The Millennial Conundrum
A little more than a week ago, my ever-inquisitive nerd of a cousin posed a question pertaining to the history of India. I wasn’t quite in the mood to provide a detailed answer to a specific question, and so I asked him to find it on the Quora app; where I told him he could find answers to most queries he had on any and every topic or issue related to India, and the world in general. All he had to do was follow a certain individual named Balaji Viswanathan. The glint in his eye seemed to suggest that I’d done him a bigger favour than he’d expected. Later that evening, he ran up to me with his tablet (digital) and asked me if I knew anything about galaxies, black holes, or the universe. While I did wish to stimulate my limited repository, I felt it would do him a world of good if I led him straight to the experts. And so a couple of TED searches later, the young man had entered a different universe.
The next morning, while my family relished the weekend breakfast, I couldn’t help but stare at the silent chair in the corner. My cousin seemed to be eating his meal, but he wasn’t exactly with us. He had one eye on his plate, and the other on his tab. He noticed my gaze and quickly turned his face (and tab) away from my sight. He saw me moving toward him and left the room in a hurried fashion. Throughout the remainder of the day, whenever I tried to get near him, he would move away. Wherever he went, his tablet followed. It was like his digital TEDdy bear.
While I felt great about my enhanced reputation as a solutions provider, I began to wonder if I’d actually done him a favour. Of course I did, I thought. He had now found a way to access top quality information about any subject under the sun, and in doing so, had augmented his knowledge base, a continually expanding reservoir of information sourced from the best in the business. Accessible data — anytime, anywhere.
But was it at the cost of his ability to think for and by himself, on his feet? Would he still ask me those silly, annoying questions that I always refrained from answering? I really wanted him to: I felt uneasy and sensed a certain envy growing within me. But the fact of the matter is, the proverb ‘blood is thicker than water’ carries little or no meaning in the digital world.
This world is a borderless entity and we’re all citizens of the ‘United States’ that form this super-nation. The digital world creates a lifetime’s worth of content in less than a day. We’re consuming information at a breakneck pace, and we’re bound to be engulfed in this endless stream of competing data. With most of Generation Z, there isn’t going to be another option — they’ll be geared to a life of digital dependence; Marc Prensky likes to term members of this cohort as ‘Digital Natives’. I like to refer to them as digital ‘primates’, in that they’re inherently primed to a digital existence, more than any other generation before theirs. The digital primate subgroup (which would also include our unborn kids) will be born into a world with clouds that store both rain and data; and a world without secrets, identities or security. Where there is a will, there is an app.
What we’re currently experiencing of the aforementioned scenario is a beta version, which, one expects, would come to fruition by the time the median Gen-Z member hits adulthood. There seems to be no persuasive argument against digitising every aspect of our world, except, that in scaling the horizons of the internet, we mustn’t forget that harnessing the potential of the inner-net connection is the best way to salve the consciousness of humanity. It seems we’ve also forgotten that there are no definitive sojourns on the digital superhighway, and by taking the endless road, we run the risk of leaving behind the non-digital natives of Gen-Z, who simply could not jump aboard in time. If we’re serious about bequeathing a sustainable future to our progeny, then that future must also emphasise the importance of sustaining human values alongside digital innovation. The ability of the millennial generation to deal with this conundrum would define our legacy.
If Martin Luther King Jr were alive in the digital age, he would “have a dream that one day, we live in a world where aren’t judged by the number of followers, likes and retweets, but by the content of our character.”
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Can’t wait to hear from you little bro.
