Always Connected: Generation Z, the “Digitarians”

I have a gaggle of children, and I have noticed that my 5 year old son thinks many devices have voice control, and he views this as normal.<p>My 11 year old son and 8 year old always think every screen has a touch interface, but they don&#x27;t use voice.<p>To me, it seems that there is a break in those generations. The 5 year old is voice activating his tablet, amazon fire tv, watches his parents voice command their phones driving - this is all totally normal to him and you can see he will often try a voice command on a device unfamiliar to him.<p>The older boys think using a PC is novel, and look at me strangely when I tell them about DOS and Windows 3.1 &#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F; oh well...

Just got back from a family reunion and my relations&#x27; kids were glued to their tablets playing mindless games and watching YouTube unattended for 4 hour spells and more day after day. It was so depressing, all these boring consumer drones in the making.<p>My kids get 1 hour of screen time a day, max (until they decide to become coders, and then the cap is lifted. :)

With all due respect, what a bunch of b.s. Goes to show that always being connected maybe isn&#x27;t all it&#x27;s hyped up to be. From the sound of it, it doesn&#x27;t appear to produce any lasting insights.<p>p.s. Whoever typed &quot;exec&quot; to run a DOS program?<p>p.p.s. &quot;Software is a dead. Digitarians know apps, games, and web browsers.&quot; WTF?

Can someone please remind me how demographers defend treating post-WWII generations as being 20 years in length when the evidence is very clear that real generations are much longer?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.isogg.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Generation_length" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.isogg.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Generation_length</a><p>I wouldn&#x27;t care so much if it weren&#x27;t for having to endure another round of inane punditry.

My son was born this year in March. I&#x27;m not sure if that counts as Z or if its something beyond that... but i&#x27;m not sure technology is the thing that will &quot;Define&quot; his generation. To be sure, I think VR and AI will definitely impact them by a lot.... but I think more impactful is that he&#x27;s going to be coming of age at exactly the moment when some of the worst effects of climate change (if we managed to slow it down very soon) are projected to happen.<p>I think his generation will be defined not by the new tech invented, but by the global changes they have to adapt to.

This generation is fighting the largest class warfare battle in history and guess what. There is only mutually assured destruction.