October 15, 2006: Generation M Goes to Work?

It looks like it is time to revisit the subject of Generation M, this time in response to an observation by JP Rangaswami cited on Cook's Collaborative Edge:

When generation M goes to work, those people will have their pens and their computers and their phones and their cameras. Not company-issued ones. And we have a job to do to pave the way for them, which is where identity and authentication and permissioning and walled-garden arguments begin and end.

My immediate reaction to this text was that we need to be less concerned with the paraphernalia that Generation M will bring with them to work and more concerned with what they will be doing at work! I believe that this is one of the key issues that came out of the Time cover story about Generation M that I discussed on September 27. As a matter of fact, I am probably most concerned with what percentage of the Generation M population will actually go to work, whether by choice or because of the prevailing unemployment figures.

I am reminded that, in the summer of 1996, I had the good fortune to be involved in an experiment that John Seely Brown had proposed. His thesis was that, if we wanted to understand the “office of the future,” we should study the kids who would inhabit that office after they finished their education. This project was a joint effort of Xerox PARC and the relatively new Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL), where I worked and which was the host site for the experiment. We were still new enough to have a lot of free space, which we equipped with an abundance of Macintosh hardware running state-of-the-art “rich media” software, along with one “token” Windows PC. We also had miles of butcher paper lining the walls for note-taking during daily brainstorming sessions. I think JSB’s intention was to build the ideal sandbox and then see what games the inhabitants would play in it.

Since I was the FXPAL manager assigned to this joint effort, I had to worry about what the results were and how they would be reported; and I am sorry to say that there was not much to report. As a matter of fact, looking back ten years, there are only two things I remember. One is that the only female student very quickly declared her Mac to be a “personal space” by fitting it out her her collection on miniature stuffed animals. The other is that the Windows PC became very popular, because it was the only machine running Zork Nemesis. The seven students reacted to this “scarcity” by developing social protocols for playing the game communally; and, believe me, it was fascinating to see these seven kids huddled around a single screen (one at the keyboard) playing this game as a single “player!” This may be the closest I have ever come to seeing the “wisdom of a crowd” in positive action!

The point of this story is that we ended the experiment no better informed than we began it. Meanwhile, technology barged on ahead at its breakneck pace leaving us wondering if we even had a handle on the right questions to ask. (At least today I have a question that I feel is worth asking, which is whether or not today’s Generation M could engage in the same communal approach to working with a limited resource that our kids did.) I feel as if none of us running the experiment really knew what we were doing and that all we could do was wait to see if serendipity would contribute anything (and, in my case, it did).

I have a tendency to extol the virtue of singing the old songs. In this case I think the “song” we need to revisit is Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. More specifically, I think we need to review the first six pages of his Introduction, in which he tries to scope out the nature of social forecasting while distancing himself from what, in his time, was called “futurology.” The lesson to be learned is that we should not dwell on “When Generation M goes to work” but, instead, should address the question of how our generation can “touch” them in meaningful ways, building on a comment that John Dodds made in Confused of Calcutta. This is the only way we have “to pave the way for them;” and I wish there were better ways for us to do it, since our educational institutions seem to be doing such a poor job of it.