Generation Plug & Play
Autor: Marco Tulio Kehdi | Publicado: 2010-11-27T20:31:00-03:00

I am sorry for taking long to write. I am really back. When I said it in my last posts, I really meant it. I feel like I am going through many situations in my life that again makes this blog to be somehow interesting. I had another topic that I was thinking about writing, but I decided for a new one, the “Generation Plug &amp; Play”.

I did a fast research at Google and I didn’t find any mention to this expression in this context, but it seems to be very appropriate. Why am I discussing about different generations? There are two main reasons: the first is because some days ago I was in a discussion with some people and they were asking me about the differences between the generation Y and the one that is about to come; and the second is because I feel characteristics of this new generation, on people of my generation… which made me reflect even more about the subject.

So what are those characteristics? When I was young I had the chance to dissect some very old computers. I had a 286, after that, a 486… a Pentium 100. For those that has no clue of what I am talking about, their procession speed was around 66Mhz. Which means that the computer in which I am typing right now, has almost the same procession capacity of 70 pieces of that one. We used to measure the speed of a new computer, by typing DIR on DOS and seeing how much time it would take.

The consequence of me having this kind of intense and "insider" contact with those computers, is that I have not just learned how to do something, but how that thing made what I wanted to do, possible. In a practical example: I know that, when you copy a text (Crtl + C), it will be allocated in the RAM memory, most likely. How is it different of the generation of my parents? 

Once I gave an example to my uncle and he says he uses it still. The example was: imagine that now, he wants to download a song in his computer. It’s more likely that he is going to follow a mechanical process. He is going to review in his mind a series of steps that he would need to take to be able to get that song downloaded. For example: I need to go to that specific website, to click in that specific section, to search for an artist, to find the song in a list and etc. If it’s in our case we just have the outcome in mind: I need that song. We have not only one path to get there: I can go to Itunes, I can use torrent, I can download it from Youtube and if we put more efforts thinking about it… We would likely think about more ways to do this task. So, being short, for my uncle, this process is something mechanical, for me, it’s organic. 

However, if you think about the next generation, is it different from us? I would say, in parts. For sure, they are able to transform this task in something organic as well. They can research and try to find the easiest source to find the solution. But they have no idea on the evolution of the technologies that made it possible for them to download that. That’s the first difference. But what identifies them as the Plug &amp; Play generation is the "inability" to deal with any new complexity in the process. I will try to exemplify that again.

When I was 12 years old, we had an awesome game called DOOM. That was a hit and we loved to play that (short note: nowadays, to be able to play DOOM in a computer like mine, we would have to use some function to de-accelerate the computer, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible). But, to play Doom it wasn’t a simple (Plug &amp; Play) thing. Actually, quite the opposite. We needed to go to DOS (another Operational System - like Windows - based on text) and utilize a software called ARJ (the only one that we knew that could do it) type a routine for the software to be able to compact the game from another computer to ours in 12 diskettes and then, run another routine in our computer to be able to decompress it. Important note: there was a HUGE chance that one of the diskettes would have some problem, and then you would have to re-start the process from the beginning and the diskettes were also somehow expensive.

And now that you may be asking me “and what does it have to deal with the Generation Plug and Play?” Well, I answer that with another question: “Can you imagine any of the kids you see, doing that to play a game??” I don’t think so. This next generation can be multi task, get used to new functions and be able to use new apps or play games much faster than I do. However, this inability of dealing with the hardness of the process to get things done may have several consequences for them. The most clear for me, is related to the type of problems that we have in life. Those are not very structured problems with Plug &amp; Play solutions and that may mean a lot to the resilience, patience and many other characteristics of the new generations. That’s something we will take time to be able to see clearly and much more to understand it.