To start with, a quick note to my readers on the two very similar posts (now hidden) that preceded this post. Those were the side effects of being a researcher in marketing. I wanted to check consumer reactions to reading an article on a mobile screen. In any case, here goes the next post, on the “mobile generation”, an entire generation of youngsters who have grown up on mobile phones.

This generation is fast with the fingers: swiping on a touchscreen is the skill to aspire to, rather than typing on a keyboard, just as typing on a keyboard was once the skill to aspire to instead of typing on a typewriter. Indeed, this post is being written (written?!) on a smartphone where the screen tells me that I have reached 127 words and “where” was swiped as “welfare” by mistake. Deliberately or not, my paragraphs are shorter as I swipe because I feel the need to divide the content on the screen for ease of reading, forgetting that the reading might happen on any kind of screen.

That brings to mind one other way of communication that we oldies were used to: writing. Today’s mobile generation hardly writes, especially if you exclude coursework at school and college. I wonder if there are any negatives to not writing. As I understand, drawing shapes using all of one’s fingers is a finer skill compared to moving a single finger on a horizontal surface. It also seems to me, based on my limited understanding of neuroscience, that engaging in simple horizontal finger swiping, instead of  creating complex shapes, at a very young age, could be detrimental to creative thinking. That said, the usage of a wide range of apps with diverse functionalities might encourage creative thinking as well.

This brings us to the final question: the mobile generation might be fast but are they nimble? They can navigate apps with ease using a touchscreen, but can they handle the complex problems of life with panache? Are they merely quick, or are they also ready for change and challenge?

PS: there might errors in this post on account of being typed on a smartphone and not a laptop.