Entering the Shift Age: The End of the Information Age and the New Era of Transformation by David Houle

Author:David Houle [Houle, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2013-01-17T14:00:00+00:00

Digital Natives are the first generation of the twenty-first century. There is no remembrance, legacy thinking, established pattern of behavior, thought, or cultural context from the twentieth century. They are a clean-slate generation.

If you will accept my earlier premise from Chapter Two that the Shift Age started around 2006, then the oldest Digital Native was nine and just entering the fourth grade. So this is the first completely new generation of the Shift Age.

Now, why do I divide the Digital Natives based upon birth years 1997–2009 and 2010 and after? Think about what transpired with connectivity and technology during the years 2010–2012:

• Global cell phone connectivity crossed 70 percent

• Touchscreens became the norm

• The iPad was introduced, starting the computing migration to tablets

• App phones—iPhones and Android phones—achieved market dominance in the smartphone market segment in the United States

• 3G, then 4G, high-speed wireless connectivity became commonplace in many countries

• Ebook readers took off in the United States and ebooks as a percentage of books sold dramatically increased

• DVDs gave way to streaming

• Smart music platforms such as Pandora and Spotify grew dramatically

So, a two-year-old in 2012, in a middle-class or above household, has screens everywhere, many of them touchscreens. From the app phone to the tablet, to the laptop to the flat-screen television, screens were and are ubiquitous. Digital Natives’ first awareness of and consumption of content was all on screens.

This second wave of Digital Natives will never remember content that was not available on a screen. This second wave will never remember not having touchscreens. This second wave will never remember a time when they couldn’t interact via video with anyone anywhere in the world, live. Everything from anywhere and at any time is available on a screen. This means that this second wave of Digital Natives will be the first generation for whom the screen reality may well be the dominant reality they experience. They will be the first generation that knows no lack or limitation because of place.

This points to the special reason I am fascinated by the Digital Natives and particularly the ones born since 2010. They simply will have a different consciousness than any preceding generation. As they grow up, this will become increasingly clear.

In the last chapter I touched on the probable evolutionary shift in human consciousness that will be a defining part of the Shift Age. I have always thought that this might start to occur in the 2020s. When will the oldest Digital Native turn twenty-one? 2018. When will the first of the second wave of this generation turn twenty-one? 2030. (To bring this down to the old traditions of the physical reality, the United States will have a Digital Native as President in the 2040s, following the first or second Millennial President.)

So this coming of age of the Digital Native generation will be one of the strongest influences on this evolutionary step of human consciousness. Of course, there will be people from preceding generations that will make this shift as well, but they will have had to let go of something from the past to do so.

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