Generation Gap

In September, I am giving my major annual 'State of the ICT Nation' speech for the Prince's Trust (and atop BT Tower as before). It's entitled Revolution and one of the themes is what I perceive as a growing Generation Gap as evidenced by those that 'get' social networking (ie Facebook) and those that don't. Indeed I've given you many examples of the corporate use of social networking on HotViews on many occasions in the last few years.

Last month I wrote What won it for Obama where I detailed how the 40 year old Barack Obama had harnessed the power of social networking in his campaign and had built the largest ever Facebook Group. By the way, it had 900,000 members when I wrote in early June. It now has over 1.1m.

This Generation gap appeared again on Saturday when Obama visited the UK. Gordon Brown (aged 57) gave Obama books on Winston Churchill by Martin Gilbert. In contrast, David Cameron (aged 42) gave Barack Obama (aged 40) CDs of the UK artists he most liked on his iPod - Radiohead, the Smiths, Gorillaz. It seemed to illustrate the Generation Gap very well. Mind you, if you don't understand the significance of this (or know the groups) you probably don't 'get' social networking either!