After a talk yesterday at the Indiana Chamber Executives Association’s annual conference, i had a great discussion about the powerful generation gap between the baby boomer and the younger generations that have now entered the work force (in terms of their attitudes toward social media).  He explained his personal experience of the gap in a very interesting way.  I will do my best to paraphrase it here:

“I distinctly remember watching, with my parents, the episode of the Ed Sullivan Show on which the Beatles first appeared.  I absolutely loved the music, and my parents hated it.  There was a distinct generational difference between how i experienced that music and the way that my parents did.  I think the same dynamic is at work with social media, but this time I am in the role of the older generation.”

He went on to point out that, though many people explain the social media generation gap as a lack of fluency with the tools or a misunderstanding of its utility, there is a much deeper, more fundamental dynamic at work.  A dynamic which is similar in some deep way to the one which also meant that millions of American families had nearly identical experiences of that first Beatles appearance.

I could not agree more.  The shift toward mass social media adoption is a part of a much deeper cultural shift which requires more than a mere re-tooling.  Instead it must begin with a deep understanding of the role that technology (social media, television, Beatles records, printing presses) plays in how we change our ways of organizing, communicating with and relating to each other from generation to generation in business and in society.