Information generation

Information generation!!

When I was growing up I remember our generation was termed, GenX, neXgen or something like that I recall from the bombardment of the plethora of ads showered upon us by the multinationals vying the Indian consumer market. but that’s the topic of a bygone era..

The next in-thing is the Information generation - this is the breed of next generation youngsters who have all the information in the world at the tip of their fingers by means of device they prefer calling smart phone. Mind you the important word here is "information", which is far far from "knowledge". I was sitting at the DMV today and the only thing I could see people doing is accessing internet from their phones [lets leave the smart out of it for now]. Gone are the days whne people would plan in advance for long queues by brining along novels newspapers or something creative to do.

There was 40 year lady trying to use her blackberry small screen, a guy in thirties on his samsung and then this teenager on his nokia browsing facebook. The guy had his dad talking to him all the time but not once did he peep out of his smary device. Texting his friends, messaging them, talking in the cryptic messenger language [ttyl, brb, gtg and what not] - was very abyssmal to say the least.

I was reading an article in the wall street journal a few weeks ago. A nice argument on : is internet the best way to assimilate information and gain knowledge. The argument against the internet went something like this "when you research information on internet, you are faced with a huge amount of information which is most of the time superficial. Also the number of links for any topics are so many that the mind wanders from page to page and grasping is at a very amateur level. The probability of this information being retained is significantly lower. " In a more traditional way, when the information is obtained from books, the understanding is in much more depths because of the power of concentration.

This brings me back to the information generation and its future. Convinience is one thing, but if people start spending spare time facebooking and twittering on 3inch screened smart devices, they are going to develop the attention span of a racoon. Technological enhancements are going to make things easier for us, but what are we going to end up with?

Smart Phone and Dumb People ??

{PS: guy who invented the smart phone is no doubt smart, but just check out if he spends as much time on it as the genX who are more likely going to be dumb enough to pay for his smart device}