Data Quest Article, 02/2009, Ganesh Natarajan   The budget is well balanced with emphasis on education and employment     The next time you go to a friend’s house for dinner make sure you check how you press the doorbell. If you do it with your index or middle finger like you watched your dad doing you are still safe but if you involuntarily end up using your thumb, you are well on your way to becoming what Don Tapscott has called a Net Gener, a person who has the disease that most of us in the IT sector and of course new US President Barack Obama have caught, excessive use of sms services and blackberries which have made the thumb the most flexible part of our anatomy and sent us careening down a one way slope to living on the internet. Not that’s such a bad deal actually – my friend Sukhie Vohra introduced me to the joys of sms at the dawn of this decade and over the years my faithful mobile phone has become a hub for jokes and comments of all colours. As indeed have the ubiquitous e-mail and the power of social networking epitomized through wonderful sites like Facebook, Linked In, Silicon India, Plaxo, High 5 and a zillion others. The Net Geners who lurk all over the web are quick tell me where to dine in Stuttgart when my Dopplr update reveals my latest trip plan and friends and acquaintances from companies and institutions of a distant past profess to know me intimately and insist on being my friend. I stand resolute to admitting only people I really want to let into my life to leave their eyeballs on my Facebook site but everybody and his dog and brother and friend are free to stalk every other site I inhabit !So I plead guilty – I am a Net Gener and proud of it ! Alice Hawthorn in a seminal article in the International Herald Tribune points out the skills transformation that have slowly but inexorable swept us into the Net generation, which our younger generation now take for granted. The ability to multitask which our children do naturally – television blaring, an iPod tune strumming in the ear and a telephone conversation keeping the mouth busy while the fingers respond to text messages and the eye looks at instant messenger feed have slowly become part of our way of life and work as well ! Ms Hawthorn also mentions visualization or the ability to capture multiple images and even text from multiple web sites and synthesise them into some form of understanding. I remember being very inspired in the nineties by a wonderful book written by the editor of WIRED magazine that predicted the demise of push based marketing through newspapers and television and the need to understand a plan for pull based marketing through the World Wide Web. When I stay with my daughter at her apartment in Cambridge and observe the fact that she never installed a television set or subscribed to The Times or Telegraph, I realize the wisdom of those early predictions. What is amazing to note is the familiarity with ever changing technology that many of us happily embrace as part of everyday lives. While traditionalists like me still stick to trusted and familiar blackberries and phones to avoid the perils of learning new tricks with iPhones and newer devices, most of our brethren and all of the next generation find it second nature to change technologies every few months and assimilate the latest music download sites and wikis into their daily routine without a “Flickr” of an eyelash. Young Nilofer an ISB grad who live at our house and has become the informal Chief Technology Manager of the house, can flit between deciphering gibberish on our flat screens to managing the wireless environment and uploads and downloads that go across five computers in the house with the ease of master craftsman, except that her craft is ingrained in her learning processes whereas many of us have been dragged kicking and screaming into the realms of the Next Geners! There are still some wise youngsters who proclaim “nobody below the age of thirty can ever become my Facebook friend” but the new generation are a tolerant lot that permit us to fumble with our learning processes and invade their domains from time to time! And a final word of warning to all fellow Net Geners. The fist hospitalization case for Blackberry Thumb was reported a year ago in the US and evolution will surely see our great grand children born with oversize thumbs and underdeveloped spelling and essay writing skills. Thank your stars you may not be around toe see that!       Back