Millenials to the Rescue
I’m fascinated by the rising generation. I love to study and watch them. I truly believe that they are up to the task to make the world great — not just the USA, not just your local city, but the entire world.
I must disclose that much of my thinking and influence comes from the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe, the authors of Generations and the Fourth Turning. If you want to get a picture of the cyclical regeneration witnessed in human nature across hundreds of years, Strauss and Howe’s work is pretty insightful.
I couldn’t help but think of this when I read the article in the USA Today last week on Millenials. They are active. They are vocal. They are driven to make a difference. In my opinion, they WILL be the drivers of the next societal revolution for human rights, equality, global education, world peace, and overcoming poverty.
This is all framing up and being supported by technology. Think of the way technology is reaching across the youth culture, regardless of geographic boundary:
- U2 requests and gets hundreds of thousands of concert goers to send a text message to support the One Campaign, an effort to rally Americans to fight the emergency of global AIDS and extreme poverty.
- Students reach out through MySpace to share insights into “their personality” (Harrison Group poll estimates 58 percent of American teens have a profile on MySpace).
- Groups on social networking sites like Facebook and Friendster have linked together active social and civic-minded students on individual campuses and across the world.
- Instant Messaging services like AIM, Yahoo, Windows Messenger allow for a new method of “presence detection” as an increasing percentage of the population spends more time in front of their computer — which they do because the computer is their portal to the Internet.
- Personal blogs provide an outlet for sharing opinions, feelings, and beliefs.
- Real-time journalism through camera phones. For example, the 911 hijacking and terrorist plot was first reported by passengers on board the planes. Also, the London train bombing of 2005 was reported in “first person” by passengers with camera phones, long before CNN, BBC, or other news outlets could arrive.
- Live blogging at conferences. This was an amazing eye opener to me as I was able to “experience” the MacWorld event thanks to Engadget insta-blogging what they were hearing and learning. All this was near real-time to me and far earlier than the “day-old” posts to the news sites.
- Free Voice over IP (VoIP) services like Skype that let people connect across vast geographic boundaries and free of the heavy telecom tolls in Europe and Asia.
- Real Simple Syndication (RSS) makes it easier than ever to let topics from blog authors or like-minded individual across the Internet come to you, creating a very “informed” audience (of both positive and negative positions).
- Podcasts on thousands of subjects and topics, from both professional, academic, and individuals, make it possible to stay current on topics from experts in their fields.
- And of course, wireless phones and data networks. Just walk across any high-school or college campus. They’re all on their phones talking to friends.
Yes, to those of us who are watching, we’re seeing the beginning of a revolution that will be driven by the power and new world-wide-reach of communication technology. The old AT&T ad copy tagline, “Reach Out and Touch Someone,” has an entirely new meaning when you consider all the possibilities offered today.
Technorati Tags: Education, Facebook, Gen Y, Millenials, MySpace, Software