Born on the Web

I've been a fan of "Lonely Planet" from the time I started traveling outside Europe. I once promised myself not to go on holiday without a Lonely Planet of the region. Because those small lettered books have the potential of making a holiday worth the money. It really made a difference on my trip to Thailand and South-Africa. It gives you something to work with, and certainty when everything else is failing, people who have used a Lonely Planet travel guide sure know what I mean.

But still there is something changing for me and I'm not sure why. For my recent trip to Zanzibar I still bought a Lonely Planet of Tanzania, but I found it a bit scarce on information on places to stay, so this time I mainly used Tripadvisor in looking for places to stay. The problem with Tripadvisor is that you can't get it in a handy paperback guide. So I checked out a few places that had more than 10 reviews, looked that they were overall positive, checked their rates and remember the place and name, wrote them on the back of my Lonely Planet.

So for some reason, I felt more secure and comfortable reading reviews from regular people than the Lonely Planet 3-4 lines reviews. And it seems the reviews from the writers of lonely planet aren't as objective as they originally stated. Which is logical, it is impossible for a traditional publisher to gather such amount of information and more important, keep that information up to date. We've seen the brittanica vs. wikipedia story, so I really think Lonely Planet should think about a more democratic way of maintaining their travel guides.

Tripadvisor isn't perfect either, too many advertisements and I find it impossible to understand why they never show the link to the homepage of the accommodation. The reviews are valuable but they should evolve more to a kind of wiki for each place to stay that is listed. People should be able to collaborate on a more generic description of the accommodation, and people who don't want to spend the time writing reviews, should just be able to mark descriptions as accurate or inaccurate.

Still I will keep using Lonely Planet guides, it remains a very valuable source, but they should use their avid travelers to keep the content up to date, to add new places to stay, that direct you to the hot spots of the moment. 

I'm currently reading Wikinomics, which is one of the best books ever on the topic. There is a very nice chapter about the new generations of people who've grown up digital. Because my blog is dedicated to the net generation or "born on the web" generation, I'm going to give you an extract from the chapter.

All the generations in developed (and increasingly, developing) countries use the Web. Seniors, for example, have time to spend and new motives for going online - communicating with their grandchildren may be the most important. However, a new generation of youngster has grown up online, and they are bringing a new ethic of opennes, participation, and interactivity to workplaces, communities, and markets. For this reason, they merit special investigation. They represent the new breed of workers, learners, consumers, and citizens. Think of them as the demograpgic engine of collaboration and the reason why the perfect storm is not a flash in the pan but a persistent tempest that will gather force as they mature.

Demographers call them the "baby-boom-echo," but we prefer the Net Generation, as Don dubbed them in his 1997 book Growing Up Digital. Much of the following research we present has been updated from that book in a recent study with our colleague Rober Barnard, CEO of D-Code.

Born between 1977 and 1996 inclusive, this generation is bigger than the baby boom itself, and through sheer demographic muscle they will dominate the twenty-first century. While it is smaller in some countries, internationally the Net Generation is huge, numbering over two billion people. This is the first generation to grow up in the digital age, and that makes them a force of collaboration. They are growing up bathed in bits. The vast majority of North American adolescent know how to use a computer, and almost 90 percent of teenagers in America say they use the Net. The same is true in a growing number of countries around the world. Indeed, there are more youngsters in this age group who use the Net in China than there are in the United States. This is the collaboration generation for one main reason: Unlike their parents in the United States, who watched twenty-four hours of television per week, these youngsters are growing up interacting.

Rather than being passive recipients of mass consumer culture, the Net Gen spend time searching, reading, scrutinizing, authenticating, collaborating and organizing. The Internet makes life an ongoing, massive, collaboration, and this generation loves it. They typically can't imagine a life where citizens didn't have the tools to constantly think critically, exchange views, challenge, authenticate, verify, or debunk. While their parents were passive consumers of media, youth today are active creators of media content and hungry for interaction.

They are also a generation of scrutinizers. They are more sceptical of authority as they sift through information at the speed of light by themselves or with their network of peers. Though they have greater self-confidence than previous generations they are nevertheless worried aboutr their futures. It's not their own abilities that they are insecure about - it's the external adult world and how it may lack opportunity.

Research show that this generation also tends to value individual rights, including the right to privacy and the right to have and express their own views. Throughout adolescence and later in life, they tend to oppose censorship by governments and by parents. They also want to be treated fairly-there is a strong ethos, for example that "I should share in the wealth I create." They have a very strong sense of the common good and of collective social and civic responsibility.

Further, this is the first time in human history when children are authorities on something really important. An N-gener's father may have been an authority on model trains. Today young people are authorities on the digital revolution that is changing every institution in society.

The main tenets of Growing Up Digital have been borne out. However, in the last decade we learned a lot more about how the Net Generation will rewrite the rules for communities, markets, and workplaces.