The next generation

The other day I saw a presentation about designing things for today's youth market – "Generation Y" – which got me thinking what the traits of my daughter's generation will be like?

I grew up in the US squarely in Generation X. The aimless slackers from the 80s built a future for ourselves in the Internet in the 90s. We had the first taste of what the future would be like. It wasn't flying cars and jetpacks. It was instant communication with everyone you know, all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips, and your brain half-delegated into the cloud, accessible wherever and whenever you wanted.

Generation Y grew up with the web already in place, but missing that overall sense of no future gotten by growing up under Reagan or Thatcher. They seem to have much more sense of entitlement. Not than Gen X doesn't have that too — not everyone my age grew up expecting to live in Brazil, Delicatessen or Clerks. But the sense of why can't I have nice stuff? seems pretty strong in today's pop culture.

The meeting of Gen Y's instant gratification with the smartphonification of the internet is the generational change that even the most hypersocial Gen Xer has trouble keeping up with. Where Gen X tried to change the world with technology, Gen Y seems to be building a place for making money and getting nice things, a la App stores and Kickstarter.

So with Generation Y being always on, always connected and comfortable living in public, what's Generation Z going to be like? How are they going to think? What are they going to build that's going be so different that I can't imagine it?

What happens when all you've ever known is that you can hear any song, watch any movie, know any fact, find any recipe, read any book, take any class, at any time with no effort? Do you get lazy with too many choices? Will misinformation drown out the real media and real facts (Are you sure Mark Twain didn't write Tale of Two Cities? My online comp lit class covered him during the Naturalism movement.)

How much effort we spent finding that hidden gem of a song/book/movie/whatever was a blessing for our generation as well as a tragedy. They were hard to find, but once we got it, we really appreciated it. When we got our hands on that album we'd been hunting for ages, we listened to it over and over until we could recite the whole thing end-to-end in our sleep. And there was that movie we finally saw at 35 that would have changed our lives if we saw it when it came out when we were 17.

Will Gen Z be better off having everything at their fingertips? Never missing out on that lost opportunity? Or will they be so blasé about it that they never bother to watch anything more than once, if even that? Will anything have the chance to really impact or will it just be one more byte in the feed?

I focus on this because it's the most obvious trend I can see coming to a point in the next decade or so. There's lots of other technological things I can see coming, but social trends they usher in are much harder to predict. I've always been a little ahead of the game on using internet for communication (I was researching the mobile computing and social networking back in 1995), so I'd like to think I can at least have a chance of getting in the head of my daughter's generation on that front.

But will the mobile internet still be the defining factor on her generation? There are so many things that we appear to be on the crux of. Climate change, alternative energy, bio and nano tech, air travel, economic/political turmoil… All of those are potential game changers. It's hard to picture what could happen, let alone how it's going to affect culture.