I don't generally like generational labels.  They generally fail to impart any actual description of the humans they encompass and with the exception of The Greatest Generation, are predominantly negative.  No one I know ever says anything really positive about the Boomers and Generation X has been so maligned as lazy yuppies and miscreants as to make me glad I was born just a few years too late to be lumped in with them.  My generation has been given a placeholder name, Generation Y.  Some others might call us the New Boomers, Millennials, or the Echo Wave.  We're not Generation Y simply because it comes after X.  Calling us Millennials is misleading, as by definition we were all born before that anti-climactic event.  We're not New Boomers simply because our parents are now Old Boomers.  None of these names have anything to do with us, other than to denote our chronological place in the world.  Sort of.

I've just finished reading What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis and I'd like to nominate his moniker for us as perhaps the most accurate and defensible.  Jarvis calls us Generation G.  The G is for Google, of course.  Though certainly not the major theme of the book, Jarvis points out that our generation has embraced Googleism and that we have grown up with Google.  In the book, Jarvis lays out what he believes are the concepts and business practices of Google that are changing every part of the world that Google touches.  As a member of the generation that made a monster out of Facebook and has been enforcing the rules of the road on the internet--openness, transparency, and treating personal information with care and respect--I found myself having a surprisingly intense reaction to the concepts and potentialities that Jarvis lays out in his book.  We have come to a point where the things we are capable of seems to outstrip our will to harness those powers.   I want to hasten the demise of the hysterical mass media and prop up the niche journalist.  I want to see the strength and voice of society's true numbers captured and applied to the problems whose solutions are obfuscated by the powerful few.  I want to see the industries that live by knowledge gaps alone begin to fall prey to the power of search and a plethora of individuals sharing their bits and pieces of what used to be impossible puzzles.  

          In chapter after chapter Jarvis shows that the technology is here and that all this is possible.  The future is now.  But none of this is happening on any real scale yet because Generation G does not age and mature at the pace of Moore's Law.  Our numbers cannot grow as fast as YouTube does.  Most importantly, the Boomers are not with us.  Many of them have no concept of the power that the federated model of information flow will afford us.  Those that do are, at least in my experience, too well anchored--by fear or ignorance, usually--to the methods and models that have always worked in the pre-Google age and are unwilling to commit the time and effort necessary to take advantage of these new opportunities.  Generation X, for its part, stands between; uncommitted to the Internet Age but capable of embracing it, and simply too small in physical numbers to swing the balance of power in either direction.  Jarvis finishes his book with a glimpse of the future, and it is not without irony that in the ever quickening world of Facebook status updates, texting, Twitter, and push e-mail, I found myself hoping for the world to hurry up!  The future is us, and all we can do is wait and see what we can build with the tools that our technology has already provided.   

What Would Google Do? is one of those books that makes the intangibles tangible, laying out example after example of industries and practices that are all about to change, like it or not, because of the power the internet brings to the user.  I'm still mulling over everything I heard and the implications, but in the meantime, I highly recommend the book, even if you're not a member of Generation G.