{"id":88,"date":"2007-07-04T19:15:45","date_gmt":"2007-07-05T02:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/systematic.hrblogs.org\/2007\/07\/04\/should-we-worry-about-the-children\/"},"modified":"2010-02-18T11:58:23","modified_gmt":"2010-02-18T18:58:23","slug":"should-we-worry-about-the-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/?p=88","title":{"rendered":"Should we worry about the children?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My ‘conference friend’ Rich<\/a> has a cool new job – good stuff, Rich! I started to reply to something he wrote but it got so long I figured I’d better put it here instead.<\/p>\n

Read Our Future Colleagues Have MySpace Accounts<\/a> for the context first.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rich, If you’re a dinosaur…I must be petrified. New grads coming into the workplace are closer in age to my children than to myself. My kids (13 and 11) are growing up wifi; not just laptops but PSPs, Sidekicks and Nintendo DS and the observations about handwriting, spelling, jargon – are on point, but in my opinion it’s more reflective of our struggle to adapt, just like the dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

Younger folks have always integrated technology and information pipelines better than older generations. Further, If I can use my kid’s educations are any kind of benchmark, they’re getting a lot more knowledge and academic challenges thrown at them at an earlier age than we did.<\/p>\n

The ability of any given youth to function socially still boils down to the individual level. My daughter would appear to be a poster child for ADD-style overload. She’ll be texting in her room with the TV, laptop and sometimes video iPod (with one earbud inserted) going. Yet she got amazing grades last quarter and is a social butterfly with a large circle of friends. My son is a different archetype – he’s much more of a loner, with few friends but deep passions that he explores fully offline and online. One day he casually told me he corrected the Wikipedia entry on a book series he was reading – he’s the 11 year old. He couldn’t understand why I was amazed at that.<\/p>\n

I do see one commonality that worries me, it’s less about social engagement and getting out than it is about our increasing inability to be alone with ourselves. I see people filling up time that was formerly contemplative with some other form of connection – cell phones. Better than 50% of people I see driving, walking dogs, out for a stroll are on their phones. I don’t fear a future where life is experienced from behind a screen but one where nobody is comfortable being alone with their thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My ‘conference friend’ Rich has a cool new job – good stuff, Rich! I started to reply to something he wrote but it got so long I figured I’d better put it here instead. Read Our Future Colleagues Have MySpace Accounts for the context first. Rich, If you’re a dinosaur…I must be petrified. New grads […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[286,293,291,294,287],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-business-culture","category-social","category-social-media","category-systematic-viewpoints"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions\/179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andyscherer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}