Gen Y's Fantastic Networking Skills

The majority of teen girls are not performing sexual acts in front of webcams for men they meet online. What may be more common are the provocative photos girls put on their MySpace profiles.
Annie Goodstein, YPulse

I've heard so much about Gen Y's advanced networking skills but I've never figured out exactly what they are. They can stay in touch with old school pals via email? So what?

Teenage girls like to use Instant Messenger. Unimpressed again. And some young people like to use MySpace and Facebook as mentioned above -- but fewer than we thought.

Is that it? Or, are Gen Yers particularly adept at initiating conversations with strangers at business gatherings? I've never heard mention of that.

In fact, I'm not sure that Gen Y has superlative networking skills at all. Perhaps it's just a fantasy of some granny who'd never used a computer and was over-impressed when she saw her grandchildren sending messages to their friends.

Any other opinions?

Paul Watson claims that having helicopter parents is not networking.

David Brooks is impressed by the "sucking-up skills" of many of his students at Yale:

I got a call from a politician in California who said that one of his important donors had a daughter at Yale who really wanted to get into the course. Such networking skills at such a young age make you want to stand and gape

Yep, that's right a Generation Y girl makes a simple phone call to Daddy, and this is written-up by the middle-aged Brooks as ultra-impressive networking skills on her part.

In my day (sorry, it just came out), pimp-Daddys were at least seen for what they were, rather than bizarrely reverse-puppeteered, so that their Rolodoxes become a personal achievement of the novice young ho. Oh, and being a sycophantic ho was not usually a role one aspired to, either.

Tammy Erickson, however, is incredibly impressed.

Here's the short version: Gen Y uses brief text messages to monitor where everyone is and what they are doing. This allows them to access these people for information when needed. It also enables them to coordinate them for quick action.

There are those who predict that one day soon, we will no longer think of computers as computational devices, or even means of communication. Their ultimate role, the reasoning goes, is coordination.

Text messaging is in some ways the early vanguard of this move toward the use of technology for nearly-constant coordination.

If you watch Gen Y's on a typical weekend night, you'll see that they rarely plan. Instead, they coordinate, largely through text messaging.

To most parents, these short messages may seem like a ridiculous use of electricity. But they are sharing bites of information about their current momentary location, where they are headed, and when they will arrive. This information allows them to hone in on each other like ships using radar.

Papa told me something similar when we spoke about Twitter in Toronto. Oh yeah, Twitter. That was hot for a couple of weeks, wasn't it?

Before closing, let me throw in a few more writers who stress, yet again, Gen Y's heavy use of modern technology as opposed to the networking itself.

Alison Willie trots out the usual MySpace, cell phones and text messages.

They hand out their MySpace pages before ever reciting their phone numbers; they haven't had a land-line telephone since they moved out of their parents' houses; they text faster than you can type

And Nadira Hira at Fortune stresses Gen Y's Blackberryitis:

The most important decorations, though, are electronic - iPods, BlackBerrys, laptops - and they're like extra limbs. Nothing is more hilarious than catching a Gen Yer in public without one of those essentials.

This reminds me of the TV dad whining that "she's always on the phone!" And, as I rarely see anyone out in public who isn't on a cell phone, maybe this part is true. But, is that real "networking" or simply yakking with your friends?

Comments

[Kristi Young formerly known as Kristi Mediocre]

I actually use text messaging to schedule phone interviews, and send updates on when I'm travelling and where I'll be to potential candidates. It's 1 Billion times more effective than a phone call or an email. Great Post.

[Chris Taylor]

I don't think the txting or IM phenom is much of a Gen-Y thing, it's more of an "age bracket" thing.

SMS message services have been with us since 1995, and instant messaging services for just as long.

When I was a young guy with lots of free time, I spent a good chunk of the day in IM services chatting with my pals. As I get older, I spend less and less time in IM because, frankly, my time gets eaten up with other things away from the PC. Same with my peers, particularly those with kids.

Still use text messaging a fair bit as an aid to coordination (i.e. accept / decline lunch invites, meeting times, invites to events, etc). But primary coordination still takes place mostly via phone, e-mail or in person. It would take waaaay too much thumb-typing to crank out a message specifying, say, an invitation to a scotch nosing, including the date/time, venue, other attendees, whiskies to be sampled, masterclass descriptions, etc etc.

Texting is valuable when you know most of the details and want to pass on an update. Or the entire message is short (i.e. pls pick up dry cleaning for me, I'm delayed at office til 6).