Playing Digital Poker by Marsh Soules, Ph.D. If the digital future is a poker game between generations, then cultural analyst Don Tapscott is betting on the youth, those born since 1978. As he describes them in his recent Growing Up Digital: the Rise of the Net Generation (1998), the N-Gen has been surrounded by digital media since birth—they’re "kids so bathed in bits that they think it’s all part of the natural landscape." And they rival the Baby Boom generation in sheer size, each comprising about 30% of the total population. For Tapscott’s money, the N-Gen has important advantages: their "half-tone, complex world of information pointers, judgment, and interpersonal interaction is the antithesis of the good guys / bad guys world of adults. The growing wisdom of the new youth stands in stark contrast to the utter dumbness of much of the adult world" (297). In this view, the new generation will simply be able to out-play the guardians of the status quo, and the stakes are high. Echo or Net? In Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1998), Tapscott extends many themes he explored earlier in The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (1996). Growing Up Digital explores the transformative potential of digital networking to the demographic profile popularized by David Foot in Boom, Bust, Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift (1996). Indeed, Tapscott gives the impression that he wants to (re)brand the young Echo cohort with a more consumer-friendly tag for anyone hoping to profit from the next great source of revenue and livelihood. How will we sell to, educate, discipline, entertain, nurture, or govern these kids? Thankfully, Tapscott’s own children and his considerable investigation into the opinions of these wired young people save his book from exploitative excesses. In the end, this work is elevated above the material plane by Tapscott’s love and respect for the Growing Up Digital kids--they are "smart, fluent, social, analytical, self-reliant, curious, contrarian, articulate, media-savvy, bored with television" (124). In many respects, the stars of this story are Tapscott’s children, Niki (14) and Alex (11), both important members of their "open family." Tapscott the marketing analyst is also a nurturing parent with deep concerns for his children: "Faced with pervasive hostility and ignorance by a host of technophobes, antiyouth academics, old-media propagandists, government ideologues, corporate manipulators, and paralyzed educators, will your children have found a place of refuge, two-way communication, and trust in your open family? Are you prepared to step up to this challenge and opportunity?" (254) You Said You Want a Revolution The "coming generational explosion" is by no means inevitable, says Tapscott. But it is born of serious cultural contradictions and fired up by the "revolutionary" spirit of the N-Geners. For example, he suggests that even though the Net Generation will be best equipped to create wealth in a knowledge economy with their digital fluency, the older generation will continue to hoard wealth and power. N-Geners will want to control their own destinies, and will be ready to assume power while the Boomers are still in their prime. The promise offered by digital technology may be frustrated by actual opportunities, a contradiction which could be aggravated by differences between what the older generation says and what it does. While the virtues of youth cultures since the 50’s will certainly be debated as part of this revolution, the main contradictions identified by Tapscott concern employment and the distribution of wealth, styles of governance, and cultural values: "This is setting us up for a battle of the generational titans. Unless the boomers have a change of heart, the two biggest generations in history are on a collision course. Given their knowledge of and access to powerful new communications tools, their revolt will make the 60’s protests look like kid stuff" (299). What’s in the Cards? If we accept Tapscott’s scenario as probable, or even possible, how can we accommodate this revolution without defusing its potential for positive change? In his analysis, Tapscott returns again and again to the interconnected themes of distributed networking, decentered organizational models, interactivity, and life-long learning. Digitization, the lingua franca of the Net Generation, enables an unprecedented convergence of communications devices. And networking technologies—from modems and LANs, to satellites and cell phones—extend our ability to interact with higher degrees of synergy. Once digital technologies have been appropriately adopted, networking has demonstrated its ability to transform organizations, create new forms of wealth, reconfigure the workplace, and redefine entertainment. One-to-many broadcast media such as television and classroom lecturing can seem retrograde after people have experienced meaningful interactivity. Finally, keeping pace with these transformations promotes life-long learning. The winners in this high-stakes poker game will not be able to bluff their way to riches or power because the networking revolution will be won with the best hand. The reason the bluff won’t work is intrinsic to networking technology. Barriers to communication, such as censorship, incompetence, or inability to perform are interpreted as damage and routed around. The revolution may not be a noisy one as people seek, and find, temporary autonomous zones, leaving former fields of play silent and empty. Bet the horses from home. Download your lecture notes from the Web. Higher (Education) Stakes Institutions of higher learning hoping to attract and hold the Net Generation have some institutional learning to do, even as the earliest of this generation are peering in the windows to see if anything of interest is going on. The first, and most daunting task will be to make a learning institution more flexible and responsive to client needs by decentralizing and streamlining administrative processes. (These will be clients, not students, with strong expectations of service, value, and performance. They will, for example, expect to be able to customize their learning, and will balk at prescriptive formulae for acquiring an education. "User-defined" will become the new mantra.) Next, it will be important to assess what needs to be known, what constitutes contemporary knowledge—in short, to define the new curriculum. Equally important will be to understand interactivity, and how to make it meaningful in learning environments. Do institutions of higher learning have credibility as places of knowledge, or are they resting on their credentialing laurels? How can skill acquisition be combined with useful theory? Can value be added to what may be widely available elsewhere? Are the new parameters of digital space, time, and distance embodied in our missions and goals? We have our work cut out for us, if only to learn the rules of the new game. If Tapscott’s research is credible, the next generation of learners will be hungry, inquisitive, demanding, ambitious, socially-conscious, and capable. Will we be able to learn from them--and ourselves--quickly enough to form meaningful educational alliances? It’s too early to throw in the hand, but we’ll have to ante up to play the game. ***