social networking teens use the sites to make plans with friends; 49% use the sites to make new friends.
• Older boys who use social networking sites (ages 15-17) are more likely than girls of the same age to say that they use social networking sites to make new friends (60% vs. 46%).
• Just 17% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to flirt.
• Older boys who use social networking sites are more than twice as likely as older girls to say they use the sites to flirt; 29% report this compared with just 13% of older girls.

OK. If you’re a Boomer you most likely feeling a bit estranged from all of these numbers. If you are an X-er you are more likely to know abut this, but many of you dismiss it as ‘what the kids are doing’. If you are a Millennial you are most likely to ask, ‘so what else it new?’ You’ll ask this question respectfully.

Here what I think this means, and I’ll borrow liberally from Jim Holt. I think a whole lot of protons are out there colliding and connecting in ways that seem and sound fairly innocent, with the social network sites being the equivalent of the quaint malt shop of Dobby Gillis days, but I suspect that if that is your theory you are missing a lot of what is really going on.

Lets continue. It’s now Tuesday and friends are emailing me like there’s no tomorrow about the Apple announcements coming out of Macworld.

9:15am — People are standing on seats. Stephen Jobs is speaking:

“We’re going to make some history together today.”

9:42am — “Well today, we’re introducing THREE revolutionary new products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls… The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone… The third is a breakthrough internet communicator… Get it? This is one device.”

It was the long-awaited announcement about the new iPhone that sent the tech world, not to mention a whole lot of Apple consumers, into a state of near collective ecstasy. Such excitement over a phone. Here’s how Wired describes it:

When Steve Jobs stood on stage Tuesday at Macworld and showed off the iPhone for the gathered masses, he wasn’t just selling a phone. He was selling us the future — mobile, broadband-connected and ubiquitous.

The iPhone, and the dizzying panoply of new gadgets emerging every day, are no supercollider, but in many ways the social consequences of the convergence of these technologies with the social fact of so many young people connecting themselves into webs of correspondence; it is hard not to think that something extraordinary might come of all of this.

On Friday night my wife Paula and my colleague and friend Conrad gathered by my decidedly old TV to watch the PBS documentary Generation Next about the Millennial Generation. Having studied this generation now for seven years there wasn’t a much that surprised us. But the documentary, which includes lots of good interview data with young people, reinforces a portrait of a Generation powerful and poised to make an enormous impact on the world.

OK, one more connection. I have long been interested in the work of Thomas Malone at MIT. I think his book The Future of Work is one of the most important on the subject of our economy and where it’s headed. Turns out Professor Malone has started a new Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT. Right on the home page he tells us what he means by this term collective intelligence.

“A working definition: …collective intelligence is groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.” Professor Malone immediately goes on to acknowledge that this definition doesn’t exactly set human history on its head. But after giving us several good and interesting contemporary examples of CI, including Google and Wikipedia, he goes on to say:

[I]t is now possible to harness the intelligence of huge numbers of people, connected in very different ways and on a much larger scale than has ever been possible before. In order to take advantage of these possibilities, however, we need to understand what the possibilities are in a much deeper way than we do so far…

The key question we’re using to organize our work is: How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any individual, group, or computer has ever done before?

I suspect that Steve Jobs thinks he has a pretty good idea about how an answer to this question will emerge.

But Mr. Jobs’ questions are not my questions. My question is this: How will Millennials in the U.S, and around the world, harness the extraordinary energy bound up in the convergence between their moment in time and the technology that they so naturally internalize[d] and put to use? What will they do with the extraordinary opportunity they have to generate a new kind of collective intelligence?

I will attempt a response to my own question, and I hope many of you who have read this far will do likewise. But I cannot resist the opportunity to use just one more quote from Jim Holt’s article on protons. He concludes thusly:

Energy and beauty are deeply linked in contemporary physics. At the highest energies, like those immediately after the Big Bang, perfect symmetry prevails, and all the forces of nature merge into one. As the universe cooled down, this symmetry was broken in various ways, so the world we see around us is, as the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg has put it, “only an imperfect reflection of a deeper and more beautiful reality.” By reaching back toward the primordial energy, the L.H.C. promises to move us a little closer to that reality.

Energy and beauty. Here is where my own biases emerge. Unlike many of their critics, I am four-square in the camp of Strauss and Howe, authors of Millennials Rising. I believe in the potential energy and beauty of the Millennial Generation. The PEW Institute tells us that thus far much of the potential of social networking is bound up with bonding and sharing. And then I see all of this “primordial energy” with iPhones etc., and I sense something much deeper emerging.

Will the Millennial Generation reveal something new and beautiful about the world? Do we have yet much evidence of the emergent power of their collective intelligence? According to the PBS documentary, and our research I might add, this Generation is showing signs of a system of social values which emphasize responsibility, service and community. The documentary also points out what has been known about Millennials, which is that they are ambivalent about conventional politics but eager to make a difference in the world.

So here are some of my speculative predictions about the direction of Millennial collective intelligence. It will:

1. Do what other generations alive today have thus far refused to do: deal seriously with climate change.
2. Transform politics by linking local politics with global politics, exhibiting much less interest in the failing nation state.
3. Create new forms and structures for virtually all types of social activities, including business.
4. Split at some point in the future over the issues of materialism and consumerism.
5. Use global social networks to suppress or moderate extremism and fanaticism.
6. Produce a group of leaders from sub-groups within the Generation that traditionally have not wielded social power and influence; in this country, women and minorities.
7. Reinsert issues of fairness and equity into politics on a global scale.
8. See its basic sense of optimism challenged at a very deep level, as the crisis of the planet continues to escalate, but this optimism will survive and allow their collective intelligence to grow into collective wisdom.

I’ll stop here.

Have I tapped into your skepticism? Do you think I’m nuts? Do you see or feel any of this? This in many ways is the intention behind this blog. To hear and listen to each other about the direction of the Millennials, because where this generation decides to go is where we are all going one way or the other.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under Generational Savvy, Work & Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.