You Are the Millennium Generation, What Does that Mean?

At its core, issues management is about communication. While the list of corporate functions involved in issues management is extensive, as I indicated in last week's class, issues are managed almost exclusively through communications. We are in the early stages of a communications revolution whose implications can only be guessed. But this revolution has huge implications for issues management and it's important for practioners to know where things are heading. Clues about the future exist in how your generation uses communications in your daily life. An article in the Sunday New York Times analyzes this phenomenon by describing the daily lives of some selected "millennials." Millennials are described as the generation born between 1980 and 2000. The significance of this generation is that it is the first generation who have never known life without the Internet and other new communications technologies. So, how millennials use these communications technologies are very suggestive of how everyone will use them in the years to come.

Here's my question: How does this compare with your daily life? Which of these communications technologies do you regularly use? Ipods, text messaging, instant messaging, TiVo, etc. etc.? Does this group accurately represent you or your contemporaries? Or is it different in Washington?

Here's where you can teach me. I consider myself an early adopter, at least for my generation. I have a blog (besides this one). I have an Ipod (which has changed my life). But, while my fifteen year old son is an inveterate instant messenger, I've never picked up that particular technology.

So, tell me, does this article, (link pasted below), tell the truth about your generation?

A Generation Serves Notice: It's a Moving Target - New York Times: "'We think that the single largest differentiator in this generation from previous generations is the social network that is people's lives, the part of it that technology enables,' said Jack McKenzie, a senior vice president at Frank N. Magid Associates, a market research and consulting firm specializing in the news media and entertainment industries. "