World Future Review interviews Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital

Don Tapscott, professor, and chairman of the nGenera Innovation Network, bestselling author of the book Grown Up Digital, and WorldFuture 2009 keynote speaker is a strong believer in the “Net Generation.” In this interview with World Future Review, he says that technology is, indeed, affecting the lives, values, and development of teens...by enabling them to transform society for the better.

World Future Review: What are some of the long-term effects that the global digital divide will have on those left behind? What will happen to those on the wrong side of the global digital divide? And is the gap currently getting wider?

Don Tapscott: There was a whole chapter [about the digital divide] in Growing Up Digital (McGraw-Hill, 1998), and what I said at the time was that there’s a danger that we’ll create this world of haves and have-nots, knowers and know-nots, doers and do-nots, people that can communicate with the rest of the world and those who can’t. This is called creating a structural underclass, and it creates wounds in society that will be hard to heal. I noted at the time that half of the kids in the world had never used a telephone, let alone the Internet.

So, flash forward twelve years. Since I said that, a billion people have come onto the Web and half of them are in this demographic. There are more young people in China today with access to the Internet than in the United States. So, I don’t think it’s true that the gap is getting bigger. I think it’s narrowing. Now, this is a complicated topic because the central divide is related to real economic and social divides in society as well, and it correlates perfectly with poverty. If you look at Africa, there are charts in [Grown Up Digital] that show the world map according to Internet access. Africa’s pretty much the biggest continent in the world, in terms of the world map according to [the percentage of] young people. But it’s the smallest continent on the world map according to Internet access.

Even in the United States, this is a problem. I pointed out in the book that there isn’t really just one generation—there are two. There’s the top half, which is doing spectacularly, that have Internet access, that go to reasonable schools, that are performing well. The universities are flooded with students right now—they’re graduating in record numbers. And there’s the bottom half that is doing terribly. The bottom third is dropping out of high school. So this is a big complicated issue and it’s right at the heart of how, in our economies, and in the global economy society, we will create wealth; in how we will have social development, and how we will establish social justice. That’s why programs like One Laptop Per Child are very important, and should be supported by everybody. It’s very sad that this program has detractors and vested interests that don’t want to see a cheap computer go out around the world to young people in underserved areas. I could go on and on about this…

WFR: There’s no real consensus on how to regulate the Internet. Is the Internet something that can self-regulate, or does it require governance?

Tapscott: Well, regulation works at a number of different levels. There is a role for laws. At the one end, you’ve got hard stuff like ensuring that the Web stays open, and that it’s not divided up into a number of world communities, that you access purely as a function of how much money you’ve got. At the other end, you’ve got all kinds of so-called “soft issues” for which I think that regulation makes sense, and that you can’t just leave it to markets. Stuff like privacy, and at least in European countries, we have some pretty good laws regarding this, and they don’t deter innovation as people say because privacy is good business practice. The trouble is that there are unscrupulous people who will violate basic principles of privacy to the detriment of everyone. So again, market forces are critical to the success of the Web.

I was at a group meeting of the World Economic Forum in Dubai and one of the things [participants] called for is a global digital Marshall Plan to roll out the Internet and broadband around the world, to make sure that every kid aged four has access to the Web. And that’s the kind of thing that Obama could play a real leadership role in achieving. Markets are never going to take this technology to Kenya, so you need to have government leadership. And given the current global economic crisis, government is no longer a bad word. Heck, there may even be a day when taxes are no longer a bad word.

WFR: Passing laws regarding privacy and copyright on the Internet is one issue and enforcing them is another. Is there any way to effectively enforce the “soft issues” on a global or even a national scale?

Tapscott: The basic institution of government is … nation-states based on national economies. Except that today, increasingly, we have regional economies and a global economy. Take legislation around financial services, it’s all domestic, and it’s become crystal clear that the nation-state is the wrong size to address the needs of the global financial marketplace. So, we’re in the early days of establishing important new institutions of global governance where you can start to have not just new forms of cooperation or new guidelines but actual regulation that has teeth and is enforceable on a global basis. Now, it doesn’t mean a global government because of the so-called Web 2.0. There are all kinds of new institutions and models that are possible, and we’re investigating this right now in a program that’s called Government 2.0. You can learn more about it at: www.NGenera.com/pages/innovation. There are also various communities on www.GrownUpDigital.com on education, government, management, marketing, democracy...we’re just getting this going right now.

WFR: In the U.S., this generation is facing so much more debt than previous generations. What’s driving that? Can it partly be attributed to the ease of purchasing products online? Doesn’t this generation have more access to credit than previous generations, and aren’t they using it? In other words, is there a danger that we’re creating a generation of online shopaholics?

Tapscott: There isn’t, because these kids have very strong values. Yeah, they like to shop, but that’s not mainly what they’re about. They mainly care about the world. I mean, just look at what kids want to do when they graduate. Of the top ten organizations they want to work for, five of them are government or not-for-profit [organizations]. When I was a kid, everyone wanted to work for IBM. In the Eighties, they wanted to work for Michael Milken or an investment bank. In the Nineties, they wanted to work for a dot-com. And today, kids graduating from Harvard want to work for Teach For America. So this is a generation with a very strong sense of integrity. They also have great B.S. detectors.

Now, when I speak of a generation the way I just did right there, it’s mainly about the U.S. There are differences around the world. Coming into the workforce in the U.S., money is number four. They want to learn, they want to do interesting things and meet interesting people, and they want to do something meaningful, and they also want to have fun. In India, money’s number one because if you’re the kid in the family who got to go to college, you have to come back and support the family. So you care a lot about how much the job pays. The big problem for kids in terms of debt is the crushing debt of having gone to university. Debt is a real problem but it’s not that we’ve created a generation of shopaholics.

As you know from reading the book, I’m very concerned about the negative portrayal of this generation—that they’re net-addicted, glued to the screen, losing their social skills; [that] the Internet is eating the neocortex of youth today, that they’re the dumbest generation, that the digital age stupefies young Americans and is jeopardizing our future, “don’t trust anyone under 30,” they steal, they violate intellectual property rights, they’re bullies, they don’t give a damn, they don’t vote. And so on.

None of this cynical, negative view of youth vis-a-vis their interaction with the Web is supported by data. We’ve created a “little army of narcissists,” says Jean Twenge in a book called Generation Me. People are making this stuff up. This is kind of the central issue to me. You have the biggest generation ever—they’re coming into the workforce, [into] the marketplace, into society. With them, and from their experience growing up, is a whole new culture. It’s a culture of collaboration and innovation and speed and integrity. This culture is meeting up against all of our traditional institutions. We’re in the early days of a huge generational clash. If we older people don’t smarten up and listen to them and learn from them as opposed to doing the opposite…

In all of our institutions, we do the opposite. Rather than embracing Facebook and social networking [in order] to get beyond electronic mail to create high performance collaborative enterprises, companies are banning Facebook. When you do that, you say to a whole generation, “we don’t get it, we don’t understand your technology, we don’t understand collaboration, and we don’t trust you.” So, the really big central issue about the future to me is: what are we going to do? Are we going to continue to defend our old models and old institutions in the face of this new powerful view and force that’s emerging, or are we going to embrace it and transform our institutions for the twenty-first century? Sorry, I get a little passionate about this stuff.

WFR: Speaking of strong values, one of the eight Net Gen “norms” you describe in the book is integrity. How is this generation defining integrity, and how is it going to play itself out in the future in the economic and political spheres?

Tapscott: I think that young people have had to form their own point of view about values. When I was a kid, you just went to church and Sunday school, and that’s how you got your values. And there was no porn and there was no Blackberry that Dad could pull out at the dinner table and be distracted from the kids. Life was pretty straightforward. I had access to two television stations, as an example. We had one newspaper that came into the house. And I just kind of assumed this was the way things were. These kids are confronted with all kinds of conflicting stimulant information. They need to form opinions, and they need to figure out where they stand.

I think another factor is just the baby boomers overall have been pretty good parents. They talk to their kids and there’s a much more open relationship between the Net Geners and their parents than between the baby boomers when they were kids and their parents. The family was a more closed kind of thing … the kids reported to Mom, and Mom reported to Dad. But now there are real conversations that happen in families. And the boomers have been criticized a lot, but overall, they’ve been pretty good parents on these questions.

Another thing is that because of the Web, young people have grown up having to scrutinize things and I think they have pretty good B.S. detectors largely because there’s so much B.S. on the Internet.

WFR: Any idea what the generation after the Net Generation is going to be like?

Tapscott: Well, one of the biggest ideas in Grown Up Digital is that because these kids have grown up spending their time differently, especially during adolescence from the ages of eight to eighteen, a critical period of brain development, they actually have different brains. Boomers have watched TV for 24 hours a week and that creates a certain kind of brain. And these kids have spent that amount of time interacting, collaborating, composing their thoughts, scrutinizing, authenticating, organizing information, having to remember things. And this creates multitasking, and this creates a different kind of brain. So the actual deep structure and synaptic connections in the brain are different for an entire generation. Which, by the way, explains why this is not simply a life stage difference. It’s a true generational difference.

So, what will be the impact of the next generation—the kids who are twelve and under, who are truly bathed in bits, immersed in digital technologies and in the interactive and collaborative way of accessing information? … all I can say is that I think they’re going to be a lot like the Net Geners—even more so—but we’re in the early days of really understanding that.

About the Interviewee

Mr. Tapscott's earlier books include Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (with Anthony D. Williams) (McGraw-Hill, 2006), The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (McGraw-Hill, 1996), and Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (McGraw-Hill, 1998), to which his newest book is a sequel.

This interview was conducted by Aaron M. Cohen on behalf of World Future Review.