Screenagers

Back blogging after a few days travelling around. I co-hosted an exec roundtable on Wednesday at the IOD on Flexible Working (FW) and learnt a new word - screenagers. Simon Hughes and I were discussing the use of technology to support FW and how the net generation was increasingly making one of their criteria for choosing an employer being their support of FW. Net Gen meets the Baby Boomers was our punchline but that was sucker punched by a way better term from Mark at Herman Miller – screenagers. Expect to see more of it in my presentations from now on!

It reminded me (along with the little r post earlier this week) of the language we speak here at Microsoft. It’s a language all of it’s own and we even have an internal site for newcomers to get up to speed with geek speak. Gareth Branwyn has been tracking this kind of stuff for years for Wired in his excellent Jargon Watch.

Back to screenagers though - a search for this took me to www.demos.co.uk and a paper entitled “Open Source Democracy: How Online Communications is Changing Offline Politics”. More for the reading pile this weekend – 70 pages…ouch!