How the Generations use social media
Posted: June 2, 2011 Filed under: Social Media 1 Comment »
How do various generations use social media and what’s the impact of their understanding and usage in the workplace? Here’s one perspective from Cisco’s Ayelet Baron in this interesting post from a few months ago. I’m guessing it was written from a millennial’s perspective, so I thought I’d add my boomer thoughts to it, because as Ayelet points out, different generations have different perspectives.
First, I think that our definition of what a generation is has changed over the past few years – it used to be the time between having children and then the children having children - about twenty-five to thirty years. Now generations seems to refer to groups of people born in the same decade who share similar perceived “cultural” experiences such as Generation X born in the 70′s, Gen Y for the 80′s and millennial or Gen I (for Internet) for the newest group born around the arrival of the Internet. I think this cultural generations concept was created by the media as a convenient way to lump groups of people together as generalizations, and it has caught on widely now and become part of our social conversation.
One point of disagreement I have with the premise of the blog is that this is the first time in history that five generations have worked together in the same workplace. This is a misconception, if you think about farmers, family businesses, manufacturing where multiple generations have worked together on the same factory floor, coal miners etc., working together has until recently been the norm and not the exception.
Where I do agree with this blog though is in the different approaches different age groups take towards social media. I think it is true that the boomer crowd see social media as tools and that younger people see it as an extension of themselves. For boomers, social media is a radical departure from the way we’ve always worked, and it can be perceived as frivolous and trivial if used to discuss lunch or the best caffee latte or dangerous if used the wrong way.
I do take exception to the notion that boomers are all about propriety and living offline though-propriety implies acceptance of convention which I don’t think describes the children of the 60′s well. I think us old folks do have a measure of respect for those around us and tend not to want to offend, probably because our livelihoods, families and mortgages were dependent on maintaining good relationships with employers who had some degree of authority over us. With the increase of independent mobile workers who have sought after skills and knowledge, the more formal relationship is diminishing and that is a good thing.
I agree that the tools that used to be provided exclusively by employers are now open to everyone and it is great to be able to take advantage of so many alternatives instead of being tied down to whatever one’s employer mandated. Of course, this also feeds into the independence and mobility of workers which is a huge advantage for the younger crowd. I also agree that sometimes older people can get caught up in process and bureaucracy too easily and it sometimes is difficult to communicate the immense opportunity that social media offers to them.
The one big difference I see between the generations is the naturalness of being online for younger people. Everything flows from their Facebook page from relationships, to travel plans to career searches. I find that the adoption of the online world and social media in the older crowd is very uneven. Some people have really taken to it, others haven’t even considered it. It still has that frivolous feeling to lots of people, despite evidence to the contrary, but to be fair, I do hear that from all sorts of people, not just us aging boomers.
So I guess I basically agree with most of the points in the blog – I just hate being lumped together and generalized about just because of my age. I am fortunate to be surrounded by younger people most of the time, so maybe I’ve just gotten interested in the online world by osmosis and am not a good representative of my age group. But, if there is one thing that age has taught me, it’s to not make assumptions based on generalities. So what’s your experience – do you think the cultural generations stereotypes fit or should we forget them and just deal with people as we find them?
Good points. I would add that it can be lonely as a boomer who sees the online world as an important world, even though I can barely speak the language. Sometimes I feel like Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, unable to persuade those around me that there really is a whole world in there. What will it be like for our grandchildren, who will grow up in a world where almost everyone hops in and out of the wardrobe with ease?