Millennials: Impatient and Rash? Quick-thinking and Solution Oriented? Neither? Both? Here's a Report.
By: Steve Grumm
The Internets weren’t even a series of tubes when I was high school. In college I used Netscape Navigator to browse while doing school papers, and Yahoo! was the latest thing in web search technology. So I’m greatly interested in how the technology-driven Millenials will change the ways we work as the years unfold. Here’s some new research from the Pew Internet Project and Elon University’s Imaging the Internet Center:
Teens and young adults brought up from childhood with a continuous connection to each other and to information will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in a different way from their elders, according to a new survey of technology experts.
Many of the experts surveyed by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Internet Project said the effects of hyperconnectivity and the always-on lifestyles of young people will be mostly positive between now and 2020. But the experts in this survey also predicted this generation will exhibit a thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes, a loss of patience, and a lack of deep-thinking ability due to what one referred to as “fast-twitch wiring.”
The survey results are based on a non-random, opt-in, online sample of 1,021 internet experts and other internet users, recruited via email invitation, Twitter or Facebook from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University. Since the data are based on a non-random sample, a margin of error cannot be computed, and the results are not projectable to any population other than the experts in this sample.