on Nov 7th, 2007If A Teenager Can Borrow Your Car Then A Baby Boomer Can Surely Social Network
“We’re here. We’re old. Get the f**k used to it.” [Edited for those of you who find the English language offensive.]
Mark Cuban, the dude who sold broadcast.com for $500 million before the internet bubble burst, recently vented about the media constantly writing articles about how anyone over the age of 30 seems incapable of adapting to new technology. There’s an assumption that anyone with a job is too busy working their ass off to figure out how to text message, twitter inanities to friends they’ve never met in person, or get linkedin to a social network that simply renamed the yearbook as facebook and made it into a myspace for communicating with anyone who shares a common interest in say, “my friends all think I’m a lesbian, but really I’m not.”
Most of these articles perpetuate a bias that infers an adult is incapable of comprehending a new concept. Remember how as a kid you learned your grandpa died. Maybe you were only 5 at the time, so the concept of death was pretty much defined by a vague notion that you had to put on a suit and tie and watch black limousines drive a bunch of people to a place filled with slabs of stone. Because your mind was still young and learning how to use language, the concept of death hadn’t yet made the leap from experience to a story articulated by words that has a contextual meaning learned over time.
Concepts derive their meaning out of experience and language is merely the embodiment of their nature. If you can use language, you can pretty much learn a new concept. It helps if you have some experience with what the concept represents, but it’s not required. Stepping back from the web 2.0 mania, it suddenly becomes clear that all we’re really talking about here are communication tools.
Instead of writing a letter and popping it into the mail, you send out a text message. Big whoop. Instead of picking up the phone to let all your friends know you’re having a party, you send out a bulletin on Myspace. Amazing. Instead of logging in on your laptop to update your blog, you snap a picture with your cellphone and send it to your blog so everyone can see you’re still in bed nursing a hangover next to your passed out girlfriend.
So what’s the point of taking an editorial position that says all these communication concepts are so radical they must be incomprehensible to anyone over 30? You got me. It ain’t true. About the only thing that matters is having some free time to gain experience with using them. High school and college kids have plenty of free time to socialize and test out the technology and software. But make no mistake, as concepts, they are about as complicated as figuring out the optimal time for baking a sheet of chocolate chip cookies.
Instead of writing articles about how anyone over 30 can’t adapt to new hardware and software, perhaps journalists should conduct a study and look into the composition of their reading audience. They just might discover a fair portion of their readers are over 30. Imagine that.