"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"
An adage taken from a cartoon caption published in The New Yorker on July 5, 1993
Don Tapscott, one of the original Canadian Internet gurus, says that if presidential candidate Brack Obama gets elected tomorrow, as predicted, he can thank the new "net" generation.
Tapscott, writing in today's Report on Business in The Globe and Mail, claims that the children of the baby boomers, who he calls the "net" generation, have used the electronic tools found on the Internet to change the outcome of this election and will soon change business and even society as we know it.
In a four-part article, Digital boom is about to hit the workplace, Tapscott suggests that the net generation's ability to use Internet for more than just job postings and surfing but rather as a social networking tool will revolutionize business.
For example, a recent roundtable discussion featured in This Week In Technology, a very popular online podcast, there was talk that some cell phone users no longer listen to voice messages. All their voice messages are forwarded to an overseas company which immediately resends the message back to the cell phone as a text message which is the preferred method of communications for many young people.
As for the Obama campaign, the candidate hired Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook, to take charge of the online campaign. According to Tapscott, the results in terms of getting votes and raising money, was astonishing.
And to go back to the New Yorker cartoon: You don't have to be the youngster to belong to the "net" generation. After all, nobody needs to know everything about you online.
