Fred tackles the age question again today. Gist:
Who is developing this “clearer idea”? Who is developing the set of “design patterns”? It’s the younger generation. And its important to understand why.
It is incredibly hard to think of new paradigms when you’ve grown up reading the newspaper every morning. When you turn to TV for your entertainment. When you read magazines on the train home from work.
But we have a generation coming of age right now that has never relied on newspapers, TV, and magazines for their information and entertainment. They are the net natives. They grew up in AOL chatrooms, IMing with their friends for hours after dinner, and went to school with a Facebook login.
The Internet is their medium and they are showing us how it needs to be used.
And that’s clearly true (although I suppose it begs the question of how it was that a bunch of older people designed the new paradigm that is the Internet in the first place). But it also seems to me to be just one of an infinite number of examples of the essential idea, which is that Young wants to be different than Old; wants to find its own way. The Young do what they do they way they do it, and take the world with them as they go. Always have, always will. And the Old tend not to follow – for various reasons.