There’s A Watershed Moment Coming
by Jon Husband
Many of us have written about the spread of social media and social computing, Enterprise 2.0 platforms and the emerging designs of capabilities for collaboration, the calls for management innovation and the realization that much of the changes yet to come relate to culture and the dynamics of interaction.
Here’s the Toronto Globe and Mail’s early look at the new book Grownup Digital, which outlines the huge impacts on the horizon as social computing dynamics continue to spread and penetrate more deeply into the workplace.
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Digital boom is about to hit the workplace
If Barack Obama is elected U.S. president tomorrow, it will be a spectacular display of power by a new generation of young Americans. They overwhelmingly support Mr. Obama, of course, but their clout is far greater than the number of their votes.
Their real power lies in the way they use digital tools that give them unprecedented abilities to spread information, work together and organize.
Young Americans have used these tools to rewrite the political playbook in the campaign to elect the first African-American president.
Just wait until they start using them to shake up the world of work.
I call them the Net Generation, because they’re the first generation to grow up digital. These are the children of the baby boomers, young people turning 11 to 31 this year. They’re the biggest generation ever – even more numerous than their baby boomer parents. For them, digital technology is like their parents’ fridge: It’s not technology to them, but simply a normal part of life.
Young people who have grown up digital use technology in a very different way than their parents do. Here’s just one example: Watch the way they use mobile phones. Parents use them to talk and check e-mails. Net Gen-ers think e-mail is old-fashioned. They’d rather use the phone to text incessantly, surf the Web, find directions, take pictures, make videos and collaborate.
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