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What are post-millennial expectations?

OK. I am hearing this term at school and teacher-librarian conferences – POST MILLENNIALS. These K-12 folks are already hitting these people’s lives. Arrghhhh. Another demographic!
Anyway, by some theories the generation of the Great Depression were formed by the world they lived in, the war generation (WW2) were influenced greatly by their world, and the Sixties period of more education and prosperity created a Boomer bulge. The GenX’ers grew up as the first generation that always had computing, and the Millennials always had the web. Does the environment shape generations? What about the post-Millennials?
What if you’ve never known a world without:
The Facebook
MySpace
IM and Texting
Online Gaming
TiVo
Meebo or Trillian
Flickr
Blogging
Netflix
Blinkx
Podcasts
MP3’s
Cel phones
Smartphones
Viral video
School websites
Online application forms
Txt voting for American Idol
and the rest.
How does that shape your generation?
We have to keep an eye on our Millennials for most 5 year strategic plans. We better keep an eye on these post-Millennials for anything we’re creating for kids and teens…
Hmmmmm.
Stephen

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Posted on: February 23, 2006, 4:37 pm Category: Uncategorized

One Response

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  1. Andrew Hubbertz said

    The speed of social and technological change is relative and tends to be uneven. My grandmother was born in 1880. Arguably, she witnessed more change in her first thirty years than I did in mine (1946-76). For her, that included, beside many of the things on your list, automobiles, elevators (making tall buildings possible), agricultural technology (reducing the number of people needed on farms), and public health (reducing in particular water-borne disease). In my own first 30 years, I witnessed nuclear energy and nuclear proliferation, space travel, television and of course computers. Important all, but for most people these were in the background of their lives. (TV is the notable exception.)
    The last 15 years have felt different. Although the notable changes lie within a narrow band of information technologies, their impact is ubiquitous. Will this pace continue and accelorate, or will it plateau for a period? I certainly don’t know. But when it comes to planning for the future, my chief concern is that the future will have access to _us_, that our digital memory will not be lost. Fortunately, there has been huge progress within the last five years or so.