Microsoft Office

From the Office Hours Blog: Next time you’re in a meeting listening to a manager who looks younger than your cat detail your role in your company’s Social Media Future (aka Web 2.0), consider this: Never before has the workforce spanned such a crazy range of technological backgrounds. However you draw the lines, those of us who generate paychecks break into distinctly different groups depending on when we grew up:

* Before computers Mimeographed homework assignments. Account ledgers. Manual typewriters. Steno pools. Back when “cc” meant actual carbon copies and paper reigned.
* Before PCs Humming mainframe systems the size of Cadillacs, rack after rack of data stored on spools of tape, punch cards by the fistful, zigzag paper printouts.
* Before the internet Snail mail was the only kind, newspapers thrived, and hard-bound encyclopedias hogged library shelves (until Encarta came along — remember Encarta?)
* Before social media Before MySpace and Facebook, Twitter, Digg, RSS feeds, blogs, and wikis. Friends were almost always people you actually, like, knew.
* Now The first generation for whom text messaging is almost as natural as speaking, and to whom online privacy matters less than constant presence in a plugged-in world.

And guess what? That last group is the only one that’s growing.

Swimmers and fish
Those of us in the “Before” groups may be jumping into the Social Media environment as fast as we can. But the world of tweeting, texting, friending, digging, and blogging is not our native element.

We’re like swimmers. Not nearly of Olympic champion Michael Phelps’ caliber, but capable of learning to cover the distance we need to, charmed by certain entertainments along the way (lunchtime YouTube, anyone?) But there are swimmers, there are excellent swimmers, and then there are fish. Vast numbers of folks now coming of age — the generation that John Palfrey calls “digital natives” in Born Digital — are already so comfortable in the waters of social media that they might as well sprout gills.

Demographic distinctions are more than handy categories. Web 2.0 — the first great wave of social media — is fundamentally retooling how we work, play, connect, and, perhaps quite literally, think. Behavioral scientists and worried educators are scrutinizing our young colleagues-to-be for signs of lopsided intellectual development, social problems, attention shortfalls, etc.. But these same young people also have a facility with virtual communication in multiple media that borders on creative genius.