Cyberculture: Society, Culture, and the Internet - The E-generation Gap

THE E-GENERATION GAP

Cyberculture of the 1990s and early 2000s was in a transitional stage, shaped and inhabited largely by those with a foot in both the pre-Internet era and the Digital Age. Children growing up in this period, however, will never know an era when the Internet wasn't an entirely natural component of life, when it was seen as a transformation from the life they knew. As a result, cyberculture's shape is likely to change rapidly as younger generations come of age. Parents may fret over the skills and experiences their children miss out on by being wrapped up in cyberculture, but in all likelihood the Internet will be entwined more and more with daily activities and the distinctions between cybercultures and the dominant cultures will blur.

Don Tapscott, in his book Growing Up Digital, reported that at the end of the 1990s two-thirds of what he called the "Net Generation" used personal computers either at home or in school. According to Tapscott, such children are less concerned about the technology itself, which increasingly is simply part of the background, as about the technology's functionality in their daily lives. In this way, children growing up in highly developed areas of the world in the early 2000s were fundamentally different from their parents, for whom such computer technology was a revolution occurring in their lifetimes, sharply separating, thanks to its speed and impact, the life they knew before the Internet and the one that exists today. This generational dynamic, according to Tapscott, speaking to Communication World in December 1999, was "about to—like a tidal wave—sweep across all of our institutions."