I recently came across some research and writings wondering whether the Millenials, born between 1982 and 2000, are part of an “intellectually devoid generation.” The ASCD Blog takes a look at Prof. Mark Baurlein’s work, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young American’s and Jeopardizes Our Future. The author believes that students don’t read and think, but practice, “information retrieval, not knowledge formation, and the material passes from Web to homework paper without lodging in the minds of the students.”
I haven’t read the book but have begun to read the reviews on the author’s site and it looks to highlight many trends that we see around us and experiences that many of us have had in daily life since the rise of the Internet and other forms of media. Here is a nice excerpt from a review that describes something I did with a print newspaper article yesterday.
Elsewhere, Bauerlein also echoes Carr by citing a study of online reading habits which has discovered something called the “F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content.” This is the technique of reading horizontally across the first few lines of text, then halfway across for a few more, and finally vertically the rest of the way down the page. There can be few of us who do not feel a twinge of guilty recognition at this description. Busted!
I am not sure if all of this means that we have the dumbest generation coming of age, but we do know there have been many management challenges with this generation.
The entrepreneurial generation blog over at Entrepreneur.com points to PR firm Porter Novell’s experiences giving Millenials their own “mini” firm in order to empower them.
According to Entrepreneur.com, “Last summer, the firm created a ‘pop up’ agency called Jack & Bill (named after the firm’s founders, Jack Porter and Bill Novelli) and staffed it with eight young employees.”
“We have an agency filled with millennials, with a need to feel empowered,” Porter Novelli managing partner Lisa Rosenberg told Stuart Elliott of The New York Times.
Is this generation so lame that firms have to make up projects in order to keep their interest? Perhaps all work with these Millenials should flow through MySpace, Facebook, and CollegeHumor.com. Maybe that will make it easier integrating the “Dumbest Generation” into the modern workplace. Any thoughts?