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There will be many Aus­tralian sharpie Baby Boomers very quiet today. The hero of loud, Aus­tralian Rock and Roll, Billy Thorpe, died at 60 of a heart attack over night.

I won­der if in this elec­tion year, the pol­lies will pull a State Funeral. I hope so, as the impact his music had on that gen­er­a­tion sur­passes many who get a State funeral.

If you are not a par­ent or teacher with chil­dren between the ages of 5–15, you might want to read some­thing else. I know how it gets when people talk about kids.

If you are a teacher or par­ent, wel­come to the new inter­net gen­er­a­tion gap.

An art­icle pub­lished in the New York magazine, Say Everything, details the online lives of Gen­er­a­tion Y. The art­icle takes a moralistic-angle to cre­ate a story; and asserts that the gen­er­a­tion gap is greater now than when Elvis, Cliff Richard and The Beatles rock-and/or-roll per­ver­ted the lives of Generation-X’s par­ents in the 1950s/1960s.

It’s more than mor­als. It is about how the world is at the pivot point of a dra­matic change.

This quo­ta­tion from Clay Shirky sum­mar­ised where we are at:

“Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in some­thing old people are not allowed to, it makes us bit­ter. What did we have? The mall and the park­ing lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.”

The moral side is important,Look at your internet-connected kids: what are they doing, right now?

As a com­par­ison, I took a photo of Liam over the week­end that illus­trated this major gap:

1. Liam has both MacOS X Tiger and Microsoft Win­dows XP run­ning, and is using both flu­ently. Vista will not be installed until he’s backed-up his PC, and he’s sure his games work.
2. MSN Mes­sen­ger is his con­nec­tion to the out­side world: rarely will one of his friends call on the phone; but I am sure he com­mu­nic­ates more widely than I at the same age. His peers are world-wide, not local.
3. There is a Fire­fox ses­sion run­ning on the Mac with his favour­ite web sites (for­ums, not blogs) going. He says that he’s had a Fire­fox browser win­dow run­ning for 2 weeks, solid. 
4. On the Win­dows box, he is cre­at­ing an Adobe Premiere video clip (adding titling+encoding). Not only con­sum­ing con­tent; he is act­ively adding bits to the world. The video comes from cap­tur­ing an anim­a­tion cre­ated using Garry’s Mod for Half-Life 2.
5. He is listen­ing to ABC’s Triple-J not via radio, but via Internode’s stream.
6. Liam watches less broad­cast TV than Avril and I. Way less. Yet his know­ledge of what is cur­rent and news­worthy is no dif­fer­ent. There  is no man­u­fac­tured scarcity (either in time, or in phys­ical atoms)
7. Wiki­pe­dia answers everything.

Hyper-connected & digitally-creative.

Com­pare this to your world.

Mak­ing a ‘social net­work­ing’ plat­form that assumes you are con­nec­ted and are writ­ing, not just read­ing from the web: that’s next. THe next gen­er­a­tion is cre­at­ing these tools as the Baby boomers and Generation-X keeps look­ing at its col­lect­ive navel.

Talk­ing to the great Michael Stod­dart (Stod) around the pro­ver­bial water cooler, he stated that under-25’s don’t learn the same way as us Generation-X and cusp-Baby Boomers.

Rather than learn by rote the ins-and-outs of a “new thing”, the Generation-Y’s remem­ber the tags and “where to access” the inform­a­tion — know­ing that if they ever need the inform­a­tion in the future, they’ll use the “tags” to grab the info.

Also, Generation-Y are exper­i­enced with the media-savvy breadth of info, and know how to “fil­ter” out the noise.

Last week, Uncle Mike asked about my “take” on tags.

Now I get it — “tags” are a memory access method, a digital mne­monic.

Rote learn­ing just doesn’t work in a stream-of-media world.

I’d love to get into the under­stand­ing of Learn­ing; time doesn’t per­mit so I’ll tag it, and move on.