The NetGens 2.0: Clouds on the Horizon

We've been following the work of Malcolm Brown, from Dartmouth College, for a decade or more. He always finds some insightful stuff to learn from just about anything. His latest shares a shift he has noticed in just the last 3-5 years, suggesting to him that we are past "Net Generation 1.0" and already into Net Generation 2.0:

For daughter #1, getting a laptop for college was a big deal. She had been using desktop computers for years, of course, but the combination of starting college and getting a laptop was an enabling rite of passage. For daughter #2, the laptop was more like socks, sweaters, and shoes. She’d been using a laptop throughout high school, so she simply packed her laptop along with all the other essentials. No big deal.

An additional marker of change was the use of e-mail and Skype. Daughter #1 had used her college’s e-mail system. Daughter #2, who has been using Gmail for some time, never really gave a thought to using the campus e-mail system. In addition, daughter #2 has moved beyond her cell phone and is using Skype for many of her communications. This shift in my two daughters’ IT outfittings is mirrored by students at Dartmouth. Four years ago, when Dartmouth contemplated giving up its quaint but antiquated home-grown e-mail system (called BlitzMail), it was the students who protested the loudest. For those NetGens, life without BlitzMail was unthinkable. Today, with Dartmouth going through the same exercise, the majority of students welcome an upgrade. Many, perhaps most, don’t even use BlitzMail, preferring Gmail, Facebook, or some other hosted service they’ve been using for years.

Something has shifted. Perhaps one way to delineate this shift of the past four years is to say that students have moved from being the “NetGens 1.0” to being the “NetGens 2.0.