What is interesting: the one who manages the employee, who is suitable for his father, and the one who receives instructions from the granddaughter, who is with technology on “you”, feel equally embarrassed.
A well-known writer, special correspondent for a popular newspaper, sighs at the computer in the editorial office. The young boss asked him to redo the article. The writer calls his granddaughter:
“Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. What is it that the computer emphasizes different words to me?
He is the one who corrects your mistakes. Click on the right mouse button — you will see.
After a while, shouts are heard: — This Underwood teaches me to write! Me, the laureate of the Russian Booker! Guess what he says?! «Freak» is a word with a pronounced expressive intonation. Use in business speech is undesirable! Here’s a freak!
And what is interesting: the one who manages the employee, who is suitable for his father, and the one who receives instructions from the granddaughter, who is “you” with technology, feels equally awkward. And it often doesn’t even occur to young people that older people don’t use mobile phones not out of stubbornness, but because they don’t know how. Simplified models appeared only after the anthropologist Sadie Plant commissioned Motorola to make a poignant documentary in 2002, in which elderly people fidgeted with mobile phones in their hands, trying to figure out where this phone had a receiver, where the lever was, and which side to apply it to the ear.
Progress has reached such a pace that attitudes have changed: young people often know and can do more than their own parents
For thousands of years, our civilization has developed very slowly. The main task was to preserve the accumulated knowledge and pass it on to descendants. The bearers of this knowledge were old people, hence the respect for their authority. But there were always “upstarts” who, contrary to tradition, invented something of their own. If the innovation turned out to be useful, peers learned from the inventor new ways of hunting, farming or building.
This was how scientific and technological progress was ensured, which in the 1960th century reached unprecedented rates: people no longer had time to learn everything that their contemporaries came up with. The American anthropologist Margaret Mead noted back in the XNUMXs that with such a high rate of knowledge renewal, young people are becoming more knowledgeable than old people *.
Our children master new technical means faster than us. Fathers try to keep up with their sons in mastering computer games, and grandmothers take Internet surfing lessons from their grandchildren. But in labor relations it is still customary for the elders to command the younger ones. Therefore, everyone needs employees “under 30”, which is simply ridiculous in the context of the general aging of the population. In addition, the success of any business depends not only on knowledge, but also on personal maturity. Young people, of course, learn new things faster, but tolerance, breadth of views and the ability to cooperate come only with age. And without them, no human activity is possible.
* M. Mead «Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap». Panther, 1972.