Father of the Internet
Fighting Poverty with Connectivity
Our world: transform or collapse?
Learning by doing, not by listening
Twenty Four Seven Connected
From pyramids to bird's nests
Music like water
Golden Age or Another Crisis?
The power of collaboration
New demands on the telecoms industry
Growing up Digital
See yourself in the news
Download, Adjust, Print!
Creative minds flourishing
A new era of advertising
Change and humility in politics
We still need handshakes
Ethical Business and Female Power
Healthcare through mobile devices
On our way to a stable world
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Don Tapscott - Growing up Digital
Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, describes in Ericsson 2020 Shaping Ideas today's young people as the smartest generation ever. He claims that adolescents, who have grown up with the Internet, are not only more used to handling digital technology, but their brains are actually different.
Extract from Don Tapscott on Growing up Digital
Don Tapscott: Don Tapscott
Don Tapscott: Today many of the best examples of innovation in business, in education, society or in government, are coming from young people who are using the web as this powerful tool to change the model. So, this is a whole new mode of production that's emerging. The Internet is not about putting a video on to YouTube or creating a gardening community online or having a cool website or a government portal. This is a new mode of production that's emerging. It's beginning to fundamentally change the way that we orchestrate capability in society. To innovate, to create goods and services, to govern, to educate. That's the meaning of the web. Don Tapscott continues, for those who have been fortunate enough to grow up digital, their brains are actually different. Because how you spend your time during extended adolescence, age eight to eighteen is the number one predictor of what your brain will be like. This is the time when the human brain gets built, the wiring and synaptic connections of the brain. And if you spend twenty-four hours a week watching TV like my generation did you get a certain kind of brain. If on the other hand, you spend an equivalent amount of time being the user, the actor, the initiator, the collaborator, the rememberer, the organizer, that gives you a different kind of brain as well. This is the defining characteristic of this generation. And as they come into the work force, the market place in society there's no more powerful force to change every institution. There's a lot of cynicism about the generation, they're net addicted, glued to the screen, loosing their social skills. There's a book called The dumbest generation that says that the digital age is stupefying young people. The only trouble with this negative view of young people, there's no data to support it. This is fiction. Don Tapscott states, this is the smartest generation ever, volunteering amongst high school and university students is at an all time high and civic action became political action with the Obama campaign. In the US, the percent of kids that are clean in high school, that don't do drugs or alcohol is up year over year for fifteen years. IQ is up year over year for many years. SAT scores are at an all time high. It's never been tougher to get in to the best universities. This is a generation that we can be enormously hopeful about. And let's face it, my generation is leaving them a world that is full of big, serious, systemic, deep problems. You think about where we're at in human history, I don't think this is just a recession, I think it's a punctuation point. That we're going from something old to something new. We need to listen to young people, embrace their culture, adopt to their tools and change our organizations. And if we do that we'll have better performance, better innovation and institutions and organizations that are more appropriate for the 21st century.
Don Tapscott: Don Tapscott