Opinion Sur Joven

I don’t want to resort to clichés, but I have no choice. We’re going through one of the most important revolutions in the world’s history. This revolution isn’t related to ideologies, slavery abolition, bourgeois emancipation or the end of class struggle. We’re participating in a digital revolution, boosted by continuous technology advances, the Internet and the appearance of other complementary inventions. Today, almost nothing is done like it used to twenty years ago. We have changed our way of writing (who writes by hand anymore?), the content of our writings and the way we read, get information and make long distance communications (we hardly ever use the phone anymore) and short distance communications (employees working in the same room generally use chat programs to talk instead of doing it face-to-face), and the way we work, study, search for information, think, look for a serious/sexual relationship, acquire porn and even have sex. Breathing, eating and going to the toilette seem to be the only activities that remain unaffected.

The problem is that, if the world has changed so much since these technologies appeared, all those who haven’t been able to adapt to them are left aside from the world. It’s kind of a very primeval social Darwinism.

A digital gap is a division between those who access the new information technologies and those who don’t. This concept is generally used to distinguish rich countries from poor countries. Whereas the first ones can make a complete use of ICTs (information and communication technologies), the poorest and most neglected regions in developing countries have no contact with technology at all. Even in poor urban sectors such as Latin American slums, poor people access ICTs in cybercafes and other internet access points. But, logically, the learning level of the people who use these means isn’t as high as for those who have a computer at home all the time.

That’s the digital gap. Young people in rich countries can connect to the world through their computers and thus get more and better jobs; young people in poor countries can’t.

However, there’s another worrying digital gap. The generational digital gap. People aged between 45 and 65 or 75 have an irregular relationship with technology. And that generates both distance and a communication problem between them and young people. That’s what we want to analyze in this article.

Is it {chronocentric} to say we’re living a unique revolution? Probably. It’d be hard to assure situations like this haven’t happened in the world before. Every time a disruptive technology appeared, it changed the course of history. The printing press is an example. It managed to democratize information in a way no one had imagined to that day. In fact, the universalization of the alphabet was possible thanks to the printing press.

The appearance of the steam engine, used in the textile industry, represented the beginning of the first industrial revolution and a base for the technology used to create locomotives. That’s how the process that replaced animal-drawn vehicles started. However, this type of transportation didn’t change people’s particular lives, until many years after, when cars appeared.

The typewriter, the direct predecessor of modern text processors, didn’t manage to reach popularity beyond offices. It wasn’t as much used as Word, partly because its advantages weren’t that many: it posed an advantage for readers, because they no longer had to worry about understanding anyone’s handwriting, but it didn’t benefit the author, who wasn’t able to modify the text, save it or resume it another day.

Television was another invention that changed the history of the 20th century. But, as opposed to what happened with the typewriter, it only influenced people’s personal lives without interfering with other aspects. Undoubtedly, it generated a revolution in terms of entertainment, and also modified certain family habits. But it hasn’t changed other aspects of our lives.

The use of the telephone was broader, because it influenced people’s both personal and working lives. It changed the way of doing business and talking to friends who lived more than five blocks away: visiting them was no longer necessary. But, unlike computers, using it didn’t require any skills. Any person can pick up the handset and make a call without difficulty. Does this make it less important? No. However, the use of the telephone didn’t leave people aside because of their skills. The internet does.

Communication and lack of communication

There’s a problem between the signifier and the signified. To me, these symbols I see on the right mean “minimize, maximize and close”. To my parents, they’re a line, a square and a cross (a three-symbol tic-tac-toe?) These icons don’t represent the same for a 20-year-old person as for a 60-year-old one.

A mouse, to me, is an extension of my hand. In fact, I’ve spent at least a third of the last ten years of my life with my hand on that little device. To Norberto, it’s still very difficult to use. He grabs it with his thumb and his index finger and moves it to the position where he wants to click. Then he releases it and pushes the left button with his index finger, without holding the rest of the mouse. Not only does this action take longer, but many times he accidentally moves the device and can’t manage to click on the right spot. I’ve tried to teach him how to use it properly, but I haven’t succeeded, at least until now.

But let’s not go that far. Miguel is the CEO of an important NGO in Buenos Aires. He’s sixty years old and never sends emails, which causes many problems between him and the young people working in his organization. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to do it. He knows how to send emails, but somehow he can’t manage to get used to them as a means of communication. Thus, those young activists send him requests, reports, but he never finds out, partly because he only checks his emails once a week. So, many times he calls them a few days after to ask them why they haven’t sent him those reports (he wants them in paper).

At the beginnings of radio broadcasting, Orson Welles adapted the novel The War of the Worlds to be aired over a radio network. The newscaster simulated a news bulletin informing that at that moment the Earth was being invaded by a Martian invasion, and the description was so realistic that many people believed the story. According to reports of those days, the broadcast started with an introduction of the novel saying it was fiction, but not all listeners heard that warning. When they turned on their radios, they thought the alien invasion was really happening. The panic spread, and it supposedly caused mass hysteria in the city the radio show was broadcast from.

“The War of the Worlds” and mass hysteria derived in many studies about the influence the media had on listeners (and watchers afterwards). At that moment the “hypodermic needle theory” appeared, which sustained the idea that the messages the media injected on recipients reached their brains directly, producing significant alterations in their way of thinking.

These types of theories were very popular until the 1960s, when other experiments were carried out to refute them. That’s how the so-called “limited effects theory” appeared, which posed the idea that the media actually influence people’s brains but with certain restrictions. That is, media messages reinforce predispositions, rather than change them.

Later studies suggested this panic was less widespread than newspapers suggested, perhaps the story was magnified through the years. And it is also suggested that the effects of the media are not as linear as they were thought to be those days.

In my opinion, when a new communication technology appears -such as the printing press, the radio, TV…-, the problem is that people think whatever these media say is true. As industries move forward and individuals make contact with technology, they learn that not every message broadcast by those media is necessarily true.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a relative. It basically said we had to send an email to each senator in the Congress to complain about their dishonesty. The email ended with the phrase “Let’s make them work for the common good and for their salaries!” and included a complete list of all Argentine senators, including their email addresses and phone numbers. The problem was that the list dated back from 2001…

A few days later, I received an email with an open letter supposedly written by Joan Manuel Serrat, where he supported the State of Israel and criticized the Arab world. I was surprised to find out Serrat had so openly chosen a position, so I started looking for this supposedly open letter in Google. Most blogs and forums referred to it as “Serrat’s letter”. However, searching a bit further -and in more reliable sites-, I found out the author was Ajinoam Nini, an Israeli singer who had shared performances with the best singers. In Spanish, among others, with J.M. Serrat.

A leadership crisis

“Digital natives” is the name for those who were born in a world where the Internet already existed. “Digital migrants” are those who lived in the world when this tool still didn’t exist and today have to adapt to the new reality.

This poses a problem for those who got used to living in a world that was radically different from this one. But it’s also a problem for us, the young natives (or, in my case, the amphibians, because I’m in the middle), because we don’t have a guide to tell us how this is going to continue.

Whether we are natives or amphibians, it implies a challenge: having to necessarily take some steps without the help of a guide, someone who has already walked the steps we want to walk. The world has progressed thanks to young people from past times who were able to learn -from those who preceded them- what paths they had to avoid. But his world has changed so much over the last fifteen years that it seems hard to learn from previous experiences. For instance, I -as a journalist- have a hard time finding inspiration in those who created a newspaper, a magazine, a TV show or a radio show, simply because today all those media are being questioned and are at serious risk of disappearing. I have a hard time to find references in my professional field, and something similar happens to young people in almost all professional and social fields.

But just as it implies a challenge for us, it is a challenge for older people as well. Even if it’s hard for them, even if they’ve built their whole lives on different schemes, they must try to learn how this world works: a world where the Internet and ICTs are essential for society to work.

And reducing this digital gap is also a challenge for governments, NGOs, foundations and cultural centers, among others. Not only the digital gap caused by poverty, but also the one caused by generational differences. Developing methods to narrow those distances should be an important goal for those who aim at creating a more egalitarian world. Not only generating social possibilities, but also allowing the people who were born in another world to become a part of this brave new world.

Illustration: Guadalupe Giani

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