A case in point: On my recent flight to New York, the stewardess made an announcement not once ... but three times ... not to conjugate in the aisles. I don't know what was more disturbing, the flubbing of what's actually a very important security announcement, or the fact that I was the only person laughing at the mistake. Surely someone else must have noticed, and then shared my image of passengers rebelling against airline authority by rising from their seats to declaim "amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum..."
I realise few people these days are as particular as me when it comes to words. (I am, after all, the type who still cringes at the mis-use of decimate. It is a beautiful word that means, quite precisely, to reduce by 10 percent. No other single word means that. Why must people bastardise it to mean total destruction, when we already have so many words that mean the same?) But I'll stubbornly keep arguing that precision is important. Language, after all, is one of the defining elements that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Many people lay the blame for linguistic decline solidly on the shoulders of the Net Generation, those born since the '80s who've grown up surrounded by technology. They communicate on a massive scale, but by text, twitter and snippet. They truncate. They abbreviate. Punctuation is a waste of space. It is unlikely that they conjugate.
This week, however, I must lay down my love of tradition and defend them. I've just attended a conference on innovation in New York. (It's the centrepiece of a major sponsorship I manage and is well worth exploration if you're interested in the topic. Go to xprize.org for full conference coverage.) Don Tapscott, author of "Born Digital" and an expert on societal change sparked by our networked world, was the special guest at our customer lunch and gave the conference's keynote address. He is wonderfully upbeat about this generation and positive about what we can learn from them.
The best proof point came from the conference itself. Attendees were older than the 20-something net gen average, but because the topic was innovation, most had a net gen sensibility when it came to the online world. These are people who love collaborative technology. Twittering, texting and skyping is as natural as breathing. More than 200 people attended the conference and at least 30 of them were tweeting throughout. (For the uninitiated, Twitter is a service that lets you broadcast short comments, or "tweets" to anyone who subscribes to be your "follower".)
My generation (I scraped into the baby boomers by three and a half months) was taught that doing anything other than paying attention during a presentation was the height of rudeness. Even if contravening that norm, we do it surreptitiously, sneaking a quick peak at our blackberries while pretending total engagement. Not the net gen. At this conference, the norm was for laptops to be open and blackberries in use. Were they being rude? Not paying attention?
On the contrary. Many were tweeting, and their actions added another layer to the conference. By searching i2i on Twitter you could pick up a live feed of all these tweets to see, in an instant, what people found interesting. No need to wait for journalistic coverage to see what the sound bites were. If 10 people tweeted the same quote, you knew that was the hot observation of the speech. If nobody tweeted for a few minutes, you knew the speaker was losing the hall. The kind of commentary that normally takes place in the breaks was happening real time, condensed into the presentation itself. Conference organisers regularly flipped the main screen from the speakers to the Twitter feed, so the whole hall could see this silent but tremendously active layer of participation taking place.
I have never attended a conference session that had this sense of buzz, engagement and participation. All that from a room in which it appeared that a chunk of the audience was messing around on laptops, paying no attention whatsoever. Clearly, there is more to this generation, and to social networking technology, than meets the eye.
So next time you see a kid with earphones on and eyes glued to a screen, don't immediately assume he's dropping out of the world. He may actually be contributing to it in a new and exciting way.
Just don't let him conjugate in the aisles. This, of course, would be a very bad thing.
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