Is Gen Y the Dumbest Generation?

Mark Bauerlein argues in The Dumbest Generation [Amazon] that Facebook, Twitter, and the internet in general has made Generation Y “uniformed, illiterate, and self absorbed”. Demagogues like him also add impossible to manage and educate to that list. Is it true that Facebook has made Gen Y incapable of focusing at work, that Twitter reveals inability to craft a paragraph, and that Youtube comments illustrate a stark decline in analytical reasoning?  No.  Although I wont go deep into the arguments, we can look at books like like Grown Up Digital [amazon] ($4.5 million dollars of research money).

If anything, Generation X should be worrying about the reverse: that their skills are rapidly becoming antiquated in an age of digital necessity. There are two powers at work here. First, some of the practices Gen Y utilize might be outright better than the Gen X practice. Grown Up Digital cites online collaboration and scrutinization of streaming information as examples. Sure, we might not all need to know everything about your favorite celebrity on a day to day basis. However, look at the case where a Gen Y gets live RSS updates on relevant research papers (e.g. from Arxiv, SSRN, combined with Mendelev). Then that is combined with up-to-the-minute sentiment and opinions off the blogosphere. That can trigger the Gen Y’er to pull up relevant books on the Kindle, and then start an forum or chat based conversation about it. This, all over the course of 15 minutes. We can see how Gen X might potentially become frightfully behind.

The second power at work is the inherent network effects [wiki] generated by these technologies. Print media erodes, the TPS report fades into oblivion, alternative information sources gain in popularity. Even if a blog is inherently less refined when placed in comparison with a Boston Globe article, the blogs may soon win out due to purely market forces. Before long (or already) they will be better for many forms of information.

This is not to say that Gen X practices are to be thrown away en masse. Of course, practices will need to be integrated. Just as those who manage to adopt starfish management within established command and control frameworks will thrive compared to those married to either ideology.  So OK, we need to learn from both the old and the new. So what? Corporations, Political Groups, and Educational Institution are all already working on it. It will be easy to integrate new information-rich pedagogies into existing organizations once the Net-Gen grows older, right?

Wrong.  And this is even more wrong for established western societies like the United States. It may take massive political/shareholder will to affect these sort of fundamental changes from the top down (just look at healthcare technology). In other cases, we may look towards disruptive technologies/processes to foster from the bottom up. In either case, young people will need to take responsibility and ownership over future drivers of their economies.

Think back to that disinterested, uninterested 20-something year old editing her blog at work, making a new YouTube video between projects, and keeping in touch with 50 friends over blogs and AIM when her boss is being a pain. Think about how much positive change that person could affect if her skills were appreciated and she felt like she had more stake in work success. That’s what Gen X should be worrying about.