The Digital Divide: Writings for and Against Facebook, Youtube, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking

by Mark Bauerlein

  Intel gets it. Many of its employees telework, while other staffers take advantage of flextime, compressed workweeks, part-time hours, and job shares. All the company’s major work sites offer employees great amenities, such as fitness centers, locker rooms, basketball and volleyball courts, dry cleaning, sundries, and food court–style cafes with menus that change daily.3 Studies repeatedly show that perks such as those offered by Intel boost employee satisfaction and performance.4

  So does Google. Its engineers are asked to spend 20 percent of their workplace time on projects that are of personal interest to them. Google says it has a strong business case for making such an offer. If Google’s employees are the best and brightest available—and Google believes they are—then whatever piques their personal interest could open new avenues of business for the company.

  While flexible work hours and workplace amenities are routine practice at many high-tech firms, the flexible workplace philosophy is making inroads in other sectors. Best Buy, America’s leading electronics retailer, is trying to revamp its corporate culture to make its workplace more appealing to young employees. The endeavor, called ROWE, for results-only work environment, lets corporate employees do their work anytime, anywhere, as long as they get their work done. “This is like TiVo for your work,” says the program’s cofounder, Jody Thompson.5 By June of 2008, 3,200 of Best Buy’s 4,000 corporate staffers are participating in the ROWE program. The company plans to introduce the program into its stores, something no retailer has tried before.6

  There are even signs that more Net Geners will seek to own their own business, especially after they worked for a traditional bureaucratic company for a while. The appeal is having more creative control, more freedom, and no boss to answer to. In recent years, YouTube, Facebook, and Digg have emerged as outstandingly successful examples of organizations started by individuals under the age of twenty-five. Such stories inspire other youthful entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams.

  Young people insist on freedom of choice. It’s a basic feature of their media diet. Instead of listening to the top ten hits on the radio, Net Geners compose iPod playlists of thousands of songs chosen from the millions of tunes available. So when they go shopping, they assume they’ll have a world of choice. Curious whether the African Pygmy hedgehog makes a good pet for a pre-teen? Google offers more than 25,000 links to “African Pygmy Hedgehog” to help the Net Gener decide. Interested in buying a book? Amazon offers millions of choices. Search for a digital camera on Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine, and more than 900,000 pages appear. The number is even greater in Asia, which has far more choice in consumer electronics than North America.

  Baby boomers often find variety burdensome, but the Net Geners love it. When faced with thousands of choices, they show no signs of anxiety, from what we could see in our online survey of 1,750 North American kids. Only 13 percent strongly agree with the statement “There is so much to choose from that when I buy something, I tend to wonder if I have made the right decision.”

  Typical Net Gen shoppers know what they are going to buy before they leave the house. They’ve already checked out all the choices online, and they are well informed and confident in their decisions—83 percent say they usually know what they want before they go to buy a product.7 With the proliferation of media, sales channels, product types, and brands, Net Geners use digital technologies to cut through the clutter and find the product that fits their needs. And if it turns out to be the wrong choice, Net Geners want to be able to change their mind. They are attracted to companies that make it easy to exchange the product for something different or get their money back.

  The search for freedom is transforming education as well. At their fingertips they have access to much of the world’s knowledge. Learning for them should take place where and when they want it. So attending a lecture at a specific time and place, given by a mediocre professor in a room where they are passive recipients, seems oddly old-fashioned, if not completely inappropriate. The same is true for politics. They have grown up with choice. Will a model of democracy that gives them only two choices and relegates them, between elections, to four years of listening to politicians endlessly repeating the same speeches actually meet their needs?

  >>> customization

  Last year, someone sent me an iTouch PDA. It was sitting in a box on my desk at home when Niki and her boyfriend spied it. They were astonished I hadn’t opened it up, so Moritz opened the box, and then hacked into the iTouch so he could give it some special features—lots of widgets, some of my favorite movies, like The Departed, plus some music from my computer, including a couple of great tunes pounded out by my band, Men In Suits, with Niki singing lead vocals and me on the keyboard. They kindly left the horrid PDA on my desk with a little note. It sat there for months, until someone took it away. It’s not that I wasn’t grateful. I just wanted the PDA to work. I didn’t need it to work for me. That’s the difference between me and the Net Gen.

  As a typical boomer, I took what I got and hoped it would work. Net Geners get something and customize it to make it theirs. This is the generation that has grown up with personalized mobile phones, TiVo, Slingbox, and podcasts. They’ve grown up getting what they want, when they want it, and where, and they make it fit their personal needs and desires.

  Half of them tell us they modify products to reflect who they are.8 Niki, for example, has a phone with white-and-orange swirly “wallpaper” on the screen, plus a ringtone that sings out a techno version of “Taking Care of Business.”

  My son Alex has a special mouse for his laptop. Now, most of us have a mouse with two or three buttons. Alex has five. “My mouse is called the Mighty Mouse,” he tells me. “Each of those buttons does a separate thing, according to my interests and what I need to use it for. My left button clicks on something. The right button opens up a window, just like a regular one. The middle button is a track wheel, so if I’m on a Web page or a window in my operating system I can scroll 360 degrees. On the side, if I click on one button every single window that’s open on my computer will shrink down so I can choose individually. On the other side is a button that opens up my dashboard, basically, which shows me different widgets—a news widget, a wild widget, a sports widget, a weather widget, a time zone widget, and a widget that monitors the health and productivity of my computer.” See what I mean? “It’s funny,” Alex notes. “I’m actually in the middle to the low end of technological advancement in my peer group.”

  Today, the “timer” car-customization industry, largely fueled by Net Geners, is worth more than $3 billion in North America. The trend snuck in under the radar of the big auto companies. At least one auto company, Toyota, is trying to pounce on it by introducing the Scion niche brand back in 2003. Company research shows owners spend $1,000–$3,000 on customization and accessories, from paint jobs to XM satellite radios with Bazooka subwoofers. These are kids in their twenties, and they “have changed every category they have touched so far,” says Jim Farley, VP of Scion. “It’s the most diverse generation ever seen.” 9

  Our research at nGenera also shows that the potential to personalize a product is important to the Net Generation, even if the individual decides not to make any changes. The desire is about personalizing and accessorizing—it is more aesthetic than functional. Personalized online space is now almost obligatory; witness the popularity of sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Net Geners also customize their media. Two-thirds of early technology adopters say they watch their favorite TV shows when they want to rather than at the time of broadcast. With YouTube, television networks run the risk of becoming quaint relics. The industry will still produce programming, but where and when the programming is watched will be up to the viewer.

  At work, the Net Geners will want to customize their jobs. In our online survey of 1,750 kids in North America, more than half of Net Geners said they liked working offsite.10 They enjoyed the change of scenery, they said, and their ability to work outside the office s
howed their employer they could be trusted to get the job done. They may even want to customize their job descriptions, although they still welcome some structure and want to know what is expected of them. Ideally, companies will replace job descriptions with work goals, and give Net Geners the tools, latitude, and guidance to get the job done. They may not do it on day one, though. “Demanding to customize a job description is a bit brash if you’ve only just started a job,” Alex told me. “But after a while, I think it’s fine to make suggestions on how the job could be changed or improved.”

  >>> scrutiny

  On April Fools’ Day 2005, I decided to play a bit of a gag on my employees and associates. I asked my executive assistant to send them the following e-mail:

  Through Don’s connections at the World Economic Forum, Angelina Jolie (she’s an actress who has become involved in social responsibility), who attended the last Forum meetings, is interested in Don’s work and wants to come to Toronto for a meeting to discuss transparency in the global economy.

  This has been arranged for Thursday, May 26th.

  Don will be having a private lunch with her and will come to the office afterwards so she can meet others here and continue the discussions. The day will end with a cocktail party at Verity.

  She’ll bring some of her friends.

  Please confirm your attendance.

  Thanks,

  Antoinette

  In my dreams. Anyway, not a single young member of my staff fell for the joke. I would get responses like “Nice try” and “You and Angelina. Right.”

  However, associates my age reacted in a completely different manner. They were falling over themselves to join the afternoon discussions and attend the cocktail party. I believe the expression is they fell for it hook, line, and ink. And they were not happy to find out that Angelina was not going to appear.

  Net Geners are the new scrutinizers. Given the large number of information sources on the Web, not to mention unreliable information—spam, phishers, inaccuracies, hoaxes, scams, and misrepresentations—today’s youth have the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. They appear to have high awareness about the world around them and want to know more about what is happening. They use digital technologies to find out what’s really going on. Imagine if Orson Welles had directed the radio version of War of the Worlds today, instead of in 1938, when it caused widespread panic as many listeners believed that Martians had actually landed. In a couple of clicks, Net Geners would figure out it was a play, not a news broadcast. No one would have had to flee their homes!

  The Net Generation knows to be skeptical whenever they’re online.11 When baby boomers were young, a picture was a picture; it documented reality. Not so today. “Trust but verify” would be an apt motto for today’s youth. They accept few claims at face value. No wonder the 74-second “Evolution” video was such a big hit when it was posted on YouTube in October 2006. The video showed an ordinary attractive girl—the director’s girlfriend, in fact—being transformed into a billboard model—with considerable help from Photoshop, which lengthened her neck, reshaped her head, and widened her eyes. You could see, before your very eyes, how fake the image of beauty is in magazines and billboards. The video was made for Dove soap by a young Australian working for the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency in Toronto. It instantly struck a chord among Net Geners worldwide. Unilever, the British conglomerate that owns Dove, estimates it was seen by at least 18.5 million people worldwide on the Net,12 not including how many saw it on TV, where it was prominently featured on morning talk shows. Not bad for a video that cost only $135,000 to make.

  But the story didn’t end so well for Dove’s parent Unilever. Very quickly, some young consumers took note that Unilever was also the maker of Axe, a men’s cologne with a campaign of ads featuring highly sexual and exploitative photos of women. The theme was that if you bought Axe, women would be dying to strip and submit to you. As fast as you can say “mockumentary,” videos began appearing on YouTube pointing out the contradiction. One, “A message from Unilever, the makers of Axe and Dove,” ends with the tagline “Tell your daughters before Unilever gets to them.”

  For anyone wanting to reach this age group, the best strategy is candor. They should provide Net Geners with ample product information that is easy to access. The more they have scrutinized a product, the better they feel about purchases, especially ones requiring a large financial or emotional investment. Boomers marvel at the consumer research available online; Net Geners expect it. When they go shopping, almost two-thirds of Net Geners tell us, they search for information about products that interest them before they buy.13 They compare and contrast product information, online, and look for the cheapest price without sacrificing value. They read blogs, forums, and reviews. They’re skeptical about online reviews. Instead, they consult their friends. They can be very picky. Our survey found that 69 percent of the “Bleeding Edge” (first adopters) said they “wouldn’t buy a product unless it has the exact features I want.” Only 46 percent of Luddites (technophobes) felt that way.14 It’s easy to be a smart shopper in the digital world, and it’s about to get easier. As Niki tells me, “You’ll be able to scan the bar code of a product on the store shelf and up will pop information on what the product costs at other stores.” Bar codes that can hold that amount of information are already registered with the patent office.15 It’s only a matter of time.

  Since companies are increasingly naked, they better be buff.16 Corporate strategies should be built on good products, good prices, and good values. The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies website is ideally suited to the Net Generation. It provides potential customers with an online insurance quote and calculates how much the company’s competitors would charge for the same package. Progressive believes it offers the best value in most cases, and backs its beliefs with facts.

  Companies should expect employee scrutiny. Two-thirds of the Bleeding Edge say that they’ve searched a great deal for online information about the organization they are currently working for or about people working in their organization. Sixty percent of the same subgroup say they would thoroughly research an employer before accepting a job offer. Respondents say they want to prepare for a job interview, learn about corporate culture, and ensure that the company and job fit their needs and desired lifestyle.

  Scrutiny, as we have seen, can go the other way, too. Many Net Geners still don’t realize that the private information they disclose on social networking sites like Facebook may come back to bite them when they’re applying for a big job or public office.

  >>> integrity

  Recently, Niki received an alarming message from one of her high school friends. The young woman, who was volunteering in Ecuador, reported that she had seen the horrible conditions of people working in the fields of roses—the dreadful chemicals sprayed on the flowers, the long hours, the child labor. Niki instantly sent the message to all her friends on her Facebook network. Now, whenever she buys roses, Niki asks questions about where they come from. She won’t buy flowers from a company that sprays poisonous chemicals on plants that children pick. It’s a small, but telling, example of the values Niki shares with her generation.

  The stereotype that this generation doesn’t give a damn is not supported by the facts. Net Geners care about integrity—being honest, considerate, transparent, and abiding by their commitments. This is also a generation with profound tolerance. Alex had an experience that drove this home for me. I asked him to describe it.

  My junior year, I decided to study abroad in London, England. I will always remember what one of my fellow students said the very first day. Before we began, he stood up in front of an auditorium of 250 students, faculty, and program coordinators and made this announcement:

  “Hi everyone, my name is Steve, I am from St. Louis, Missouri, and, like the rest of you, I am really excited about being in London. But perhaps unlike the rest of you, I have Tourette syndrome. So if you think you hear a donkey or a sheep in the ba
ck of the classroom, don’t hide your lunches because it is just me. Sometimes I can’t help making animal noises. Also, don’t be distracted if you hear any swear words or grunting either, because that’s me too. Thanks for hearing me out.”

  With that, most people in the class just shrugged their shoulders and began making small talk with the people around them. Sure enough, the head of the program was barely able to get out a “Welcome to London” before Steve started BAAAAing away. At first, some people did seem distracted. I personally was fascinated with him, both for his peculiar problem, and with his ballsy move at the beginning of class. I was impressed with his confidence and how honest and direct he could be about his illness, and I think everyone else was too. After a couple of minutes, it was like his illness wasn’t even there (even though his grunting and cursing still was).

  Alex’s story made me flash back to when I was a kid. There would have been no student in my class with Tourette’s syndrome. More likely, he would have never made it to any university, or worse, would have been locked up in a mental institution. If he had gotten into our class, how would we have reacted to such a seemingly bizarre thing? Would we even have known about psychiatric conditions like this? Would we have just shrugged it off as Alex and his 250 classmates did? Would we have had such tolerance for diversity and such instant compassion for someone with an illness like this? Or would the stigma of mental illness have gotten the better of us? And would we have had Alex’s admiration for the courage and determination his fellow students showed?

  It’s not surprising that Net Geners display such tolerance, and even wisdom, compared with previous generations. They have been exposed to a ton of scientific, medical, and other pertinent information that wasn’t available to their parents. The world around them has changed, too. So it’s not surprising that they care about honesty. Among other things, they have seen the giants of corporate corruption, the CEOs of Enron and other major companies, being led away in handcuffs, convicted, and sent to jail. It’s far easier for Net Geners than it was for boomers to tell whether a company president is doing one thing and saying another. They can use the Internet to find out, and then use social communities like Facebook to tell all their friends.