Spanning the digital divide

In the BCB newsroom this week: thoughts of the digital divide, the generational divide, and where the two ideas intersect.

Peter Severinson's investigation of Gen Y – in the West, regarded at the most educated and "wanted" generation in history – has got us talking: What, other than stereotypes, separates the Baby Boomers (materialistic, self-obsessed) from Gen X (worldweary, underemployed) and Gen Y (ruddy, idealistic, overachieving)? We think it's the technology.

Three of us from the BCBusiness digital division were sitting around the other day, chatting. The conversation ran from taxonomy (the way we tag the articles we post online) to our content management system (basically, the guts of the website) to something called information architecture (our Web developer was rambling about it – I actually have no idea what it is). The striking thing is that, although each of us digitalistas is busy all day long, clacking away at our keyboards in our garage-sized bullpen, not one of us produces a tangible object.

This is pretty new, isn't it? I envy our writers, who can heft a magazine in their hands when everything is done. By contrast, with websites, where each article falls into a bottomless archive and retrieval depends on juice from BC Hydro and the cooperation of a computer, everything seems contingent. Digital workers teeter daily on the brink of solipsism: Is anyone even sure that a webpage actually exists?

John Cochrane, an old BCBusiness stalwart and the VP of Promotional Features, got his first-ever work computer two months ago. By contrast, our digital media team is populated by people whose spinal columns may as well connect to our motherboards. And although we undoubtedly think more globally, we've almost totally forsaken the physical and the local: we seldom need to telephone outside the office, print anything on company letterhead, or shake a client's hand. It's a different world.

And it's the technology that makes it so, for ill or for well. Without their social networking sites, would Gen Y be so sociable? Without their 24-hour Internet and MSN Messenger would their attention span (or their spelling) be so degraded? I feel sorry for Gen Xers, really. All they got was auto-reverse cassette tapes and Betamax vs. VHS. What a gyp.

A few more techie stats on our winning young friends from Gen Y, courtesy of Wikipedia:

• 97 per cent own a computer
• 94 per cent
  own a cell phone
• 76 per cent use instant messaging, and 15 per cent of those are logged on 24/7
• 34 per cent use websites as their primary source of news
• 28 per cent own a blog and 44 per cent read blogs
• 49 per cent download music using peer-to-peer file sharing
• 75 per cent of college students have a Facebook account
• 60 per cent own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod.

John Bucher is the editor of BCBusiness Online.

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