The Word of the Day Is "Crowdsourcing"

"In addition to basic differences in attitude that seem to arise with differences in age, each generation tends to use social technologies in different ways. To get a broader sense of these differences, I asked 1,200 of my closest friends on Facebook and Twitter what they thought of the online generation gap. Surprisingly, the answers I got - from people as young as 19 and as old as 60 - were fairly consistent. The gap is most evident in the way people use the networks, not in whom they connect with. The networks of nearly everyone who responded to my questions span multiple generations of users. But the observations my correspondents made about the kinds of posts that other participants submit were telling. One representative response came from a Twitter user who had this to say: "Gen Dvide=Usage Dvide <25>25 tend 2 use 4 customized networking/info/culture/research" (that's text speak even I barely understood).

Translation: It's all in how they use it. Common gripes about the inanity of Twitter updates - stereotypically oversharing every moment of daily life from breakfast to dinner, including all rest stops - may be largely due to the tendency of 20-somethings to broadcast their personal lives in their status updates. (The Twitter criticisms can be rebutted, of course.) Nearly every respondent acknowledged that members of Generation Y - often defined as those born in the 1980s and 1990s - seem bent on publicizing every detail of their daily life over the Internet. By contrast, members of Generation X - tagged as those born between 1964 and 1984, who now make up much of the mainstream workforce - tend to post more information about their professional lives, conferences they're attending and projects they're working on. To some older observers, it looks like self-absorbed bragging, though many 30-somethings claim to have reaped career-boosting benefits from this type of crowdsourcing." (Robert Strohmeyer, PC World, feature article on the MSN homepage, June 10, 2009)

"Rob Carter, chief information officer at FedEx, thinks the best training for anyone who wants to succeed in 10 years is the online game World of Warcraft. Carter says WoW, as its 10 million devotees call it, offers a peek into the workplace of the future. Each team faces a fast-paced, complicated series of obstacles called quests, and each player, via his online avatar, must contribute to resolving them or else lose his place on the team. The player who contributes most get to lead the team - until someone else contributes more. The game, which many Gen Yers learned as teens, is intensely collaborative, constantly demanding and often surprising. "It takes exactly the same skill set people will need more of in the future to collaborate on (multinational, multicultural) work projects," says Carter. "The kids are already doing it." (Anne Fisher, Time, May 25, 2009)

On the movie Swing Vote, with Kevin Costner (see my 2/4/09 review), the main character uses the term "insourcing" to describe manual labor job positions getting taken by illegal immigrants. "Crowdsourcing" beats that word hands down. I happen to be one of those "self-absorbed" 30-somethings described above, using online networks for "info/culture/research." It reminds me of a conversation I once had with a college roommate about internet search engines changing what is "definitive" to what is "most popular." Marketing firms are already "crowdsourcing" different celebrities by the number of Twitter followers that they have. Popularity has gone from being a quality to a measurable quantity.

What that means for the future of employment is no different from the past - "it's not WHAT you know but WHO you know" (or how many people know you). Instead of the 20-year span defined above as 1964-1984 for Generation X births, I had always heard that the cutoff was 1978, making me a day away from being born into Generation Y (Why?). If 1984 is the actual cutoff, then that makes my youngest brother less than a year off from being Generation X. I think he played World of Warcraft, which I never did, so if you're just going by the second quote above, I am definitely X while my brother is Y.