my generation

“This generation gap is really a technological gap”- McLuhan

The social and psychic distance that emerged between industrial age parents and their electric children in the ’60s can’t be blamed on teenage rebellion: Kids were experimenting with radical new sensibilities, new art, new fashion, new social architectures, new inner trips, all in an effort to make sense of the emerging electric surround.

For decades, we’ve been unable or unwilling to recognize the vital role that youth culture has played in revealing the vocabulary and grammar of our electronic environment.

The kids found shelter in electric music
while their parents could only hear noise.

 o o o

As the pace of innovation accelerates,
the gaps between disruptive technologies get shorter and shorter,
and the interval between ‘generations’ correspondingly shrinks.

Today, kids are growing up in a technological environment that didn’t exist five years ago. We speak of the Wikipedia generation, the YouTube generation, the Twitter generation. Each of these environments encourages new literacies and new social and psychic patterns. The cultural architecture that grew around Wikipedia already seems dated when compared to the distributed intelligence that is emerging around the real time web.

“… in the world of the future, the new illiterate will be the person who has not learned how to learn.” - Alvin Toffler

A new meta literacy is emerging that isn’t based on any single technology but instead on our ability to quickly internalize the grammar and vocabulary of any new technological environment.

As meta literacy begins to grow, the gaps between generations are becoming irrelevant.

Generations no longer measure biological descent
    from grandparent to parent to child
or even the cultural divides that once split neatly along age groups.
Today, a generation is a technological environment and its literates
        and is no longer bound to any specific age.

Generation is becoming a choice rather than an inheritance. And we are quickly approaching a time when generation gaps may disappear entirely … what Gabriel dubbed ‘The Last Generation’.

Wendy challenged the idea: “How do you know that some crazy thing that we can’t even imagine yet isn’t going to come along and create an even bigger divide than anything we’ve witnessed before.” And she’s right. This may not be the Last Generation, capital L capital G, but maybe just the last electric generation.

The kind of Meta literacy we’re gaining today is smoothing out the tremors of digital innovation, but will it be able to bridge the gap between the electric and the quantum? A while back I asked:

When you and I are old (and a bit senile), how will we interface with a generation, that has transcended biology?

agovernmentman replied:
“i intend to transcend right along with the kids.”

Beautiful. But I wonder whether we’ll actually be able to.

Today, the bleeding edge of art isn’t as shocking and disorienting as it was in the 20th century when we were first starting to make sense of our electronic culture.

The gaps between successive technologies have gotten shorter, and the bridges of consciousness that most artists are building don’t need to stretch as far as they once did. 

But will the art and counter cultures of the quantum era be so easy for us to digest? It’s difficult to imagine what a rave or woodstock full of stelarcs would even be.