Pre versus post Internet era mindsets
Interesting essay by Bruce Schneier in the Wall Street Journal about Barack Obama’s right to use a personal PDA. The essay closes with an astute observation:
The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We’re now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren’t fully an information age society.
When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he’s operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society’s tolerance for digital ephemera changes.
Now I recall mulling over this same issue a couple of years ago…framed at the time as the “transparent versus opaque generation gap“.