Current mood:

nerdy

Generational Blur

What is a human generation? Here’s a good definition I found via wikipedia:

William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations, list the generations of Anglo-America. Their definition of "generation" is given as: A cohort-group, which are all persons born in a limited span of consecutive years, whose length approximates the span of a phase of life given to be approximately 22 years, and whose boundaries are fixed by peer personality. Peer personality generational persona recognized and determined by common age, location, common beliefs and behavior, and perceived membership in a common generation.

What is a technological generation? Here’s the wikipedia definition:

A generation can also be a stage or degree in a succession of natural descent as a grandfather, a father, and the father's son comprise three generations or stages of successive improvement in the development of a technology, such as computers, automobiles, or microprocessors

What is Human Generational Blur? Here’s my stab at a theory:

Fact: As new technologies are developed and diffused at an exponentially faster rate (see Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns), the rate of human reproduction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population), while fast, is still nowhere near exponential.  Now, for the first time in planetary history the doubling rate of technology has become shorter than the length of one human generation, which has remained stable for a while at around 22 years long.  Generally speaking, Generation X, those born from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, marks the beginning of this transition period.

Theory: Many of the forces, structures, and environments that conspire to shape a distinct human generation, as defined by Strauss and Howe, are undergoing such rapid change that the traditional pattern of generational clusters spanning 22 years has been broken.  The result, which we are now starting to witness and understand, is the break-down of the existence of traditional generations into micro-generations, or “fractured” traditional generations, and the subsequent blurring of these little generational pockets as they interact with diverse information on the web (Web 2.0, Google Earth), interact with diverse other cultures via the web (chat rooms, Second Life), and communicate more effectively with over distances via Virtual Environmets (Second Life, The Sims, Everquest).  The generational blur effect occurs because large traditional generations can no longer sustain themselves and are digested by the technological environment.

Importance of Critical Periods: Because critical periods for the development of human personality remain fixed at short intervals that sometimes span less than one year, young humans born just a few years or months apart can grow up very different from one another because they experience a radically different environment during these critical learning periods.  That’s why kids who grow up with TVs, VCRs, computers, and Nintendo exhibit different behavior than their parents who were raised “walking 5 miles through snow to get to school”, which my dad actually did in Latvia.

Communication and Network Effects: Because the rate of human communication and connectivity is increasing at an exponential rate directly related to the exponential technology curve, the information environment that humans exist in (which is essential to the formation of generations) is much more fluid, accessible and dynamic.  This is not only forming distinct micro-generations, but also broadly blurring generations by morphing common beliefs and common behavior while allowing individuals of different ages and demographics to socialize and form unprecedented bonds.

Note: I believe Generational Blur to be inevitable, considering the skyrocketing rate of technology growth.  When looked at as part of broader evolutionary process, I am inclined to think that we’re undergoing a shift to both more specialized generations and also more massive generational pockets.  It feels like a period of rapid inevitable reorganization of human neural resources. … Generational Blur is an adaptation of my earlier theory of Generational Compression, which was very confusing.  I think this new version will make more sense to more people.