And the post-millennials, Generation Z, have turned either 26 or 17 depending on how you like to classify them. As a futurist I started this blog when I sensed that my children’s generation and their future would look very different from generations before them. I knew they would deal with the effects of a multitude…
“Hadn’t we enforced screen time limit that night, my daughter’s friend might not have tried to kill himself”. During the Q&A session a woman in the audience explained she had just introduced new screentime rules for her children. But in an evil twist of fate, this was the night her daughter’s friend had tried to…
Think about the home you grew up in. Did the aroma from your mother’s freshly baked cookies greet you? Or the stale smell of an empty house? Maybe you owned a house key to let yourself in while your parents were at work? Perhaps you learned to pull the door a certain way while unlocking it…
My friend Fredrik Winter who leads Oslo Business Region, a municipally owned startup accelerator, asked his network about the backlash against big tech: “Something has happened in the world of tech, and in the summer heat I wonder: In the last year there has been a sharp blow of relatively hard criticism of “big-tech”, like…
Artificial intelligence is on everybody’s lips these days.Vehicle automation, the merging of AI and automotive is the fodder of ginormous tech events like SXSW, Web Summit, Collision and CES. It’s hard not to get dazzled by the endorphin driven vibes and almost deterministic technological anticipations encircling these places. A nice contrast are smaller, more industry-specific…
To learn what makes Digital Natives tick, why not hear it straight from the horse’s mouth? This is why I spent the past few days at VidCom, the ultimate convention for online videos and the lives of digital influencers and their young fan base. VidCon is the brainchild of the vlogbrothers, themselves uber-successful YouTubers….
With increasing automation and robotics, as well as a hyperconnected global labor pool, the future of work frequently comes up as an issue for Homelanders or Generation Z. After the Millennials was recently commissioned by the educational non-profit Knowledge Works to do a nation-wide generational survey that assessed young people’s attitudes toward career preparation in…
Last week I attended Web Summit, Europe’s largest tech conference. This was the first year they summoned in Lisbon, Portugal having been in Dublin the years prior. The conference brings together over 50,000 attendees, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, globally renowned thought leaders and tech magnates as well as government officials ranging from city administrators to supranational…
No generation the size of 2-3 billion can be fully described with a simple bullet point list. And yet there are some generational commonalities we should be aware of. Generational research is a sifting process, and the biggest job is to weed out the noise between the true signals. After discarding myths and spurious effects,…
Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing a talk by Dr. Devorah Heitner, the author of Screenwise and site Raising Digital Natives. Dr. Heitner has the unusual disposition that she doesn’t believe digital technology and social media will lead our species into an apocalyptic downfall. Nor does she jump on the technophile bandwagon so often…
