Generation Gap

This is my first post of 2014 – I took a brief hiatus at the end of 2013 to take care of work that had backed up here an there. For a while I was trying to do one post a week, going forward into 2014 that will likely change, at least for a while. I’m still planning on regular updates, just probably not weekly, more like a couple times a month or more depending on what I feel the urge to write about.

A couple weeks ago I took my wife to dinner to a really nice restaurant. There was a family at the next table, a mom and dad and couple kids. The parents were fairly young – younger than I am at any rate – and the kids were a pre-teen and a teenager.

They weren’t talking to each other.

Each had their smart-phone, and they were each busy doing something other than conversing. One was texting, another was web-surfing, one of the others playing a game.

I’m not mentioning this to be judgmental; rather, it’s an observation on the world we live in and how it’s changing. Technology has become such an integral part of our society that no one thinks about how amazing it all is and how we are all truly connected.

This is important for us to understand as support professionals because we need to be prepared. Young people especially will have much different expectations on what technology can and should do for them than what we traditionally expect today. The time to start thinking about how to deal with these changes is now, because it’s coming. We can either accept that and come up with new support tactics or we can put on blinders to the changes and find out that we’re obsolete in a few years.

How are you getting ready?