Tapscott Part 2 "Grown Up Digital"

As I keep reading his book, I get the feeling that Tapscott is almost pandering to the Net Generation -- at times it seems like he's too good at turning our criticisms into encouragements. He gives advice on how to change the world to fit the Net Generation, but it seems quite transformational of present systems. I'm not all too sure that "our way" is ultimately going to be the "best way." Tapscott isn't offering ways to meet the Net Generation in the middle; he suggest ways to completely change things like the workplace or schools to accommodate their new values. 

For me, he comes off sometimes like an overly proud grandmother bragging to her church friends about how wonderful we are. But I get that perhaps he intended this book to be ultra-encouraging because there are so many skeptics (especially among people in his age group, he says) who don't believe in this generation. Overall, I think it's good that he's advocating so strongly for us. And he's doing it with a lot of research -- Tapscott's studies, polls, quotes, and anecdotes portray the Net Generation is very flattering light.

The second part of "Grown Up Digital" goes over four important systems in a Net Gener's world: school, work, the store, and the family. Again, he ends each chapter with a list of tips to help the world understand and accommodate the Net Gen's norms. One of the biggest changes to differentiate the Boomers and the Net Geners is their method and expectation of communication. It comes up in the classroom, advertising, and the workplace: the Boomers hold onto a broadcast method, while the Net Geners have adopted a network method. In other words, the older generation believes that one person at the top of a hierarchy knows, controls, and distributes the information (one-to-many). The younger generation has grown up sharing all information with everyone, collaborating (many-to-many). 

Problems are cropping now that the new expectations do not match the systems that govern Net Geners. In school, they want to be part of a discovery process – not sit in front of an all-knowing teacher who dumps knowledge into their brains. In the work place, they want to be a part of the team, not a low-level grunt who has to "pay his dues" before he earns any credibility. When shopping, they want their opinions to be reflected in the products they buy, and expect companies to take them seriously or they'll shop somewhere else.

The family forefront has a different contrast. Different factors shape the argument for Boomer-vs-Net Gener, but they still cause friction and misunderstanding between the two. The new generation has become notorious for moving back home after college and staying inside on the computer, whereas the Boomers would never think of moving back and found freedom in the outdoors. Boomers typically criticize their children for being coddled and lazy, but things have changed since their times. The outdoors were not a "free" place when we were growing up, as AMBER Alerts and stranger danger campaigns ran all over television. Instead, we turned to the web for freedom. 

And many kids move home and value their relationships with their parents, not just because they are trusting and honest, but because many Net Geners find themselves in debt when they finish college. Not to mention the huge incurrence of "helicopter parents" – Tapscott tells stories of mothers who submit job applications for their kids, or who complain to the CEO at their kids' jobs. Not cool. 

I think Tapscott is doing a good job of giving evidence that the Net Generations have huge potential for success, despite the haters. The only thing that has me worried is that some of his conclusions are based on the aspirations or the intent of the Net Geners, not their actual actions. He balances out these out with anecdotes of successful twenty-something year olds, but I don't think our credentials are quite as shiny as he makes them out to be -- yet. Maybe my skepticism is rooted in my experiences and judgements of my peers in college. Many of my peers have bright futures and tons of potential, but I know an equal if not greater number of people who seem to have already settled.

Shirky Ch.6: the Web Enables Collective Action

“Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Skirky

Chapter 6: Collective Action and Institutional Challenges

The sixth chapter of Shirky’s book on the power of organizing without organizations explains how collective action began to erode traditional institutions with the aid of the Web in the 1990s. He used an example from the Catholic Church’s scandal involving priests and bishops sexually abusing young boys in Boston. Scandals early in the 90s had been managed by the Church by keeping the matter internal (147), but a 2002 reoccurrence proved impossible to stifle. A lay group called Voice of the Faithful organized in November of 2002 to reform the Church (144) and grew to 25,000 members in less than a year (145) by using new forms of sharing: weblogs and emails (148).

“What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind... even the minimal hassle involved in sending a newspaper clipping to a group (xeroxing the article, finding envelopes and stamps, writing addresses) widens the gap between intention and action,” Shirky writes (149).

Technology minimized the cost of aggregation (151), quickened the group’s ability to add and inform members (152) and widened the potential audience to individuals who could join on their own without needing a friend to recommend it (153). “VOTF has become a powerful force, all while remaining loosely (and largely electronically) coordinated” (153). 

“What technology did do was alter the spread, force, and especially duration of that reaction, by removing two old obstacles – locality of information, and barriers to group reaction” (153). Even for the Catholic Church, one of the oldest and most hierarchical institutions mankind has seen, is not immune to the effects of its members using digital technology to organize and participate outside its realm (153). 

“In a world where group action means gathering face-to-face, people who need to act as a group should, ideally, be physically near one another.  Now that we have ridiculously easy group-forming, however, that stricture is relaxed, and the result is that organizations that assume geography as a core organizing principle, even ones that have been operating that way for centuries, are now facing challenges to that previously bedrock principle” (155).

Shirky reminds his readers that the Web and social tools like email have now become so commonplace that they make it difficult to imagine life before them (156). Email is practically cost free, instant, and does not require senders and receivers to synchronize in time to exchange information; he explains that these characteristics of the tool are what gives the medium such great success for group communication (157).

The Web is another overlooked and common tool that has drastically changed communication: users no longer needed to ask permission to create their own interfaces or modify old ones (158). This makes the Web not only a great tool as-is, but has imbedded in it the option for limitless improvement.

Shirky concludes the chapter by saying, “What the rise of new and newly powerful lay organizations shows us is that in the right cases people are willing and even eager to come together and affect the world. Motivation, energy, and talent for action are all present in those sorts of groups – what was not present, until recently, was the ability to coordinate easily.” That is why Shirky does not see the social tools as responsible for the activism, but they change the world by removing obstacles that previously hindered such movement (159).

This chapter seems to really hit home the subtitle of the book: Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors. The Internet, the Web, email, and social media are not the reason for people to organize or engage in activism – it is merely the tool that had made such experiences seem commonplace. The tools remove the previous mindset that organizing for a just cause would be merited, but too much trouble. 

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: How Digital Networks Transform Our Ability to Gather and Cooperate. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Don Tapscott's "Grown Up Digital" – Finally, someone gets us!

Think you’re smarter than your parents? Ever been told that technology is making you stupid? Author Don Tapscott comes to my generation’s defense in his book “Grown Up Digital.” He calls us the Net Generation and outlines the huge differences between us and the Baby Boomers as the result of Internet and technological advances. He is himself a Baby Boomer (born between 1946 and 1964), but has two “net gener” children (born between 1977 and 1997) from which he draws much of his inspiration.

*Note: I was born in 1991, so I, by Tapscott’s definition, am a Net Gener.

In his introduction, he outlines the opposition’s argument: the Net Generation is dumber that the previous generation was at their age, we have replaced healthy habits with an addiction to the screen, we share too much about our personal lives, we are indecisive, we steal, we bully, we’re violent, lazy, narcissistic, and we don’t care about anything of substance.

Oh no they di-in’t! The intro got me heated immediately. Seriously – I huffed and puffed a little bit.
Is that what they’re really saying about us? Jeeze. I know we’re not all the brightest crayons in the box, but this is harsh! Granted, I personally know people who exemplify each of those characteristics, but I do not believe that our entire generation is that lame, by a long shot. Tapscott provided the research (and a very optimistic attitude) to counter those statements. I won’t summarize it all; listing all the cool parts would take another blog entry (and I still have to finish the book…), but here are the basics.

Tapscott bases most of the book on what he calls the “Eight Net Generation Norms” (34). Tapscott wrote a prequel for this book, “Growing Up Digital,” so he’s done a ton of research to have figured them out. Again, his kids are a huge part of this, but throughout the book he demonstrates their applications to our behavior in education, employment, family, politics, and online. Also, he considers these the most divergent traits of the Net Geners compared to their parents.

1. Freedom. We are pretty used to having access to the things we want to know – where, what, and who, whenever we want. We’re not about to make demands about when classes should start or when we should show up to work, but as one net gener says: “We’re given the technology that allows us to be mobile, so I don’t understand why we need to be restricted to a desk; it feels like you’re being micromanaged” (76). We don’t want to commit to a lifetime career until we’ve had the chance to try out others, and when we do acquire those jobs, we want to be able to take breaks so that we can work when we’re most productive. Furthermore, this whole “Pick from two candidates from two political parties” system is just not doing it for us. Variety is far from burdensome – we expect it.

2. Customization. We design our own screen savers, ringtones, apps, news feeds, Netflix subscriptions, web browsers, playlists, profiles, and even job descriptions (once we’ve earned them) (79). We like to brand ourselves with logos and company names (Apple, North Face, Showtime, Subaru…. to name a few of my own). Pinterest, anyone? And whether we do that by buying their stuff, tweeting their media, or putting a sticker on our laptops, we choose those little things to convey our self image.

3. Scrutiny. You can’t believe everything that’s on the Internet, so we have become pros at deciphering the BS from what’s legit. Well, maybe we’re not pros, but we have a heightened awareness for scams and misrepresentations (80). Our generation is pretty good at telling whether it seems true (or just matches what we already believe), or if we should investigate a little further by searching the story on another news site. This also applies to what we buy and who we buy from. Thanks to online reviews, blogs, and the affordances of social media, we have more transparency to nail down not just what we consume but why. Are they ecofriendly companies? Are they treating their workers fairly? Are they portraying women in a discriminating way?
To our fault though, we’re not always the most scrutinizing about what we post on our Facebook pages. Shoot, I still have to untag some of those pictures of me with the red cups…

4. Integrity. Again, transparency has given us the ability to filter out the people and companies we support from those we oppose. With more knowledge, we have the capacity be more understanding, tolerant, and compassionate about things that previously had stigmas (such as mental disabilities [83]) and more discriminatory about companies who say one thing but do another. It’s not just about talking the talk anymore, because there’s video footage of you walking your walk on YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook.
On the other hand, we are also the culprits of not-so-upstanding activities like illegal music downloading and other forms of pirating (85-88).

5. Collaboration. Not only are we more capable than ever of communicating and sharing information with those around us, we recognize that no one person can possibly “know it all.” We share this humbling knowledge of how much we do not know because of the vast, extensive Web. We share music, files, jokes, memes, and emails for all sorts of reasons; we discuss our opinions and experiences about brands, companies, places, and people (89). Net Geners embrace dialogue and “want to feel that their opinion counts” (90). This extends to all aspects of our lives – work, play, and education.

6. Entertainment. For the most part, we are most productive when we enjoy what we’re doing. Some people call it ADD, but I consider it… selective attention distribution (SAD? Oh god, maybe not that then). We want to be emotionally satisfied and fulfilled by our work. Our ability to multitask enables us to write a paper and watch a movie at the same time. This doesn’t always maximize our productivity, but we will put more into our work when we have personal interest in the subject.

7. Speed. Speed, speed, speed.  Instant messages, bytes per second, company response, performance feedback, product delivery – we want our stuff… now (93). Why would I wait four weeks for those boots to FedEx when fall is starting in three? Why would I read that in a book if I can search in on Google Books and press Command+Find? Convenience, is one thing, but Speed is also tied to loyalty. Those who take too long to get back to us typically lose it, Tapscott says.
It does create in us a type of impatience in some other ways, but, I mean, I texted him like an hour ago!

8. Innovation. With the power of computers and the Internet, we can be productive, and faster than ever. It bothers us when innovation is slowed by old-fashioned hierarchies/bureaucracies. Remember calling the radio station on the way to school to request a song, and then hear it before rolling into the parking lot? Well iPhone application development isn’t quite that fast yet, but it’s getting there! As consumers, we want technologies to be capable, multi-purposed, and up-to-date.

Any of this sound familiar? I thought it did. But it’s not like a horoscope where you read it and say “ah, well, if they could prove it that’d be cool.” Tapscott actually backs up all these claims with research that makes us seem, well, pretty awesome. All those video games your brother plays? Turns out those skills are incredibly handy for surgeons, architects, and engineers.

Ok, so he’s kind of stroking our egos. But if his research is correct, we have a lot to be confident about – and a lot to live up to.

More on Tapscott to come!

Baron Part 2: Technologies that Surpass Culture

     The second half of Baron's "A Better Pencil" brought up a theme that seems very important in today's society. That sounds kind of lofty, "in today's society, this problem permeates our lives..." but when I stop to think about my own progress with technology, it is at times difficult to separate myself from the problem – let alone the awareness that it exists as a new problem, foreign to my parents generation. Sometimes technologies cause issues in aspects of life that were unrelated to the original aspect addressed by its design.

     For example, E-Mail was designed to afford us many new abilities that snail mail could not: instant delivery, irrelevance of geographic location, affordability to acquire and send. Schools, businesses, friends all use email to communicate with an audience that can now be larger and farther away. However, this affordance creates the unique problems of spam messages that make our important messages difficult to find, suspicion about the identity of senders, and the subtraction of important cues that we can normally perceive in person (such as body language, tone, volume). As a society, we are coping with these etiquette problems together.

     In the same vein, when is it socially acceptable to text in public? What kind of messages are we sending to the people around us when we walk and text, text while we stand in line for food, text under our desks in class? Among the people in my age group, for the most part, it has become acceptable to text and talk at the same time (depending on the conversation subject matter, frequency of text interruptions, etc.). I assume these rules of etiquette will transform continually as our technology becomes an increasingly large part of our daily lives. Not to sound lofty or anything.

Baron (1) A Better Pencil

     Dennis Baron's "A Better Pencil" seems to be an analysis of society's reception of literate technology. In chapter 1, he outlines the now mythic story of Plato's distaste for written language. He believed that writing would have negative effects on memory; while he is probably right, there have obviously been huge advancements since the emergence of writing. On page 4, Baron defends Plato's stance by explaining that real knowledge is learned face-to-face, and without that – like when we have to learn something by reading – we only "display an appearance of wisdom." I have recently observed this difference in my own learning style, as the things I learn from interviewing individuals always sticks with me longer and more powerfully than a similar story read in text.
     Written language is only the first of many innovations to receive skepticism relating to the development of our literate society. So far, through chapters 1, 3, and 5, it seems that the only invention to duck suspicion is the pencil (hence the title, I assume. If the pencil was the least uncontested literate advance in technology, then the rest of the book describes the "anti" response to each new advancement). The telegraph, the telephone, the typewriter – all of these inventions were at first ill-received by members of society. Our culture has obviously accepted and adapted to these technologies, and it has practically become part of our evolution. It becomes more clear after reading Baron's chapters that these pieces that now seem so flawlessly integrated into our lives were, at one point, a very strange adjustment for older generations.
     The concepts surrounding trust seem to have changed the most: "I want to look him in the eye" versus "I want to see that in writing." Baron uses the example of the telephone to demonstrate this. Apparently, skeptics of the telephone as a successor of the telegraph doubted whether people would want to share information over a line when there was no written transcript of the conversation. Culture has accepted and welcomed the telephone, but initially, there had to be a shift in the tradition surrounding the exchange of dialogue.

Achebe (2) Dragging an oral culture forward (painfully) to literacy

     The oral culture in Achebe's story sees a dramatic change in its culture in a very short amount of time. From what we've discussed in class, it feels safe to say that change to an oral culture usually happens slowly over a generation or two, not within a single generation. When the white missionaries set up camp in Okonkwo's village, they brought with them many elements of their literate society.

• Religion and the Bible
• Government
• Prison systems
• Schools and books
• Technology: guns, bicycles

     The effect on the village is painful. The tribe is pulled apart with the missionaries' new theologies. The outcast and rejected find the white men welcoming, so they give up their allegiance to the tribe. On page 176 of "Things Fall Apart," one character says "[the missionaries] put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."The change Okonkwo's tribe underwent severely disintegrated relationships between members, especially between Okonkwo and his son.

     The second half of "Things Fall Apart"shows the effect of a significant change in the tribe. Their belief system, their families, and their concept of governance is subjected to the "knife" of the missionaries' literate society, which ultimately rips them apart. It is not proof that one society (oral or literate) is superior, or that one is good or bad. It just shows the extreme differences between them, and how incompatible they can be. The incompatibility may be a testament to the fact that it took a very long time for oral cultures to become literate, because the sudden juxtaposition of the two has a negative and painful outcome.

     In my life, it seems that things are changing so fast I can hardly keep up with what's gong on – at my university, in Washington, in politics, in technology, etc etc etc. I feel like I have no escape from advertisements in every corner of my life, a sorry sacrifice for the allowances of technology. It accustoms me to a bombardment of new ideas, even if they do not have a significant effect on my life (no I do not want to change my hair color or join your church or sign your petition or watch a video about dancing gerbils!).

Achebe (1) Time in Oral vs. Literate Culture

     “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe gives light to the practices and culture of an oral society, in a form true to its theme. Achebe paints a picture of what an oral culture actually looks like in terms of its relationships, the tribe’s hierarchy, and their traditions – and he does this in the form of a narrative. It seems appropriate because one of the most defining differences in the way oral (vs. literate) cultures communicate has to do with the structure of information exchange. Memory is much more important to an oral culture, since it is the only tool a person has to transfer an idea. Stories are easier to remember than bits of data, as details are easier to recall when there are contextual cues like those in a plot. In our literate society, things are much more quantified, especially with the concept of time.

     We see this in "Things Fall Apart" with Okonkwo and his tribe. The book serves me as a student in this course in a way that textbooks or academic writing simply could not. Achebe could have taught me by giving dates to an event in the context of a timeline, and explained the reactions of the tribesmen with figures. The fact that he tells the story in narrative form in itself helps me understand the oral culture just a bit more. Or perhaps just in a different way – as a story – and this has stuck with me more than a report or an analysis would.

     One stark difference between Okonkwo's tribe and the society I live in surrounds the concept of time. In his world, time functions more as a measure of other factors, like weather in the seasons or the rise of the sun and the moon. They do not look at a clock or a calendar to determine when to plant their seeds or return to the market place. They place emphasis on completely different cues that originate in the actual world, instead of running on a man-made measure of the rate at which events occur (time).

     Compared to literate cultures like ours, this method seems much more conducive to peace with the natural flow of time. Here and today, I work on a schedule that allows at most a fifteen minute margin of error (without social consequences). I check my phones to prepare for the day's weather rather than look out the window or go outside. I anticipate the end of a week not because it signals any kind of renewal, but because I get a break from the busyness of the workweek. For me, most things are quantified – nailed down to a word count, an hour's deadline, or a grade. Those are the end results, they dictate how I go about my work, and they are traits of a literate society.

     Okonkwo's oral world provides a sharp contrast. He and the people in his tribe spend time talking with words rather than emailing text, and it gives them a stronger feeling of attachment to the people and things in their lives. For another thing, the Nigerian tribe's circle encompasses a space with about a ten-mile radius. When they can focus on just their circle – rather than the 0s and 1s that tell us about things happening all over the world – we see a distinction in the attitude the respective cultures have related to we spend our time.

Ong – Oral and Literate Storytelling

In chapter 6, Ong outlines some of the differences between oral storytelling and literate stories. They are constructed differently (if you can even use the word construct for both) and they each hold different values for what make good stories. This comes from the function and capacity of memory, and how it influences the expectations of an audience.

In oral cultures, the values important to storytellers and their audiences have more to do with the actual performance. Imagery, details, events can go in any order. Tellings are done in a lucid and free-flowing way in terms of plot, but conventions for rhyme or stanzaic form or rhythm might be more important. For that reason, organization usually manifests in the form of episodes and not plot, as literate cultures come to expect.

In literate cultures, a different set of criteria are held important. Order and organization are such expected characteristics of story that we are disgruntled and confused when they are missing. We come to recognize this in the form of plot. We want to be introduced to the characters, understand the conflict, see it build and then resolve. If the telling of that story goes in any other order, we get uncomfortable. Thoughts like "Where are they going with this?" cross our minds, and that deviance will derail us as listeners.

I would chalk these differences up to the fact that oral storytelling emphasizes the feelings of the experience being recounted, and the reader of story in literature needs to follow a formula to know what she is to expect when reading a story. This comes from training, and as with most things, when the order strays from what we learned in our training, it is difficult to interpret and follow. We have just become so accustomed to organization that it throws us off when we have to sift through the details on our own. And that may be much more natural to an oral listener, who depends more on the senses –feeding on sound, volume, expressions of the face, body language, etc.

Ong's Orality & Literacy ... What's the Difference?

In the first half of "Orality and Literacy," author Walter Ong introduces this topic of verbally-transmitted tradition with written tradition. He begins with a summary of the development of scholarship around the concept over the history of its study. Ong's current view holds that the two traditions are separate, and should be regarded as such, in contrast to previous methods of study: older scholars would describe oral culture as "preliterate," or the more primitive version of literacy. He uses a metaphor to explain this, proposing that one can describe a horse as an automobile without wheels. At first it seems a trifling discrepancy, but he makes a case for the importance of such a distinction. 

If the frame of the comparison between orality and literacy is built around the notion that literacy is the more advanced, or that oral cultures are somehow stuck in the past, or underdeveloped – basically, inferior – this breeds a skewed understanding of the two. However, when taken separately and compared or contrasted based on individualized analyses (and not the list of what the inferior subject lacks next to the superior) one can come to a greater appreciation and understanding for both.

In our case ("our" meaning the literate culture), it seems more important to come to an understanding of an oral culture. Without comparing what one or another lacks, the evaluation of a culture void of written text stretches us to consider those aspects of a literate culture that we take for granted every day. This is not to say that we "literates" lack a thankfulness for our own tradition. On the contrary, I believe it helps illuminate the assumptions which we have come so deeply to expect that they have become part of our daily consciousness, our culture. We don't even think about the implications anymore. Actually, it would be a lie to even use the word "anymore" because we can't even imagine or reflect upon a time when we were not completely surrounded by written words. 

And that's just in the first 15 pages!

Taking a look from outside the frame, we can now begin to dissect the different ways that we as a literate society do something as simple as complete a sentence – now with the backdrop comparison of the oral culture. More specifically, how is memory involved in that process?

Already, I'm trying to find links to my life that could demonstrate this mindset, the simple recognition that spoken words and written words have very different meanings in the society I live in. One very recent anecdote comes from my experience this summer as a door-to-door salesperson. When I knocked on certain doors, their owners would immediately request “to see some literature.” The context of door-to-door sales is obviously important, considering the reputation of salespeople, scams, homeowners’ busyness and disinterest, etc. there is a truth hidden below that layer of context. People wanted to see some proof, or needed reassurance that my company and product were legitimate, and they needed something in writing to satisfy that fear, disbelief, or skepticism. In other cases, they would ask me for a business card. Hah – as if it takes more than a couple dollars at Staples to print out stack of them.

Text somehow substantiate or legitimize the truth to us. We don’t have to rely on any “gut instinct” to decipher the truth. If it’s in writing, well then, I guess it could be true. At least I have her business card so I don’t have to look her in the eye to know if she’s telling the truth.

But I digress. There is a lot more than “truth” to be found in written vs spoken word. Certain human things just do not translate well into text. Inflection, tone, enunciation, and emotion are replaced by punctuation marks and maybe some italics or capital letters. While this offers us the ability to communicate with an infinite audience, it somehow dwindles our expression of the original utterance. There is no way to recreate the entire space and feeling that surrounded an event, but we can attempt to conjure them up with letters and characters so that someone in a different time and space can experience it in some way.

A theme surrounding this topic seems to be that for every advancement in technology, something or someone suffers for it. This comes from the fact that the technology is usually designed to replace something – a function or a previous artifact that was less convenient or efficient – and the old technology is lost in a small (or a very big) way. When literate cultures adopted an alphabet so they could record words, thoughts, speeches, prices, dates, etc... they sacrificed something. I think Ong is trying to get at that, at what that something is.