www.nickhodge.com

Gen­er­a­tion X, the gen­er­a­tion I am a part of, grew up in a world of immin­ent nuc­lear dis­aster and high unemployment.

The jobs we wanted were filled with the vast hordes of baby­boomers: still in the work­force, pro­tec­ted by strict employ­ment laws.

Gen­er­a­tion Y, the topic of many ‘social net­work­ing’ [eye­balls, and there­fore marketing-types] are enter­ing a world were jobs are more plen­ti­ful; and will con­tinue to choose their own jobs.

A down­side is a tax bur­den they will have keep­ing the older generation

There are many social impacts with these changes.

One con­cern us Gen­er­a­tion Xers have with online per­so­nas and pro­files is the impact of poten­tial neg­at­ive pic­tures and posts being used by poten­tial employ­ers. In the future, the power will lie in the hands of the employees.

It has been an excel­lent week for the ABC. The Curtin “docu-drama” gave a por­trait of a man of his time: Prime Min­is­ter John Curtin dur­ing the 1941 through 1942.

Last night, Jeff McMul­lan did a stand­ard “journ­al­istic show” wrapped as debate on new tech­no­lo­gies, and the impact on com­munity on “Dif­fer­ence of Opin­ion: Grow­ing Up in the Digital Age”. Cap­tured inthe fresh­ness of the moment, this Pod­cast cap­tured by Chris Saad of Particls. Dis­cus­sion boards on the topic are inter­est­ing to read.

Another essence is that people’s online and digital life is real. It is a part of generation-y iden­tity. The base-level mor­als and eth­ics still apply; and prob­ably more so in a world that is flat and always on.

• Life in Chip­pend­ale, Steven Noble.
• Roy Porter: Social His­tory of London
• Eng­lish: defin­i­tion of vir­tual. Is vir­tual a pejor­at­ive? Maybe my lan­guage is a little too 1990’s

edit title for cor­rect­ness and short­ness. 9:30pm

Yes, I work for Microsoft. Let’s get that out of the way. The above link will find me, but please don’t send me OEM offers.

Every day I get spam’d to buy OEM Microsoft and Adobe products. For prices ran­ging from US$10 to US$175, and I can get Office or Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite on some el-cheapo burnt CD from a fly-by night dodgy-brothers organ­isa­tion based in a coun­try that doesn’t exist in my school atlas. Thank­fully, gmail and the cor­por­ate spam fil­ters grab these bogus OEM offers and push the bits into email limbo. As my dad said, any­thing too cheap is always too good to be true.

As an Aus­trali­an Uni­ver­sity Stu­dent, would you buy Microsoft Office 2007 Ulti­mate for a year’s use at AU$25? Or the license for life for AU$75?

This is a brave effort by my cur­rent employer. Not just for the pri­cing and deliv­ery method: but  more for the reac­tion of stu­dents see­ing Office at price that has been pol­lut­ing the email sys­tem for the last 2 years. Stu­dents, a major­ity being some of the first of the Generation-Yers, have pretty keen senses of what is legit and what is not. 

Will emails flow through their human spam filters?

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.