Reflection and Resolution
Posted on Jan 06, 2010
Why reflection and resolution are emphasized per annum and not diurnally is its own little mystery. Yet, thinking is thinking and perhaps there will be a few pots-stickers among my early morning mental wanderings to provide food for thought in your household as you continue to raise the N-Geners under your roofs.
As 2009 concluded, Tiger Woods learned some Old Testament Scripture in a painful way. A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold (Proverbs 22:1 NIV). This is important on a variety of spiritual, cognitive and physical levels to be sure, but it is also a case study for the Net Generation. Navigate through a few web pages and you soon discover a trail of “breadcrumbs” collects to help you quickly retrace your digital steps. Where there are crumbs, there are cookies. Without regard to our wishes and intentions, there are breadcrumbs aplenty strewn from the invisible vortices surrounding our lives. Our digital dust is overwhelmingly our own creation; its permanence is a feature of the media. The Charles Schultz character “Pigpen” comes to mind; his dust devil was merely more tangible and transitory. If your letter precedes “Y” in the generational alphabet soup (i.e. Generation X), you remember a time when the words “personal information” and “private” were synonymous. Sad to say, that toothpaste is not going back into the tube. Digital footprints are everywhere and they are as permanent as astro-prints in undisturbed lunar dust. What is not immediately obvious is that even someone as young as Tiger Woods sits on the generational divide of those that understand the importance of that truth and care - and those younger. Longing for privacy and winning it will never again coalesce.
Don Tapscott, Grown up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, provides numerous insights into the world your children are creating. Yes, creating: now. Privacy, reflection and truth in the Net Generation are disquieting issues troubling me in increasing intensity. “It says so in the book,” has always been an opportunity to intone “because it is in print does not make it true.” 48 chromosomes, Piltdown Man and a phalanx of other untruths have appeared in print, with pictures. Today, mistakes and intentional errors happen at the speed of the electron and trillions of repetitions forever magnetized into the digital record provide false gravitas. For the Net-Generation the fact that the book is facial, downloadable or bound in leather will change nothing; print does not truth create. The frightening thing is that the savvy N-gener already assumes that the picture they are seeing is “shopped,” the video is a mash-up, the text has been surreptitiously edited and the digital “friend” is not a real person at all. It simply does not matter to them. When that line is crossed, truth has lost its relevancy. This generational naivety is partially induced by the natural brain development of those most active in the digital arena, but understanding that makes it no less frightening. Travails such as the Tiger Woods story, when one’s created image disagrees with the reality of the breadcrumb record, provide an opportunity in working with children to pull open the veil and discuss why reflection, privacy and truth DO matter. The silver and gold will mean nothing if the name Woods decays.
So, about those pot-stickers: what does it mean to be truly reflective? What aspects of any life should be personal and private? How will that privacy be guarded and by whom? What role will truth play the way life is lived and in our culture? By what measure will truth be judged? What are the spiritual implications of such issues? These are issues unique to our times; may their importance galvanize our action. Welcome to 2010! There is no better year than this one to begin the journey leading to solutions.
