When I turned on the BBC breakfast news yesterday, I broke in to an interesting item with a 16 year old girl talking about the way teenagers use technology. She was relating how kids use SMS, or social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube to interact. She said that parents might think their kid was being lazy, just being on the computer all day, but actually they’re using MSN to talk to 10 people at once. She said older people think that kids are selfish and “me, me, me”, but actually the popular sites are all about community. She sited Danny Wallace as an example where the meetups on the web can get converted in to real action. Danny wrote Random Acts of Kindness: 365 Ways To Make the World A Better Place.
It was a nice taster for the way Generation Y will hit the ground running in our networked world of work. The older amongst us need to start using these tools now, for fear of being swamped or overtaken by the young business people of a few years time, for whom all this web 2.0 stuff is just second nature.
I later learned that this girl goes by the pseudonym Jellyellie, and one of the reasons she was on was that she was promoting her new book “How Teenagers Think” published later this month. Her argument is that there have been plenty of books about teenagers and the teenage years, but hardly any written by a teenager from their point of view. It’s just so great to see someone that age with all of the passion of youth, turning it to something real and valuable and starting early on the rungs of the ladder of commerce. Going to here website, I discovered she dropped out of the conventional education system at 14, and has been home educated ever since. I imagine the book will be a success.
