Community Guy – Jake McKee

As a former government employee, it sounds to me as if she was reading from prepared notes. The irony is particularly striking, Jake, when the State Dept had made news by lobbying Twitter (now there's a status switch!) to stay live because of the value of the channel in relation to knowing what was happening in Iran. At a conference on Government 2.0 this week in our Australian national capital, I used that as an example of the significance of social media for government. At the same conference, two Government ministers spoke. One is a blogger and has a page on Facebook: he gets it and would probably find the kind of joke, engagingly self-deprecating as it might be construed to be, embarrassing if it had come from one of his government colleagues: he could have spoken without notes. The other has no presence that I have been able to find on the social web: he clearly needed his notes. Fortunately for us, the one who gets it is the very influential Federal Finance Minister. Hopefully the other minister will get it sooner rather than later.

I'm sure 100 years or so ago, some old fart was similarly grousing about the telephone or the automobile.

Somethings never change.

Well, at least she didn't say this:

"The Twitter is not something you can just dump something on, it's not a big truck. It's a series of tiny little tubes."

OK, so I may sound like someone's mother (I am, two 20somethings), but it's not nice to make generalizations. I'm 58 years old and have been an online community manager at two different internet startups since 2006. Yesterday, my daughter, having just returned from the Bonnaroo Music Festival said, "Now I finally get Twitter. I thought it was just stupid, but musicians use it for a good reason!" Adapting to new technology happens across all ages, genders, races, at different rates. Let's remember what "community" really means in the job title many of us have.

One last point - my issue here wasn't about age it was about being proud of your lack of knowledge. 20 years old do it too, but it's different and now what I was talking about here. At whatever age you are, being proud (and there's really no other word for it) that you don't know what's happening in the world around you is, IMHO, highly annoying. Again, it's my pet peeve.

I hear what CommunityGal is saying and I also quote the stats about boomers and social networks. At the same time, from my personal experience I don't have a problem with your generalized comments/questions, Jake. And I'm older than CommunityGal, for what that's worth. With people over about 55 I get three responses when they find out that I spend a lot of my time on social media: the joke thing, the mystified-but-I-don't-want-to-know thing and the "that's interesting, I'd like to know more" - I don't have exact stats, but those in the third category are decidedly in the minority. The others just don't know what they're missing. Be peeved, Jake - boasting of ignorance is not a good look.

I get your point about making generalizations, but you know, sometimes there's a commonality behind things that IS valid. As the mother of two 20 year olds, I'd venture to guess that you absolutely do find things about 20 year olds that are fairly common and often annoying. This certainly doesn't mean that every 20 year old does those annoying things or even that your 20 year olds do. But there's commonality.

As someone who runs a site called grandparents.com, you have to agree that there are quite a few older people who struggle with tech, and find themselves saying the same silly things that Sec. Clinton did. I hear this kind of stuff regularly and always from people over the age of 40, not under.

Making observations like this is tough: there's always someone who doesn't fall into the observation but falls into the age range itself who then objects to the core premise that there are others in the world who do the observation. So I guess I'd ask: in the world of 50+ year old people, are you the exception or the rule?

I hear you CG. And yes, your own 20 year olds are often annoying (only 18 years to go before you live it yourself!). I would, of course, call myself the exception and I also appreciate your making the effort to make the observation. But I am encouraged and really excited by the ever-growing adaption of boomers to new technology. I'm sure everyone's seen the Facebook stats http://boomersummit.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/ba... and my own experience on Eons http://www.eons.com/my_eons and now on Grandparents.com http://www.grandparents.com/gp/home/index.html is very positive. Hey, send the old people our way, we're all about getting folks up to speed!

"Will there be a time when older people don’t think it’s cool to joke about their tech cluelessness?"

Why do you see this as an issue of age versus an issue of tech savvy?

Because I tend to see it with older people. Maybe it's just me, but I never see 20 somethings saying "Geez, I sure don't get that new fangled tech!"

Jake, 20-somethings may get the operational aspects of new technology, but I often see a serious lack ability to search for information online, and to understand the sociological and often practical implications of technology.

I don't disagree with that. And this wasn't a young = good, old = bad post. There's problems all around.

I'm not sure it's a big deal. She recognizes that "the use of Twitter is a very important one, not only to the Iranian people but now increasingly to people around the world, and most particularly to young people”. She might not know how to use Twitter, but she understands that it is a channel of communication.

It's not so much the means of communication, but the message itself that is important. We've seen Iranians use Twitter to inform the world about what's going on in their country...and we've seen Republicans use Twitter to compare themselves to oppressed Iranians. I think in the case of the Republican comments, we can clearly see that knowing how to use a thing is very different than knowing how a thing should be used.

Obviously, having more tools of communication in your utility belt is better, but not understanding a medium, yet defending one's right to use that medium as "an important expression of the right to speak out and to be able to organize" is pretty good. The flip-side is having a politician who doesn't understand something, like the Internet, but believing that he or she does, and proposing laws affecting its use. So, is it really that stupid? Clinton might not see this one tree called Twitter, but I think she sees the forest.

"She might not know how to use Twitter, but she understands that it is a channel of communication"

I think that was the reason her audience laughed, but it doesn't stand up to serious thought. You can't make use of a communications medium if you don't know anything about it. Imagine her saying the same thing about TV. Would she get a pass then?

The fact that it's new is no excuse. Senator McCain has a twitter stream, for what it's worth. He may be too crippled to do it himself, but at least he or his office is doing it.

I didn't say she couldn't make use of Twitter without understanding it. I said she could defend the use of a medium of communication without understanding it, which she can, because I'm pretty sure she gets the concept of communication -- what it is, how to do it. If you understand email, or text messaging, or talking on the phone, or just talking, you get how Twitter works. It's all the same: you say something, someone listens and either says something back or not.

I like Twitter. I use it everyday. No doubt Twitter has played a major role in informing us what is happening in Iran, but I'm not going to bust Clinton for not using it or knowing what it is. It's a tool, and I'm not going to get hung up on the tool at the risk of disregarding the function. Let's not forget that lots of people who don't know what Twitter is, were still exposed to it because news anchors read tweets from Iranian protesters on the air. Meaning what? That people were able to receive the same information through a medium that was different from the medium that originated the information.

It's about the information, and what you do with it. The medium is not as important. Information is not inherently reliable just because it's sent or received through any specific medium. You can use any medium to inform or misinform. If she's got a line of communication that gives her good, reliable information (and I'm sure she does), then she's good to go.

Imagining that Clinton saying of television what she said about Twitter is a bit hyperbolic, don't you think? You think that, right now, you can really equate Twitter's importance and influence to television's, even though TV has a 50+ years head start?

Give me break. To focus in on this whole Hillary Clinton quote about not knowing a twitter from a tweeter, and that because McCain (or his staff) has a Twitter page, and that it must mean something, is a joke. Yeah, let's focus in on that. Let's not focus on the fact that Hillary Clinton and the US Department of State wanted Twitter to delay upgrading their servers because they recognized how important it was to the Iranian people to have those Twitter servers up now! Let's get ourselves stuck on that twitter/tweeter quote, shall we?

Am I supposed to pretend that it's harder to learn how to write 140 characters in Twitter than it is to learn effective communication skills? It's getting hung up on the wrong thing! It's like me telling you I'm going to cut your fingers off with a miter saw, and then the only thing you can think of to complain about is that I'm not using a table saw to do it.

It seems that the older generation also has no desire to learn new technologies. Is that something that happens with age? When we're old will we make fun of the new technologies and talk about the good 'ole days when we tweeted about news?

I hope I never stop being curious of new things.

Just stupid? Probably not something I'd really worry about, in light of everything else. I think self-deprecating humor can be very effective in making these points (which may *not* be as obvious to those outside the SM circle) more relatable. I'd rather someone who points out their shortcomings than pretending they know something they don't.

Maybe it's just a personal pet peeve thing, but jokes about your utter lack of knowledge about how the world is working is annoying. I recently told my mom that eventually the horse and buggy people didn't get laughs and knowing winks by joking about their lack of knowledge of the car... they just started looking weird driving a cart down the freeway.