Boomers Explained: Digital Wisdom

One of the more interesting sources of conflict between Boomers and Millennials and younger involves "Technology".

For starters, the two groups have very different definitions of "Technology".

If you have a conversation about "Technology" with most Boomers, you are likely to hear about nuclear reactors, airplane wings, internal combustion engines, alloys and manufacturing methods.

If you have a conversation about "Technology" with most Millennials and younger, you are likely to only discuss various, highly developed, digital technologies. For the most part, they consider all of the items in the previous paragraph to be "Settled Science" akin to pouring concrete or grading drain-fields to 1" of drop in 100'. BORING!

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Even when we are explicitly discussing "Digital Technology", the two groups often have very different visions of what they are talking about.

A Boomer might be visualizing Excel macros, solver add-ins and statistical tools while the Millennial visualizes "filters" that can be used to manipulate selfies, social media and Discord rings. The Boomer might be thinking about Fortran or P-I-D PLC controllers while the Millennial are thinking about ChatGPT.

"Digital Natives"

What Millennials see when Boomers try to talk about technology. "Just die already, so we can take over."

Millennials and younger tend to be dismissive of Boomers because the are not "Digital Natives".

The origins term "Digital Native" are worth investigating. According to Wikipedia:

The specific terms digital native and digital immigrant were popularized by education consultant Marc Prensky in his 2001 article entitled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, in which he relates the contemporary decline in American education to educators' failure to understand the needs of modern students.

..."the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decade of the 20th century" had changed the way students think and process information, making it difficult for them to excel academically...children raised in a digital, media-saturated world, require a media-rich learning environment to hold their attention, and Prensky dubbed these children "digital natives". 

The idea became popular among educators and parents whose children fell within Prensky's definition of a digital native, and has since been embraced as an effective marketing tool.

If you dissect the Wikipedia entry, the term "Digital Native" is actually grandiose and flattering language to 'splain away the fact that a distressing number of the Millennials and younger have the attention span of gnats.

Apps

Push comes to shove over Boomer reluctance to embrace every new "App". Millennials and younger become VERY frustrated over that reluctance.

Some of Boomer reluctance is humorous. We don't need any more passwords to forget. We have plenty.

A day doesn't go by without some "story" of leaked, digital information.

 

And frankly, Boomers have a better appreciation of the evil that lurks in men's hearts than Millennials. If twenty people have access to some form of data, there is a 50% chance that one of them bootlegged a copy of the data "just in case".*

 

Consider that an AI company that markets to law-enforcement recently signed a deal with Ring to access images in real-time. A person-of-interest image (say a person wearing an orange hat who just robbed a bank) can be tracked from camera-to-camera using just AI image recognition software and pulling real-time images from all cameras within, say, 200 meters of the last verified image.

Not planning on robbing a bank? Who is to say that the touch-screen kiosk at McDeath isn't pulling your finger-prints and communicating your orders with your health insurance company (or the next, nanny-state Administration, or Novo Nordisk)? You know that the bean-counters at McDeath would do it in a New York minute if they could get a penny per transaction.

 

Sometimes the corporate bean-counters step on their Richard. Most blood donors tend to be older with retirees heavily represented in Red Cross donations. Recently, the Red Cross made a big push to become more efficient and to not take "walk-ins" because that "causes" staffing inefficiencies. You can only give blood if you have a reservation and the only way to make a reservation is to have the Red Cross app. That is a classic case of not knowing your "customer"...or supplier, in this case. 

Digital Wisdom

The blow-back on "Digital Native" resulted in the originators attempting to salvage the narrative with the idea of "Digital Wisdom". It never gained traction. The appeal of being able to dismiss old people as "stupid and doomed" was just too appealing to many people born after 1980.

Wisdom is timeless. Intelligence is perishable. It is "wisdom" to know that some, hopefully small percentage, of men are evil.

Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is "doing the right things".

As we age, we gravitate toward valuing "wisdom" over "intelligence" and valuing "effectiveness" over "efficiency". 

*A number I pulled out of the air based on when I was a supervisor. 19-out-of-20 people had a good grasp of how to work smoothly in groups. 1-in-20 were wired differently and were drama-driven or enjoyed making other people miserable.