Information and Communication Technologies Bugs in the Generational Ointment?

The uses and impacts of information and communications technologies (ICTs), are not smooth, linear or fairy-tale like in dusting society with benefits. In development, adoption, uses and impacts, technologies shape, and are shaped by, social relations and social structures. Generational relations and structures are part of the socio-cultural processes by which ICTs become products, symbols, social glue, and social schism. A generational system of relations shapes how technologies shape us, our identities and social structures. Generational relations organize, manage, regulate, and modernize social structure in relation to technologies. But technologies have their own generational properties: life courses, links to specific age groups/cohorts, and clear cycles that connect or disconnect technologies to belief systems. Generation, in relation to ICTs, typically refers to the life courses of technologies, the development of new “generations” of products. In everyday use, images of the young male techie tends to be both gendered and generational. The intricate relation of technologies to generation has yet to be explored sociologically. In this paper, ICTs and generations are unpacked. Bugs are found in the generational ointment of ICTs that are explored in layers: n ICTs may reconcile the impossible, contradictions of generation, and of life course: n intergenerational transfers from older to younger of credentials and skills may create demand for ICT use; n ICTs may promote social cohesion among generations; n ICTs may ease the transition from a labour/capital to a knowledge-based society; n punctuated succession of technologies may lead to uneven relations of generations to technologies, to discontinuous impacts on generations. Data from different sources are woven together to reveal the intricate patterns of the relations of technologies and generations. Paper invited for plenary session, 2001 BUGS: GLOBALISM AND PLURALISM International Sociology Association Conference, Montreal September 19-21, 2001. Views expressed are the author’s alone. Acknowledgements: Thanks to the organizers of 2001 for permitting the opportunity to think more deeply about generation in relation to technologies. Thanks to Stephanie Knaak for help with the tables and graphics and to Fred Gault and his colleagues at Statistics Canada for help in preparing some of the overheads. And thanks always to my colleagues on the Science and Technology Advisory Committee, Statistics Canada, who never cease to stimulate my sociological imagination. “He [Prime Minister Tony Blair] asserted that that future of the nation was dependent upon technological success, arguing that computers and the Internet were powering economic growth, and that ensuring Britain was not divided into computer haves and have-nots was fundamental to the building of a fair as well as prosperous society” (Henwood et al., 2000:1)