发信人: roy_young(Roy)
整理人: imstella(2001-01-09 02:52:01), 站内信件
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Don Tapscott talks about the “generation lap” phenomenon
in his passage “The generation lap.” He thinks, “Society has
never before experiences this phenomenon of knowledge hierarchy
being so effectively flipped on its head.” The generation lap is
happening because youngsters know more than the older people, such
as their parents, grandparents, or teachers, in certain domains.
The original meaning of “hierarchy” refers to a system in
which certain people with high rank have the authorities and control
the people with lower rank. In this passage, “hierarchy” means the
structure of the society that older people are always teaching
youngsters while youngsters are always been taught. In this kind of
traditional social structure, older people are always the
“teachers,” while the youngsters are always the “students.” This
kind of old-style social structure is common among almost all the
traditional cultures. People say because older people have more
experience, youngsters, who don’t have much social experience, can
learn a lot from the older people. That was only true before the reversal happens.
The reversal has changed the society a lot. Because of the
reversal, older people aren’t always in the position of teaching
youngsters any more. They have to learn a lot of things, especially
new technologies such as computers, from the youngsters now, because
their old ways of gathering experiences, which are based on passing
experiences generation after generation, don’t work any more.
Oppositely, youngsters are the ones with a lot of experiences on high
technology equipments. Youngsters’ ways of learning new things,
which is based on trying and exploring, bring them a lot of
experiences that cannot be found on the manuals. At the same time,
the older people are trying to follow the old ways of learning, but
they cannot find people older than them to teach them new
technologies. At the same time, older people, especially the others
without experiences in computer-related job, are always afraid of
“breaking” those expensive equipments so they don’t dare to try
or explore like the youngsters. They can only learn things from
those complicated manuals, so they will never master high technology
equipments as well as the youngsters.
As we can see in the passage, not everyone is pleased with
this reversal, especially for some of the older people who cannot
accept the fact that youngsters know more than them. Because when
they were young, they learned things from people who were older than
them at that time. The older people consider teaching younger people
as some kind of priorities or authorities. Now it should have been
their turn to teach the youngsters, but because of the reversal,
that’s not what’s happening; therefore, the older people think this
reversal is challenging their authorities in the society, and they
don’t want to admit the fact that youngsters are better than them in
many ways now. Their way of protesting is by not asking for help
from youngsters. Although it seems to be a little helpless, they are
still doing this “protest,” hoping to gain their authorities back.
In fact, this is not true. The reversal is the way it
should be, and no one can stop it. In human beings’ history, the
people who have the authorities are always the people who are the key
of the progressing of the society. When females were doing the main
jobs to make everyone survives in the tribes, they had the
authorities. Later on, when males started to do the jobs like
fishing and hunting, a reversal happened, male took over the place
of the females and had the authorities. Because older people used to
be able to give others a lot of suggestions and had made people’s
lives better, they had authorities. Youngster now can give other
members of the family advices and make their lives easier, that’s
why they should have their authorities too and be respected more
than before. According to the passage, in our society, “family
members start to respect each other for what their authorities
recall are” after the reversal. In fact, older people don’t have to
be afraid of losing their authorities. They still have their
authorities even though they are less than before, because they still
have more experience than the youngsters in many other domains and
can have contribution to the society.
This also applies to the relationship between the older
bosses and the younger employees. The young employees know the newest
technologies and can accept the newest concept while the old bosses
have the experiences of management and ability to make employees with
different background and personalities to work together. When the
young employees and the old bosses can work together, which means the
new ideas from and the experience and well-organized management
combination, it often leads to a successful company.
The reversal of the hierarchy in our society is not what we
should be worried about. It is really what we should be happy for.
The reversal actually shows the progress and improvement of our
society. It’s happening in our everyday life. We hear about, we see
it, and we feel it, and our lives can get better because of the
contribution from the youngsters. We, the youngsters, are the most
important part of the reversal. Certainly this reversal won’t have
as great impact on human lives as the first and second industrial
revolution, but what it tells us is, it’s the time for youngsters
to contribute to the society directly and leave our footprints on
the book of human history now.
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