The great anthropologist Margaret Mead popularized the terms postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative — and it’s something we need to be aware of if we want to anticipate the impact of future IT technology. (See Mead’s Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap for more details.)

A postfigurative culture is one in which things don’t really change much, from one generation to another. Thus, aside from the rebellious behavior associated with adolescence, each generation expects to learn the “basics” of life from its parents and grandparents. Such cultures learn by looking back, to see how things were done in the past; and this worked reasonably well for most of mankind’s recorded history.

A cofigurative society is one in which things are changing rapidly enough that parents and children are forced to learn things more-or-less simultaneously. Immigrant families face this quite often, and it’s commonplace for the children of such families to adapt to new languages, new laws, and new social customs more quickly and more easily than their parents. Aside from immigration and chaotic disasters, Dr. Mead suggested that somewhere around World War II, the rapid pace of technology began to create an overall cofigurative society — at least in the advanced countries that were inventing, developing, and assimilating those new technologies.

Though there is still some debate among sociologists, many of us would agree that we are now venturing into a prefigurative society — where things are changing so quickly that it’s almost guaranteed that children will learn about new things before their parents do. Part of this is because learning something new often requires us to unlearn something old; and the generation of adults has a lot more “baggage” to get rid of, before they can accept and assimilate something new. Children, on the other hand, have little or nothing vested in old fashions, old styles, old customs, and old ways of doing things that were based on technologies that are being rendered obsolete.

Every adult has his or her own stories to tell about this phenomenon. When I was a kid, for example, I was told that I would not be allowed to drive a car until I could change a spark plug, replace a fan-belt, and fix a flat tire on the family car; and both at home and at school, I was told that I had to learn how to drive a manual, “stick-shift” car. All of the time and energy that went into that part of my basic “education” was essentially wasted: I haven’t had a flat tire in over 20 years, and I have no idea if my car even has a spark plug. (In fact, I don’t even own a car any more, but that’s a different story.) Today’s kids learn how to drive automatic-transmission cars, and I doubt that most of them could even find the spare tire in their trunk. When my older son bought his first car, he was dumbfounded when I suggested that he could save a few bucks by getting a simpler model with an old-fashioned “manual” crank to open and close the windows; for his entire life, every car he had ever been in had an automatic “button” that, when pressed, caused the windows to move up or down.

So, what does this mean in terms of the future of IT? Well, it means that if we’re in the business of inventing/creating new IT-based products or services, or if we are in a (management) position that attempts to control or restrict access to those technologies, we’d better not assume that they’ll react and respond the same way we do. Fortunately, there are lots of market-research firms, academic institutions, and industry-analysts out there polling the public about their attitudes, behavior, expectations, likes and dislikes — and then slicing and dicing the results into different age groups, income categories, and other demographic distinctions.

So we need to devote some time and energy — on an ongoing basis — to reading these polls, and talking directly to the more articulate members of the younger generation, and then think carefully about what this means, in terms of the assumptions we’ve made about new technology. We read, for example, that today’s generation not only does not memorize the phone numbers of their twenty or thirty closest friends (as my peers and I did, once upon a time), but a significant percentage of them don’t even know their own phone number. Why should they? It’s all programmed into their mobile phones, complete with the textual name associated with each number, and a photo of the individual associated with that number. What are the implications of this behavior? Aside from the annoying reality that when people lose their cellphones today, they have no idea how to reach any of their peers, it probably does have some deeper meaning … but I haven’t figured it out.

Similarly, we read that most young people today don’t wear a wrist-watch — because their mobile phone displays the current time. And perhaps that explains why 91% of mobile phone users today keep their phone within a one-meter distance of themselves, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (see Mary Meeker’s presentation at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit conference for this statistic.) And since it’s only a (short) matter of time before virtually every mobile phone has a built-in GPS device, we’ll always know where everyone is — even if they don’t know exactly where they are. We may think we know what this means, from our perspective, in terms of potential new products, new services, new laws and regulations about privacy and security and control … but what does it mean to the younger generation that’s most likely to have these devices in their pockets?

On a deeper level, all of this will have a profound impact on the way future generations interact with their peers, their parents, their employers, and the “authority figures” in their lives. We’re already beginning to get a sense of this with the attitudes of today’s “digital natives” — i.e., the generation that was born during the period that PC’s were beginning to be introduced, and which has thus grown up in a world that always (from their perspective) had computers. As Gary Hamel explained in a thought-provoking March 2009 Wall Street Journal blog entitled “The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500,” we can already see a number of younger-generation attitudes that are very much in conflict with the “traditional” attitudes that we find in large business organizations:

• All ideas compete on an equal footing – (every idea has the chance to gain a following; ideas gain traction based on their perceived merits, rather than political power of their sponsors)
• Contribution counts for more than credentials — (when you post a video on YouTube, nobody asks if you went to film school)
• Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed — (some individuals command more respect and attention than others; authority trickles up, not down)
• Leaders serve, rather than preside — (no one has the power to command or sanction)
• Groups are self-defining and -organizing – (no one can assign you a boring task, no one can force you to work with dim-witted colleagues)
• Resources get attracted, not allocated — (the Web is a market economy; people decide, moment by moment, how to spend the precious currency of their time and attention
• Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it — (to gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content)
• Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed — (truly smart ideas rapidly gain a following no matter how disruptive they may be)
• Users can veto most policy decisions — (the only way to keep users loyal is to give them a substantial say in key decisions
• Intrinsic rewards matter most — (money is great, but so is recognition and joy of accomplishment)
• Hackers are heroes — (online communities frequently embrace those with strong anti-authoritarian views)

Undoubtedly, there are a lot of business executives and parents and “authority figures” (politicians, religious leaders, pundits, and op-ed columnists) who will respond to the list above by saying, “Well, that’s not how we do things around here — and we never will!”

If you hear this from the authority figures in North Korea or Iran or a few other such places in the world, they may be right. But to a greater and greater degree in the rest of the world, it’s an outmoded way of thinking. For better or worse, technology has empowered the younger generation — and they will not only vote with the ballot box (or electronic voting machine), but also with their pocketbook and with their feet. They’ll walk away from their job in stuffy, conservative, technology-fearing company X, and they’ll get a new job (even if pays less) in open, friendly, collaborative company Y.

Thus, the ultimate question for us to ponder when we think about the future of technology is not “What will it be?” but rather “How will the kids react to it?”