First blood

USA Today carried an article two days ago of a survey taken.  I need to read the full survey before making too many comments.  And, a survey is the softest kind of statistical data to base too many predictions on, but I do want to comment on the direction the percentages suggest.

The article was about companies' hiring practices in the U.S.  Companies are still hiring people in the baby boom generation over younger generations for two reasons: 1) they are more reliable, and 2) they don't have to be reeducated to have good communication skills.  That's not as surprising as the pecentages given for reason 2.  Companies had to retrain 5 times as many younger workers as baby boom workers in the area of communication.

On one hand the percentage is surprising.  It is not often that the business world opts for older workers over younger workers.  On the other hand, it was predictable.  Jane Healy's book Endangered Minds was one of the first to speak of young people's "fuzzy grammar" in 1991.  Many people then and since have noted the effects of teaching to tests in favor of presenting a non-uniform, robust curriculum transferable to unpredictable situations.  Over the last decade, that fuzzy grammar group has begun and is continuing to come of age.  That's good news for baby boomers... at least for the moment.

The other side of the coin will take place soon, but certainly no later than the death of most of the baby boomers.  Communication will adjust itself to whatever the younger generations want it to be.  And that is the point of this blog.  The survey supports the idea that the major forms of communication are about to change.  Judging from the amount of You Tube activity, even for education, the amount of video consumption from TV to cell phone, the format of tracking one's life through pictures and short video clips through many formats including Picaso and Facebook, and the advent of holographic transmission, communication form has no choice but to be transformed.

Reading and writing are being phased out.  It's beginning to show up now in statistical data, not anecdotal data.  Soon more quantitative studies will surface showing the same trends that the survey showed.  Dinosaurs take note.  The KT boundary is now being put in place separating the Old World from the New.