Andrea DiMaio

There is a widely held belief that anything tagged “2.0” – such as web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, government 2.0 – resonates almost naturally with younger generations, those who were born with computers, who grew up with the Internet and really “get” everything social, from illegal download and sharing to arranging a party or solving problems at school or at work.

We, the digital immigrants, struggle to catch up with them, to understand their thought process, to show that we are cool too. This is quite evident even in government. Most of the rising stars in different government organizations are folks in their early thirties or late twenties, who seem to have energized government programs and processes, who run at a speed which is much higher than what we have ever seen before. I guess this must look like a renaissance on steroids, with the equivalent of poets, painters and other artists rocking the medieval tradition, changing the landscape of buildings, ceremony, theatrical shows.

It’s all about Facebook and Twitter and FourSquare and Drupal and Google. Those among us who decided to pursue computer science as a discipline after reading the historical issue of Science back in 1978 about microcomputers, do not recognize the current technology user landscape. Some of us still remember punched cards, or big tapes or 8 inch floppy disks, as well as our love for hardware like PDP 11 or VAX or our awe for the first personal computer, without any hard disk in it. Now we hold iPads or smartphones having several thousand times the memory and computing power of those early PCs, weighing a hundred times less. And all these devices are connected today at 4 to 20 Mbps and more, while we were still dialing up at 1200 bps or using dedicated lines very judiciously given how expensive they were.

Over the last couple of years, both technologists and users with grey hairs have been sidelined by a new generation of rampant social networking, web 2.0 folks.

Last Monday, though, president Obama, who has been instrumental to this wave of techno-enthusiasm in government both in the US and elsewhere, gave us hope with a speech to students in Virginia where he said that with consumer devices like iPods and Playstations “information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation”.

I am a father, married to a high school teacher, and both of us see how true this can be with kids at all ages, and how inadequate current curricula are to meet their changing expectations and behaviors.

Obama’s statement made me think about the difference between us (the immigrants) and them (the natives). Are they really better off by mastering new social consumer technologies? Is their instant ability to socialize problems and solutions, to share sentiments and ideas, to cooperate while competing going to make us and our experience as obsolete as it looks like?

I have a different view. Our training, both in school and at work, has been based on scarcity of resources. The books in the library, the teacher, our nerdy classmate who had already done the assignment, a computer with kilobytes rather than gigabytes of memory, an awful trip by bus to a historical town rather than browsing it with Google Maps and Streetview, a long queue in front of a museum rather than a quick check on Flickr Commons. For how fortunate baby boomers have been with respect to their ancestors (we went through an unprecedented growth period, on average we all became richer and better educated than our parents), we have learned one of the basic skills, which is how to deal with limited resources.

Look at your kids now or at your younger colleagues, those who are said won’t join the workplace if they don’t get the tools and the environment they are used to. They are spoiled with abundance of resources (bandwidth, information, attention to their needs), and in many cases we spoiled them.

The common wisdom says that they are better at socializing and crowdsourcing, but are they? Do they gather their collective intelligence when they realize that they cannot solve problems alone, or do they just do so, outsourcing their individual efforts to the power of the collective, living the dream of a world where nobody is really accountable because everybody else is?

I think that we have been celebrating and cocooning digital natives for too long. What lies ahead of us are very uncertain times, where the ability, willingness and courage to tackle problems individually is as important as the ability to engage others (the “collective”).

I look at kids who complain about having only a 4 Mps Internet access or about having an 8 rather than 32 Gb iPhones, who can do their home assignments by effortlessly accessing information from the Internet without even processing it, who measure their coolness not by what they know but by how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers they have.

I wonder how this generation will be able to cope with the extraordinary problems of scarcity of resources (oil, water, food) that we are going to leave to them as our legacy. And I feel that only blending our ability to master scarce resources and find individual solutions with their ability to socialize and crowdsource will move us all forward. But what I do not see is how that balance is being determined, developed or enforced from when they are in school to when they join the workforce and beyond.

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Category: web 2.0 in government     Tags: digital society

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