By Teresa A. Martin
It is always interesting to me how certain ideas seem to cluster. For example, in the past week I’ve had multiple conversations – unrelated to each other – with very different groups of people about the same topic. I wasn’t leading these conversations, I was just following along for the ride and there we were again, taking about the way the under-18 year old generation (is that Gen Y, Gen Z?) uses information and communications.
I guess we’re all looking around during this time of year, when a new crop of high school students graduates. And maybe we’re all feeling a year older and thus eyeing ‘the kids’ a bit more. But I suspect that is just part of the answer.
Something has really shifted in the past couple of years and I think we’re now on the other side of the fence in the change.
For decades, various theorists and technologists have talked about a non-linear world -- today’s high school graduates not only live in a non-linear world, they are also non-linear actors.
This is a pretty fundamental shift. Instead of going from right to left in logical order, Gen Z’s information flows from right to left to up to down to yesterday to tomorrow to Japan to Antarctica to the bottom of the next page.
It isn’t just multidirectional, it is multi-dimensional and multi-tasking.
And it is very different for the straightforward page world we know and love.
The notion of time and space flows differently in the non-linear world. Lots of us have thought about information and communication being something like a river that flows forward with one rise leading to the next, and we are floating on an inner tube on the surface. But in the non-linear world, instead of flowing atop the river you are inside it, with sub currents sometime flowing backwards, with un-suspected rocks and debris reshaping the path, and with our underwater tools giving us the power to reshape the direction or create our own tributary.
In a world where podcasts are just the latest form of self-media control, where play lists are in hands of the listener, where area codes no longer denote geography but might instead reference a fondness for memory or a place or a way to express one’s personal affiliation, is it any wonder information and communications are forever changed?
Dianne Durkin, CCTC speaker in May, said, "Here they come, the members of the 14th American generation. They’re self-confident and optimistic, independent and goal-oriented, and masters of the Internet and the PC."
We trained our kids to ask question, to think, to query, she said. And now that they are the emerging generation, we’re seeing what that training has created.
I’d add that we’re seeing broad generational traits coupled with pervasive digital data – and together that creates a whole new non-linear way of interacting with the world.
Gen-Z knows that it can control the river, its direction, and their interaction with it. They aren’t just along for the ride. The rest of us don’t quite believe that.
Last fall, a presentation at Purdue University on computational learning looked at Gen Z and said “Learning experiences of the future will be multi-sensory, engage technologies and significant computational power continuously and invisibly, and will be completely engaging. The future of learning will incorporate science, technology, engineering and mathematics concepts into the students' everyday life seamlessly.”
That’s multi-mode, multi-dimensional, multi-directional, and decidedly non-linear.
No, we aren’t crazy when we say that we can’t understand how someone can listen to an iPod, talk on the cell, IM in five different windows across three different time zones and two countries, and search the web for movie reviews. We can’t understand it. We haven’t been wired that way.
But this didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s all part of a continuum that started a half century ago. Gen Z is the one who jumped over the fence with it, but bit but bit we’ve been leading up to this.
We transmitted voice over long distances, we let multiple people talk together at the same time, we added moving images in the form of television and video into the mix, we went from live to recorded to radio broadcast music,
We developed ways to record and replace all these types of information.
Then, we turned this pastiche from analog to digital and speeded up the process and flexibility.
It all came together in the generation that we’ve also trained to have the hubris to believe they can control it all.
Researchers say that it takes three generations for technology to come into its own. One generation invents it, another uses it, and the third is born into it. And it’s that third generation that recreates the world with it too.
Maybe that’s a little scary, but then isn’t every new year of graduates a little scary? Happy June. Welcome to the non-linear world.
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