4 ms·

Always Connected: Generation Z, the “Digitarians”

26 points by ardeay 11y ago

brianstorms 11y ago
With all due respect, what a bunch of b.s. Goes to show that always being connected maybe isn't all it's hyped up to be. From the sound of it, it doesn't appear to produce any lasting insights. p.s. Whoever typed "exec" to run a DOS program? p.p.s. "Software is a dead. Digitarians know apps, games, and web browsers." WTF?
- shillno1138 11y ago
  Digitarians know how to push big buttons, know nothing of how said buttons work, progress indeed. Depends on your definition of progress.
  - daodedickinson 11y ago
    We rural farmers have found the ignorance of city folk about how their food and electricity and water are produced depressing and hilarious in this ambivalent way for decades. One can only wonder how far society can build technical, monetary and moral debt in this matryoshka doll sort of way before collapse... In Haruki Murakami's "The Birth of My Kitchen Table Fiction" he mentions: "It cost a lot less to open your own place back then [1974] than it does now. Young people like us who were determined to avoid “company life” at all costs were launching small shops left and right. Cafés and restaurants, variety stores, bookstores—you name it. Several places near us were owned and run by people of our generation... It was an era when, all over the world, one could still find gaps in the system." Children are pulled towards these gaps where the giant experience advantage adults have are not already dominating, unless adults spend much one-on-one time grooming children to take over their current roles. Most parents are in roles that will not be around for their children, or the parents cannot give such roles to their children. This inter-generational alienation has grown for centuries. I fear that our institutions will be, in particular, unprepared to cope with the nigh-invisible problems that the very new increase in life-expectancy will bring. What happens when groups and teams of people performing and designing at unprecedentedly high levels due to abnormal extra decades of experience start dying off, without ready replacements because the strongest minds went to niche tech sectors with the least competition from more experienced older people? I wonder if there is a cohort in some field where people with elongated life-spans dominated limited positions to the point where replacements with enough experience to keep things going will simply be impossible to find. Is this happening already? Any examples? I definitely read that there are a plethora of continuously unfilled job openings requiring too much experience and growing crowds of unemployed who cannot build experience, but maybe this is not too new or unendurable and a brutal transition is not necessary. I hope it is just a neurosis of mine. I welcome any words in response that will soothe this fear. I think too, here, of how the average age of a Nobel Prize in Physics winner is increasing at a superlinear rate. I feel a new Tower of Babel collapse will come because technological change will outpace the rate at which human brains can learn. I feel technical debt outpaces even national debts and idiocracy is resulting. I had to stop reading (ironically) Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation because it was literally giving me panic attacks. I've always been successful in school and the book just solidifies my conceit that I am king turd of a shit mountain. What if we get too weak to hold on to the shoulders of the I can understand why society requires faith; maybe it's always been Wile E. Coyote refusing to look down—and Spengler would hardly make one think otherwise. But weren't many older generations working for future generations? When have societies so obviously borrowed from the future instead of building it? Straddled their children with debt instead of taking it on for their benefit? I went to my eighth choice school out of eight to avoid debt and I'm now at an even-worse graduate school (I got into the number 1 grad program for my major, balked at $180k of debt, and am now attending an unranked school, i.e. it's not even in the top 150) and all I get in exchange is worry that the program is not challenging enough, and self-hate that I can't motivate myself enough independently of school. Todays kids build in Minecraft, just as I built in Legos, because neither of us could fight through the massive amount of red tape to build something real in, say, California. Why should kids go outside when they are allowed to do so little? There's no treasure to be found at the local park, if there was, it's been found by the crowds already, and you're not allowed to dig to try to find some anyway. My mother is a gatherer (as in hunt and gatherer) at heart, and her deepest love is to wander the mesas of desolate Wyoming, find artifacts and weird rocks, bring them home, and add them to an ever-growing found-object arrangement in her driveway that I consider a folk art installation (she is more humble). It is very illegal. But when kids do this in Minecraft or I hunt and gatherer in a Bethesda Softworks game, no one arrests me even if I get caught. But I'm exercising once-valuable skills and instincts that I should fast from and eventually eliminate if I want to gain advantage in my current sociopolitical environment. I fear I'm merely an echo of a old way of life and I find myself unable to enjoy Fallout: New Vegas without guilt or fear, and stressed out when I try to build skills for the new world order. I once had a vision that I interpreted to mean that absolute power is absolute weakness. I haven't integrated it into my life, but when I think about how people can learn how to push buttons without learning how to build the machines those buttons control, I get an in to the truth, that the pursuit of power, is the pursuit of comfort, is the pursuit of weakness, is the pursuit of stress. And this flux is eternal.
zitterbewegung 11y ago
This generation is fighting the largest class warfare battle in history and guess what. There is only mutually assured destruction.
EdSharkey 11y ago
Just got back from a family reunion and my relations' kids were glued to their tablets playing mindless games and watching YouTube unattended for 4 hour spells and more day after day. It was so depressing, all these boring consumer drones in the making. My kids get 1 hour of screen time a day, max (until they decide to become coders, and then the cap is lifted. :)
- ardeay 11y ago
  exactly, when they make the leap to learning how computers work, the game changes :)
- ProCynic 11y ago
  Well there's screen time and screen time. Building something cool in minecraft is pretty different from watching spongebob on netflix. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30
  - alexnking 11y ago
    Exactly - I don't understand why even computer literate people have trouble understanding that computers aren't "an" activity, they're a gateway to millions of them, limited by your imagination. My parents also limited the time I could spend on a computer... and I ended up writing programs on paper while I waited for the next day :P
    - michaelchisari 11y ago
      It can be more complicated than that, though. People need down time, we need an opportunity to reflect on what we've learned instead of jumping to the next thing.
  - voyou 11y ago
    "Building something cool in minecraft is pretty different from watching spongebob on netflix." Is it? Why is watching and thinking about something less valuable than "building" something?
gregpilling 11y ago
I have a gaggle of children, and I have noticed that my 5 year old son thinks many devices have voice control, and he views this as normal. My 11 year old son and 8 year old always think every screen has a touch interface, but they don't use voice. To me, it seems that there is a break in those generations. The 5 year old is voice activating his tablet, amazon fire tv, watches his parents voice command their phones driving - this is all totally normal to him and you can see he will often try a voice command on a device unfamiliar to him. The older boys think using a PC is novel, and look at me strangely when I tell them about DOS and Windows 3.1 //// oh well...
- walterbell 11y ago
  Do they think all the magic takes place on the devices, or somewhere else? e.g. do they think of "syncing" as something that occurs directly between devices, or that involves services in the middle?
  - gregpilling 11y ago
    I don't believe he thinks about it at all . It has just always been so to him, like the sun comes up in the morning.
- tajen 11y ago
  Which commands do they use to start? "Ok, tablet"? Soon your next child will wave at the device and wonder about the appendice with plenty of keys attached to the computer.
oasisbob 11y ago
Can someone please remind me how demographers defend treating post-WWII generations as being 20 years in length when the evidence is very clear that real generations are much longer? http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Generation_length http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Generation_length I wouldn't care so much if it weren't for having to endure another round of inane punditry.
swalsh 11y ago
My son was born this year in March. I'm not sure if that counts as Z or if its something beyond that... but i'm not sure technology is the thing that will "Define" his generation. To be sure, I think VR and AI will definitely impact them by a lot.... but I think more impactful is that he's going to be coming of age at exactly the moment when some of the worst effects of climate change (if we managed to slow it down very soon) are projected to happen. I think his generation will be defined not by the new tech invented, but by the global changes they have to adapt to.

26 points by ardeay 11y ago

With all due respect, what a bunch of b.s. Goes to show that always being connected maybe isn't all it's hyped up to be. From the sound of it, it doesn't appear to produce any lasting insights. p.s. Whoever typed "exec" to run a DOS program? p.p.s. "Software is a dead. Digitarians know apps, games, and web browsers." WTF?

shillno1138 11y ago
Digitarians know how to push big buttons, know nothing of how said buttons work, progress indeed. Depends on your definition of progress.
- daodedickinson 11y ago
  We rural farmers have found the ignorance of city folk about how their food and electricity and water are produced depressing and hilarious in this ambivalent way for decades. One can only wonder how far society can build technical, monetary and moral debt in this matryoshka doll sort of way before collapse... In Haruki Murakami's "The Birth of My Kitchen Table Fiction" he mentions: "It cost a lot less to open your own place back then [1974] than it does now. Young people like us who were determined to avoid “company life” at all costs were launching small shops left and right. Cafés and restaurants, variety stores, bookstores—you name it. Several places near us were owned and run by people of our generation... It was an era when, all over the world, one could still find gaps in the system." Children are pulled towards these gaps where the giant experience advantage adults have are not already dominating, unless adults spend much one-on-one time grooming children to take over their current roles. Most parents are in roles that will not be around for their children, or the parents cannot give such roles to their children. This inter-generational alienation has grown for centuries. I fear that our institutions will be, in particular, unprepared to cope with the nigh-invisible problems that the very new increase in life-expectancy will bring. What happens when groups and teams of people performing and designing at unprecedentedly high levels due to abnormal extra decades of experience start dying off, without ready replacements because the strongest minds went to niche tech sectors with the least competition from more experienced older people? I wonder if there is a cohort in some field where people with elongated life-spans dominated limited positions to the point where replacements with enough experience to keep things going will simply be impossible to find. Is this happening already? Any examples? I definitely read that there are a plethora of continuously unfilled job openings requiring too much experience and growing crowds of unemployed who cannot build experience, but maybe this is not too new or unendurable and a brutal transition is not necessary. I hope it is just a neurosis of mine. I welcome any words in response that will soothe this fear. I think too, here, of how the average age of a Nobel Prize in Physics winner is increasing at a superlinear rate. I feel a new Tower of Babel collapse will come because technological change will outpace the rate at which human brains can learn. I feel technical debt outpaces even national debts and idiocracy is resulting. I had to stop reading (ironically) Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation because it was literally giving me panic attacks. I've always been successful in school and the book just solidifies my conceit that I am king turd of a shit mountain. What if we get too weak to hold on to the shoulders of the I can understand why society requires faith; maybe it's always been Wile E. Coyote refusing to look down—and Spengler would hardly make one think otherwise. But weren't many older generations working for future generations? When have societies so obviously borrowed from the future instead of building it? Straddled their children with debt instead of taking it on for their benefit? I went to my eighth choice school out of eight to avoid debt and I'm now at an even-worse graduate school (I got into the number 1 grad program for my major, balked at $180k of debt, and am now attending an unranked school, i.e. it's not even in the top 150) and all I get in exchange is worry that the program is not challenging enough, and self-hate that I can't motivate myself enough independently of school. Todays kids build in Minecraft, just as I built in Legos, because neither of us could fight through the massive amount of red tape to build something real in, say, California. Why should kids go outside when they are allowed to do so little? There's no treasure to be found at the local park, if there was, it's been found by the crowds already, and you're not allowed to dig to try to find some anyway. My mother is a gatherer (as in hunt and gatherer) at heart, and her deepest love is to wander the mesas of desolate Wyoming, find artifacts and weird rocks, bring them home, and add them to an ever-growing found-object arrangement in her driveway that I consider a folk art installation (she is more humble). It is very illegal. But when kids do this in Minecraft or I hunt and gatherer in a Bethesda Softworks game, no one arrests me even if I get caught. But I'm exercising once-valuable skills and instincts that I should fast from and eventually eliminate if I want to gain advantage in my current sociopolitical environment. I fear I'm merely an echo of a old way of life and I find myself unable to enjoy Fallout: New Vegas without guilt or fear, and stressed out when I try to build skills for the new world order. I once had a vision that I interpreted to mean that absolute power is absolute weakness. I haven't integrated it into my life, but when I think about how people can learn how to push buttons without learning how to build the machines those buttons control, I get an in to the truth, that the pursuit of power, is the pursuit of comfort, is the pursuit of weakness, is the pursuit of stress. And this flux is eternal.

zitterbewegung 11y ago

This generation is fighting the largest class warfare battle in history and guess what. There is only mutually assured destruction.

EdSharkey 11y ago

Just got back from a family reunion and my relations' kids were glued to their tablets playing mindless games and watching YouTube unattended for 4 hour spells and more day after day. It was so depressing, all these boring consumer drones in the making. My kids get 1 hour of screen time a day, max (until they decide to become coders, and then the cap is lifted. :)

ardeay 11y ago
exactly, when they make the leap to learning how computers work, the game changes :)
ProCynic 11y ago
Well there's screen time and screen time. Building something cool in minecraft is pretty different from watching spongebob on netflix. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30
- alexnking 11y ago
  Exactly - I don't understand why even computer literate people have trouble understanding that computers aren't "an" activity, they're a gateway to millions of them, limited by your imagination. My parents also limited the time I could spend on a computer... and I ended up writing programs on paper while I waited for the next day :P
  - michaelchisari 11y ago
    It can be more complicated than that, though. People need down time, we need an opportunity to reflect on what we've learned instead of jumping to the next thing.
- voyou 11y ago
  "Building something cool in minecraft is pretty different from watching spongebob on netflix." Is it? Why is watching and thinking about something less valuable than "building" something?

gregpilling 11y ago

I have a gaggle of children, and I have noticed that my 5 year old son thinks many devices have voice control, and he views this as normal. My 11 year old son and 8 year old always think every screen has a touch interface, but they don't use voice. To me, it seems that there is a break in those generations. The 5 year old is voice activating his tablet, amazon fire tv, watches his parents voice command their phones driving - this is all totally normal to him and you can see he will often try a voice command on a device unfamiliar to him. The older boys think using a PC is novel, and look at me strangely when I tell them about DOS and Windows 3.1 //// oh well...

walterbell 11y ago
Do they think all the magic takes place on the devices, or somewhere else? e.g. do they think of "syncing" as something that occurs directly between devices, or that involves services in the middle?
- gregpilling 11y ago
  I don't believe he thinks about it at all . It has just always been so to him, like the sun comes up in the morning.
tajen 11y ago
Which commands do they use to start? "Ok, tablet"? Soon your next child will wave at the device and wonder about the appendice with plenty of keys attached to the computer.

oasisbob 11y ago

Can someone please remind me how demographers defend treating post-WWII generations as being 20 years in length when the evidence is very clear that real generations are much longer? http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Generation_length http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Generation_length I wouldn't care so much if it weren't for having to endure another round of inane punditry.

swalsh 11y ago

My son was born this year in March. I'm not sure if that counts as Z or if its something beyond that... but i'm not sure technology is the thing that will "Define" his generation. To be sure, I think VR and AI will definitely impact them by a lot.... but I think more impactful is that he's going to be coming of age at exactly the moment when some of the worst effects of climate change (if we managed to slow it down very soon) are projected to happen. I think his generation will be defined not by the new tech invented, but by the global changes they have to adapt to.