Gen-X, Net2 and Millennials
About that Net2 Conference ….
Ideas, research and tools could converge into an old way of doing things. And that couldn’t be better for the Web.
The Net2 conference will focus on how non-profits can use online tools to improve their recruiting and fundraising.
Millennials (born from 1978 to 1990; give or take) carry more social capital than most X’ers and many boomers.
This seems to point to an opportunity for the digirati and the self-defined Web 2.0 crowds to go public.
IPO baby! This is our Initial Public Opportunity.
If you choose to buy into anything that Howe and Strauss (”Millennials Rising,” “Millennials go to College,” “13th Gen,” “Generations,” and the new “Millennials and the Pop Culture”) have to say–and I do–then this social Web thing is ripe for the masses, if not mom and dad.
Consider this beta.
We need to get these tools out of the hands of our friends and into the hands of college students. Granted they’re too busy with Facebook right now, but that is just practice for the cooperate world non-profit and government sectors.
This means fewer gmail accounts and more Yahoo! accounts signing up for Ning.
Millennials, it is said, hold similar cultural and social values as the GI generation did/does. And those were the folks that made society as we’ve read about it. They won World War II and put the fez in fun. They are dying. Millennials, like their grandparents, are drawn to a larger purpose and feel a sense of civic duty.
“Generations” said something to the effect that the Lost Generation (those people who came of age in the 1920s) skipped active civic and political life in favor of creating things and the means to create things.
The Lost Generation made an impact not by crafting policy in the hallowed halls of corruption congress, but by influencing the policy makers.
Reading Howe and Strauss’ descriptions of the Lost Generation is like watching Reality Bites or Friends. There are common, obvious themes between Gen-x and the Lost Generation.
This X-er is looking for a way to do what he does best and to help someone else do what they do best. If there’s any truth to the blather above, we need to take these tools that we’re so keen on and pass them onto someone who will use them for good, not evil.
Net2 might be onto something, but the tool du jour never seems to have a purpose beyond flipping or impressing a-list bloggers. Let’s do something about that. How can YASNS improve the real world? Before us navel gazers go the way of My Bloody Valentine?
