Generational gaps

I organized an interesting experiment yesterday: a colleague at IE Business School brought in a couple of teenagers from a Madrid high school to take part in project to help orient students decide on whether to study the arts, sciences, humanities or the social sciences at university.

The two, aged 16 and 15, joined one of my classes in the Master in Management I teach. Most of the students on it are aged between 21 and 25 from a wide range of countries, and have on average about a year’s experience in the world of work.

The session, in English, and with a high level of student participation, discussed the development of LinkedIn and Twitter, from their origins up to the present day, one of the themes on a course called The social web and the customer. Eventually, the conversation turned to Snapchat, which in just four years (it was founded in September 2011), had managed to attract more users than Twitter, which was founded in March 2006. That very same morning, I had just read this article about the qualities of Snapchat:

“A conspiratorial corner of my brain thinks Snapchat is deliberately designed to baffle people older than 22, like that high-pitched ringtone for students created to evade teachers’ decrepit old-people ears. Yet Snapchat is so popular, more people use it on a daily basis than Twitter, according to a recent Bloomberg report. Snapchat has 150 million daily users while Twitter has under 140 million, and they can’t all be teens. Dismissing the app as a sext fad is, at this point, obtuse.”

As soon as the conversation turned to Snapchat, the two teenagers really connected to the discussion. They both used it, along with WhatsApp. One also had an Instagram account, and they both had Twitter accounts, but never used it. Asked about Facebook, they both said they didn’t use it. Being nice guys, they didn’t want to say it, but when I suggested this might be because Facebook is for older people, they didn’t contradict me :-)

So there you have it: I’m standing in front of a class of 21- to 24-year-olds and a pair of teenagers were basically calling them oldsters. I dread to think in what category they put me with my half a century… ancestral, primitive, archaic, prehistoric? You live and learn.

(En espa?ol, aquí)