WWW & Generation Z
Recently I came to the realization that I’m older than Google. As the World Wide Web became public domain in 1993, the famous company came into business in 1998 and I was born in between these two revolutions. This fun fact has its importance because it shaped mine and my generation’s view of the world. Our parents generation had to learn how to use these new tools that broaden their understanding of work, socialisation, politic, history and knowledge as a whole. Us ? We were born with screens, websites, blogs, instant messaging and so on. Therefore we just grew up at a similar pace as technology… until Tech started evolving faster and faster and we lost track of the very environment we were supposed to be part of.
As a “Generation Z” (generation born between 1995 and 2012 if you believe Google), I grew up with phones that kept getting smaller every year, computers that kept getting faster and growing communities online. My understanding of what it means to be human was clearly linked to technology and more than anything to digital technology. Calling people, texting, twitting, send pictures on Facebook, tagging one another on Instagram, making funny videos on Vine, listening to music on Youtube, looking for facts on Wikipedia and sharing memes on Reddit is a common experience many of my pears share.
But what does it mean for our future ? This amount of information, knowledge, data, that we have been sharing online for 10, 15, 20, 25 years… What will it become ?
Many articles will tell you to take care of your data, laws are passed around the world to prevent companies to use these little bits of informations about you in ways you can’t control, and we see more and more data-privacy awareness being raised. But at the end of the day, what does all this influx of information about one another, the world we live in, the world that existed before Internet even existed and any theory on what is to come, really symbolises ?
To me it’s all about us being humans and wanting to share more and more as technology offers us new ways to do it. And unfortunately that comes with a price. Our digital footprint can sometimes be retraced but only in certain cases and we the disappearance of websites such as Myspace, Skyblog, Vine and others, we could think our datas disappeared with them. But is it really the case ? Everything we posted online one day may be kept somewhere. It can still be in the hands of an unknown web user and none of us can do much about it. The way old Vine videos resurfaced, anything we posted could come back to us anytime soon. Good and bad.
In this complicated world, I seek better ways to share information & knowledge with like-minded people. In my opinion, we might not have much control on what use to be, but we can control what will be. Creating platforms, online spaces and forums to share, talk and exchange on knowledge we as humans need to better live together.
End of the rambling on how my Generation got a lot on her hands for the future. See you soon for much more pragmatic chats on Information & Knowledge Management, both as an individual and as companies.
