Test Your Age: Thumbs are In

I had dinner with my new business partner on Sunday evening. We were discussing some of the extreme differences in the generations and how they are using technology. She asked me a simple question to prove her point: "When you ring the doorbell, which finger do you use?"

Naturally, being the 29-going-on-40-year old I am, I raised my index finger. She asked me to guess what finger the kiddies were using. Guess what the answer was? That's right, the thumb. I can see the headline 100 years from now, "Anthropologists discover past generations learned to use their opposable thumb in early 21st century".

Unfortunately, most of my current social network does not include too many people in this age bracket (that's a lie.. I've got 49 first cousins (I'm second from last) and all their kids are in that group but I don't know who they are) so I have to wait till the babies that also seem entertained by the flashing lights of my cellphone grow up to fill me in. However, the little exposure I have had to their use of real-time scares me in all kinds of exciting ways.

Considering Stowe's Continuous-Full-on Attention to this matter, I'll close with a quote from his most recent observation:

The communitarianism of Gen Y manifests itself in many ways, but one is that quick response mentality that Dina alludes to. It fosters close social ties to remain in contact with and responsive to your social net. And, it turns out to enable a communitarian productivity increase, although not a personal one. So what may be veiwed as laziness from traditional, boomer eyes, may in fact be the outcome of social bonding. Like the European explorers of yesteryear judging tribal people the world over as inferior and lazy, the declining boomers might be spending the next twenty years whining about this lazy, shiftless, and tribal group, who will be motivated by an as-yet-uncaptured communitarian manifesto, living and working on a real-time beat.

Source: Get Real, "Gen Y and the Coming Communications Revolution"

So the question is, when you ring the doorbell, do you use your thumb?