Apparently, Boomers don’t want to blog, be part of social networks, play games online, or listen to podcasts. The reasons:
- 47 % cited concerns over privacy and having personal information on the web
- 39 % said they are too busy
- 32% said they do not see the benefit of spending time social networking
I’m from Generation X, what I see as the Optimistic Rebel Generation. The generation that realizes concerns of privacy and personal info on the web are negligible when the government, credit card companies, and anyone motivated enough can access your info. The generation that realizes that if you’re too busy, it’s your own fault. After all, Generation X is also know as the Slacker Generation. Apparently, we have a different set of values then Boomers. The social vehicles that connected the Boom Generation (bowling night, church picnics, Kiwanis) weren’t rebellious enough for us—so we developed our own.
I’ve got 3 questions at this point. When I started writing this post, I started thinking about Optimistic Rebels. I came up with the second question first, but I think it makes more sense to ask them in this order:
- Who are the Optimistic Rebels of Gen X?
- What Optimistic Rebels do the Boomers look up to?
- What do you think the benefit of social networking is?
I’ll answer the third question first, mostly because I need to think about the other two.
To me, the benefit of social networks is that we’re smarter together. We see more, know more, and remember more, when we pose questions to a group of our peers, share, and document/archive the conversations—creating a searchable record of it.
Your thoughts?
MediaPost Publications - Boomers Are Not Bloggers - 07/24/2008
12 responses so far ↓
1 Optimistic Rebels of Gen X | Brewed Fresh Daily // Jul 25, 2008 at 4:46 pm
[...] Boomer Optimistic Rebels? | OptimisticRebel.com Category: blogging [...]
2 Valdis // Jul 25, 2008 at 7:49 pm
G, where do I start?
1) Boomers have very good social networks. Usually the better their network, the more careful they are when/how they share it. Usually older folks have better networks because they have met more people over their lifetimes! … on “average”!
2) Social networks do NOT just happen on-line!!! Us boomers were building social networks before you Gen X, Y, and Z folks ever touched a mouse!
3) On-line social networks tend to be polluted, full of noise. Out of all your connections on LI, FB, MS, etc [YASN]– how many people do you really know? With people indiscriminately accepting “friend requests” @ YASN [and playing a game of "mine's bigger"] their on-line SNs tend to be overblown and very inaccurate.
4) I bet ~32% of your generation is also not on YASNs. You are a Digerati[a compliment] who hangs with other Digeratis in a tight clique [echo chamber?] and probably don’t know many people w/o in internet account.
5) I’ll put the rest in a blog post one of these days…
OMG! a boomer who blogs???
G did beat me to blogging and has always encouraged me to do so… thanks bud.
3 Gloria Ferris // Jul 25, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Bowling nights, church picnics, Kiwanis? Hmm, certainly not MY cup of tea.
This blog looks like it could become quite interesting. Looking forward to reading it.
4 TimFerris // Jul 25, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Valdis–
It’s good to be misunderstood. It gives us a tactical advantage…
5 Anita Campbell // Jul 26, 2008 at 8:59 am
Hi George, nice new blog here — I like it.
Like Valdis, my reaction to your post is: hmm, where do I start?
(1) Bowling night, church picnics and Kiwanis? I grew up during Woodstock and violent “4 dead in Ohio” Vietnam War protests — we started out nowhere near as tame as Generation X.
(2) To me online social networks are less about age than mindset. I am much more into online social networking and blogging than say, my employee of Generation X. She learned from me and probably would be perfectly content without blogging.
(3) Who do I look up to? I look up to those who are interested in trying new things. Maybe they’re Generation X, Gen Y or Boomers. Age truly doesn’t enter into much for me.
That said, I think a lot of people regardless of age wonder about the benefits of online social networking. Some people are digerati and some are not. While the numbers of the digital-embracing may be greater the younger the generation, that’s just a matter of degree not an all-encompassing stereotype. Think of the numbers as being on a sliding scale, not an either/or situation.
Best,
Anita
6 Bob Rhubart // Jul 26, 2008 at 9:04 am
Bowling night, church picnics, and Kiwanis? That’s a bit narrow and harsh, don’t you think? I mean no offense toward, bowlers, church-goers, or the Kiwanis, but come on!
First, I’m a boomer and I blog. True, I have more blogs than I can reasonably maintain, but I do indeed blog - it’s part of how I make my living.
I also have a Twitter account. And a LinkedIn account. And a Facebook account, and a couple of others. So I’m hardly averse to social networking.
It’s also true that all that makes me unique among my Boomer friends. I have one friend who apparently checks his email only every couple of weeks. He wants me to call him to let him know if I’ve emailed him. (I don’t.)
But what really surprises me is the number of 30-somethings I know and work with, many of them marketing professionals in the software business no less, who have every reason to blog, but don’t, and don’t really understand the medium or its value.
And as far as optimism goes, Boomers have been around longer and seen more of what happens in life. I won’t speak for my entire generation, but I’ll say that I’m no less optimistic than I was when I was in my 20s. But I’m a hell of a lot more practical, and because I’ve got some mileage, I make better decisions that I did when I had more hair and a better waist-to-inseam ratio. We don’t think everything sucks. We just know that there is a suck cycle. Sometimes things get sucky for a while, but the suckiness always subsides.
The current recession? Been there, done that, at least three times before. Nutcase in the White House? Ever heard of Nixon? Not the Oliver Stone movie, but the real, live, Tricky Dick?
Every generation gets to go through it’s particular version of all that stuff, good and bad. It gets to make important contributions and monumental mistakes.
When I was a teenager in the late 60s, there weren’t any generational labels — none that I was aware of, anyway. My generation was simply “the younger generation.” We spanned, as does every generation, the social, cultural, and economic spectrum. We grew up, got jobs, had kids, bought homes, and did all the stuff that every generation does as it matures. It’s just life.
Let’s face it, every generation thinks it’s better and smarter than what came before. What do you think the children of the Optimistic Rebel generation will have to say about their parents generation?
The Optimistic Rebels are nothing more than future Boomers. You may have better tools, but those tools will eventually be out of date, too. And your kids will make fun of them.
It’s a cycle, and it goes on and on, as it has for as long as people have been making babies.
So maybe the Boomers haven’t embraced social media in large numbers. Does that make them inferior? Less connected, perhaps, but does that warrant inaccurate and rather insulting generalizations?
Maybe you’re hanging around the wrong Boomers.
7 Valdis // Jul 26, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Most of the boomers I know are very tech savvy — right here in Cleveland, not just my friends and colleagues in Calif. Even my boomer relatives/friends/colleagues in Latvia are quite tech savvy.
I am racking my brain, I can’t think of a single luddite boomer that I interact with regularly. Again, we tend to be like those we hang with[and vice versa]. I sure there are boomers who only use tech when their boss tells them to, but our fear of the net, and new media, is greatly exaggerated!
8 George Nemeth // Jul 26, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Not inferior, Bob, but perhaps a bit thin-skinned.
All of you can cite all the anecdotal evidence you’d like, but the survey I linked is hardly inaccurate. Boomers are interested in health info, reading emails, and receiving photos of friends and family. If you’re trying to market to boomers and not doing those things, you’re gonna fail.
I find it interesting that only 15% of the F500 use blogs to communicate with their customers. The reasons they cite:
I’ll concede that perhaps it’s a cultural thing, not a generational thing, but it’s still a problem.
To point a finer point on it, over on Slackonomics, Lisa Chamberlain has a post up that delineates Original Gen Xers from PCers. Make sure you click thru and read the excerpt from a 1990 Time essay.
Thank you all for the comments! I have to confess I deliberately wrote this post to be provocative. There’s nothing worse then a new blog without any comments on it. That said, I look forward to hearing more on the matter. Maybe I am too pessimistic about boomers in general. Is it ambivalence from being pulled in more then one direction?
9 Ed Morrison // Jul 26, 2008 at 2:59 pm
G:
Looks like a good blog coming down the pike.
Boomer Bloggers are , in many ways, the most interesting people for me to read. They have the perspective that only time can bring. At the same time, they provide useful insights on “What’s Next”.
One of my favorites:
http://irvingwb.typepad.com/
10 John Ettorre // Jul 27, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Valdis makes a particularly good point in his #2: that social networks aren’t only online. For me, they’ve merely put my pre-existing large social network on booster rockets, but they’re more complimentary than anything.
The main problem with this, of course, is that it’s basically meaningless to make generalizations about a cohort group that includes 76 million people as well as those born from 1948 to 1964. The diversity within that giant group is always going to stymie any attempt at generalization.
Finally, Ed makes a great point, about the time and perspective that age brings. It reminds me about a writer friend’s immortal line about why first novels by 20-somethings are generally so bad: because the only tension in the story is the tension between roommates, simply because that’s about the only real tension a young person has yet experience in life. Age and experience enrich everything, and make things more interesting. Boomers are only beginning to hit their most interesting period of life.
11 Rob MacKay // Jul 28, 2008 at 12:31 am
There is no question that there are generational differences in the way social networking tools are being used and adopted. There are even differences emerging between Gen X and Gen Y (see http://tinyurl.com/5lyy86).
It’s not a matter of better or worse. Indeed, as Valdis points out above, the older we get, the wider our non-virtual networks become. Nonetheless, I think that online social networks (and UGC in general) are spawning rapid decision making and more group decision making among Gen X and Gen Y that just isn’t taking place among Boomers.
There is a difference between listening to people you know versus people who are like you. Online networking is more often the latter. It’s a different paradigm.
12 Email v. Social Media | Optimistic Rebel // Aug 5, 2008 at 10:54 am
[...] you’d send them there? What’s the ratio of social media adopters to email users? If the survey says Boomers aren’t into social networks, doesn’t that include Web 2.0? If they don’t use platforms like twitter, why would they [...]
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