CHAPTER 2

Demographics

The rise of social networking (including social games), smartphones, and text messaging can be attributed in large measure to the behavior of “digital natives” whose skills, personas, and expectations have been shaped by a lifetime of exposure to the Internet and its accompanying technologies. How these technologies shape people, and vice versa, is fascinating to watch, given such a real-life and real-time case study. For businesses, employing and selling to this population present particular challenges and opportunities.

It would be difficult, and at any rate artificial, to try to argue chickens and eggs in questions of demographic change and technological change. Given the magnitude of what has happened in the past 20 years, it's appropriate to begin by asking a few questions about radical shifts in who is using information technologies and where they are doing so.

A number of commentators have noted how quickly the young pick up on such things as electronic games, text messaging, MP3 music, and other tools.¹ Whether they are called oyayubizoku (“clan of the thumb”) in Japan, “digital natives,” or the “net generation,” people currently under 30 are argued to access, process, and understand information in markedly different ways from their predecessors.² The implications of this change vary.

For starters, people facile with such tools are changing the workplace. Second, in the realm of politics, this group played a decisive role in the 2008 U.S. elections, utilizing blogs, online video, social networks, and text messaging to motivate, communicate, and coordinate. Not long afterward, the same tools played a central role in India's elections. Third, outside of work and the civic sphere, that generation is also changing personal relationships and dating, though as we will see, older people tend to follow suit quickly in this regard. Finally, many facets of recreation (with online gaming, fantasy sports leagues, and poker, in particular) play out differently by generation. All of these changes will be discussed throughout the book.

While we will have much more to say in regard to the world outside the OECD* when we discuss mobility in Chapter 27, it's worth mentioning here how mobile phones and data devices are changing entire countries and, indeed, continents. While in the developed world mobility and broadband connections have a wide range of uses, many of them recreational, in India, Africa, and elsewhere, the life-changing aspects of mobile telephony tend to be more essential: Is there a market for my catch or crop? Is my Haitian daughter alive after the earthquake? Based on this picture of a tumor or broken limb, how soon must I travel to a doctor? Thus, demography is being reshaped by technology: Standards of living and life expectancy are projected to improve in ways that dams and other infrastructure investment have yet to drive.

Is There a “Net Generation”?

The Canadian consultant Don Tapscott has, for well over a decade, been focusing attention on what he calls “the net generation.”³ He identifies eight norms to describe people born in the 1980s as they diverge from their elders:

1. Freedom and freedom of choice
2. Customization
3. Collaboration
4. Scrutiny of outsiders
5. Integrity
6. Fun, including at school and work
7. Speed
8. Innovation

All of these traits are readily evident when one spends time with educated, generally affluent people under 30. To call them a generation, however, overreaches the evidence. Tapscott relied on an online survey instrument that suffers from considerable self-selection bias: Active net users found the survey and proceeded to discuss how actively they used and internalized various facets of the net. Based in large measure on the behavior of his admittedly talented, bright, and insightful children and their friends, Tapscott says in his most recent book in the ongoing study that he “came [in 1996] to the conclusion that the defining characteristic of an entire generation was that they were the first to be ‘growing up digital’”⁴ (emphasis added).

That statement is problematic for any number of reasons; let's list five:

1. Ethnicity. Middle-class white and Asian young people, such as those in big-city U.S. and Canadian locales like Tapscott's Toronto, absolutely exhibit some of those eight traits from time to time. They are not, however, a “generation”: According to the Pew Hispanic Center in 2010, only 42% of Latinos without a high school degree (that group counts for 42% of the total ethnic constituency) go online.⁵ Given that the U.S. Latin population is large, fast growing, and less educated than whites, it cannot be bundled into Tapscott's “generation” without qualification.
2. Heterogeneous online behavior. Just as offline, the online world is hardly homogeneous. To connect any two users of various elements of the Internet only on that basis makes as much sense as to say that everybody who drives, or watches television, is a generation. Danah Boyd's observations on social class differences between Facebook and MySpace users are instructive here (and absent from Tapscott's bibliography).⁶ Video watchers and file-sharing uploaders are at least two different species, as are flame warriors versus lurkers, or Columbine-searchers versus Amazon shoppers. Web 2.0—the tendency of user-powered Web sites such as Flickr and Facebook to build off “civilian” energy, and Tapscott's pole star—is an undeniably powerful force, but it is not yet universally embraced by members of any broad demographic, not even the 20-somethings. Apple, eBay, Amazon, and even Google still retain elements of older, content-driven business models and are only minimally participatory.
3. Ethics. As far as “integrity” being a generational attribute, think about the business school students at Duke: Ten percent of the class of 2008 was caught cheating despite honor code posters prominently posted in the building and multiple adjustments to the curriculum in that direction. A separate study of 54 universities found that 56% of MBA students admitted to cheating; how many more cheaters lied?⁷ In 2005, dozens of applicants to Harvard Business School tried to view acceptance letters before they were mailed by poking around in the school's Web site after a security hole was reported. The school denied admission to all 119 net-savvy snoopers.⁸
4. Too soon to tell. This cadre is still young. To define a generation, before they reach 30, by a set of technology artifacts embraced in different ways to various degrees by only some of them feels premature if nothing else. How many of the Paris/Chicago/Prague 1968 generation similarly embraced “fun” or “freedom” as core values back in the age of typewriters? Short of World War II, at any time has an American generation been defined (to the extent that a generation can be defined) before they reached 30?
5. Reversing expectations. We're enduring a prolonged global recession, and the results could well consign the first generation in memory, if not American history, to economic prospects worse than those of their parents.⁹ According to the 2010 Census, the U.S. poverty level hit 15%. Forty percent of people in their 20s live at home at some point.¹⁰ That is, if the net generation experiences widespread downward social mobility, that will be considerably more defining than the fact that some of them like to blog or watch funny videos at work.

At the same time, any technology change that can drive redesigns in something as essential as people's clothing needs to be noted: Cable-routing systems for earbud wires are standard in many backpacks, most skiwear, and some exercise apparel. Even if Tapscott overstates the size of the cadre, millions of people are behaving from a network-centric, digital orientation: Facebook organizes their social world, iPods or iPhones their music and movies, GPS their travels, and Hulu their television viewing.

Digital Natives

A more nuanced view of the online young comes from John Palfrey and Urs Gasser in their book Born Digital. First, unlike Tapscott, they recognize how people in the whole world are online, so they refer to their digital natives as a global population rather than a generation.¹¹ The book is filled with subtle understandings of work, safety, and creativity. A key point is made early, in regard to identity: “Digital Natives live much of their lives online, without distinguishing between the online and the offline. Instead of thinking of their digital identity and their real-space identity as separate things, they just have an identity (with representations in two, or three, or more different spaces).”¹²

Digital Natives also treat research as almost exclusively the province of Google searches, sometimes with few tools for assessing the quality of various results. Physical space can become inconsequential: “Friends” of multiple sorts without linguistic differentiation can exist, and move, essentially anywhere. Like Tapscott, Palfrey and Gasser demonstrate concern over some people's data hygiene habits, worrying that offhand utterances, photos, or connections will come back to embarrass, or do worse to, the natives' later adult selves. If stalkers wanted to devise a perfect technology for their craft, they could do worse than Facebook.

Millennials at Work

A number of consulting firms appear to have found a profitable market in training white-collar managers to cope with “millennials,” “Gen Y,” or whatever one calls these people, who are different in large measure because of their facility with technology. This divergence in communication tools and styles is already having dramatic effects, according to 40- and 50-something peers of mine, particularly in knowledge-driven industries such as advertising, accounting, and consulting. Although I frequently see generational differences working with university students, from the reports of many colleagues, the sharp differences in communications platforms across generations are radically complicating the task of management. It's not unheard of for senior executives to have administrative assistants print off their e-mails, and voicemail remains the medium of choice in some firms. At the other demographic extreme, teens often disregard e-mail in favor of some combination of Twitter, text messaging, PC-based instant messaging (Google Chat), Skype, and social-network message tools.¹³

It's too soon to tell what exactly is happening, but a trend in real estate appears to be toward tighter quarters. According to the Los Angeles Times, the norm in the 1970s for American corporate office space was 500 to 700 square feet per employee. The average in 2010 was just over 200 square feet per person, and the space allocation could fall to as little as 50 square feet by 2015, according to Peter Miscovich, a real estate broker at Jones Lang LaSalle.¹⁴ Part of this can of course be attributed to expense control, but teams in some industries are growing closer and more collaborative; some people like closer proximity to coworkers. Finally, laptops, videoconferencing, and mobile phones mean that desks no longer serve the same function they formerly did.

In addition, people who grew up with a Web-centric social sensibility often communicate rather more freely than their elders (or regulators, in some cases) would prefer. The enterprise information services (IS) organization has the unenviable task of logging all material communications, and sometimes of turning off some of the most powerful Web 2.0 exemplars. The aforementioned middle-age managers, meanwhile, must communicate across an increasingly wide variety of technologies, each with particularities of convenience, cultural norms, interoperability, and security and privacy. Add to this cultural dynamic the technical incompatibilities among communications tools. It feels a bit like the 1980s days of the CompuServe versus Prodigy online services: My Facebook message won't cross over to your LinkedIn profile.

The locus of work will be addressed later, but for now we can note that both managers and managed are still adjusting to expectations of a seven-day, 24-hour workweek, made possible by BlackBerries, PCs, and the like. The workplace is increasingly located wherever the person and his or her tools are. The fact that the tools are always on and used for both work and private tasks, and are both personal and invisibly intimate has implications for relationships, for personal health and well-being, and for the basic employment contract, both specified and implied.

Behavior and Expectations

Several behavioral dynamics of the digital natives are pertinent. First, the ease of online collaboration and interaction has lowered coordination costs: Organizing a group of 3 or of 3,000 has never been easier.¹⁵ If the underlying assumption is that because people are reachable, they can be counted on, they will be repeatedly invited to contribute in some way to a project they care about. Mobilizing people, whether for a party or a cause, is now primarily a matter of desire, not logistical hurdles. Text-based interactions are so comfortable that the line between friend, acquaintance, and stranger becomes easily blurred. Digital privacy and trust are very much in flux.

Second, speed matters. Having to wait on a modem-grade connection causes nearly physical pain, as witnessed by the public outrage toward AT&T for poor iPhone connections. Multitasking is common, to the point where the need to prohibit texting and driving is motivating legislation in many states. The speed of change is very real to the digital natives. Within a single family, for example, the ages at which children get mobile phones or Facebook accounts will invariably drop as younger siblings come of age.

Looking Ahead

Technology is driving in the young (and now young adults) new understandings and expectations of time, of intimacy, of productivity, of property rights, of work, of location, and of choice. Laws and norms are slow to adapt, but change is under way in these domains as well. Any institution one can name—from public schools and libraries to bars and clubs to policing—must react. Much of what follows in this book will be read very differently by a 20-year-old as compared to his or her parent, wherever each may live. The point is not to catalog the ways this population is different—that has been capably done elsewhere—but rather to highlight the particular ways that demography is driving sociotechnical change. At the same time, the converse is true: The generation with the longest to live in the aftermath of the global recession is also the one with potentially the most powerful set of tools for living that have ever been developed.

Notes

1. See Rich Ling, New Tech, New Ties (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

2. For useful data on a subset of this group, see Aaron Smith, Lee Rainie, and Kathryn Zickuhr, “College Students and Technology,” Pew Internet and American Life project, July 19, 2011, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/College-students-and-technology.aspx.

3. Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009). See also his Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999).

4. Tapscott, Grown Up Digital, p. 2.

5. Gretchen Livingston, “Latinos and Digital Technology, 2010,” Pew Hispanic Center, February 9, 2011, http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=134.

6. Danah Boyd, “Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace,” Apophenia Blog Essay, June 24, 2007. www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html.

7. Della Bradshaw, “MBA Students Are ‘Biggest Cheats,’” Financial Times, September 20, 2006.

8. Linda Rosencrance, “Harvard Rejects Business-School Applicants Who Hacked Site,” Computerworld, March 8, 2005, www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/100261/Harvard_rejects_business_school_applicants_who_hacked_site.

9. See, for example, Catherine Ramell, “Are You Better Off Than Your Parents Were?” New York Times Economix blog, February 10, 2010, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/are-you-better-off-than-your-parents-were/.

10. Robin Marantz Henig, “What Is It about 20-Somethings?” New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 18, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html.

11. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Perseus, 2008), p. 14.

12. Ibid., p. 4.

13. See Frank Bruni, “Sorry, Wrong In-box,” New York Times, August 31, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/opinion/sorry-wrong-in-box.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general.

14. Roger Vincent, “Office Walls Are Closing in on Corporate Workers,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/15/business/la-fi-office-space-20101215/.

15. Clay Shirky has been stressing this point for years. See, for example, his Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin, 2010), pp. 65 ff.

*The countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development include the U.S., western Europe, and other rich countries. The public health and data visualization expert Hans Rosling referred to it as “the country club of the United Nations.”