Rise of the Google-Boomers

It's a bit mad...and a bit marvelous!

If you hand any 12-year-old a brand new cellphone, you’re likely to find that within two hours they’ll have the entire thing figured out. The ringtone will have been selected, apps will have been downloaded, and they’ll already be using the bomber birds on Angry Birds: Rio. Youngsters these days seem to have a natural flair for technology. In fact, technology has become so deeply ingrained into their brains that apples are being told they’re no longer a fruit. It’s the ‘Pluto is not a planet’ crisis all over again. 

Kids of the 21^st century have been dubbed the ‘G-Generation’ (G as in Google, of course). Now, one of the inborn G-Genes of these youngsters is the tendency to have a giggle at the older generation as they watch them trying to decode the latest technology - especially when their attempts to flip the touch screen display look more like the way you shake your toothbrush dry after brushing. But what they have to remember is that the older generation – or ‘Baby-Boomers’ as they were named – have had to deal with a lot of change. They have moved from records to iTunes, floppy disks to flash drives, black-and-white to HD LCD, and Facebook’s old format to Facebook’s new format. But let’s be fair, that last one is a challenge for us all! 

It’s not just the rapid change that is hard to keep up with, however. Technology works a lot like language. It’s easy to pick up if you have been surrounded by it since birth, but much harder when you have to learn it using phrase books and dictionaries – which in this case would be device manuals. The main difference between the G-Generation and the Baby-Boomers is that the Boomers are often too afraid to put down the manuals and just play. Youngsters will click around and search until they know the device backwards, while most Boomers launch into a range of colourful expletives if they hit a wrong key. But if you look at the technological devices the Boomers once used, it’s not hard to see why. Misspelling a word on a typewriter meant having to start from scratch, while a ‘daa’ instead of a ‘dit-daa’ on a morse code machine could mean the start of civil war.  The closest equivalent we have to this last one is perhaps our autocorrect feature. Just the other day my friend told me to have a ‘gyrating day’. 

The older generation should be applauded then, since they have had to learn and adapt to every new cellphone and computer since the first one was introduced. But what they still need to do is gain the confidence to toss out those manuals and just explore. It’s not like their natural technological abilities aren’t there. Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Steve Jobs are all Boomers, after all. Tell that one to your folks and you’ll soon find them picking up that iPad with a new sense of superiority. Throw in the fact that Bill Gates earns around $300,000 per second and there will be a definite rise of new Google-Boomers giving the youngsters a run for their money – literally.