Across the coffee shop a little girl, maybe 4, is showing her dad something on a tablet with a stylus in her hand. For now it’s just a game, bright and colourful, but she’s learning to interact with technology in her formative years. It’s happening while she’s learning to interact with people through language and gesture. She will be technology literate in way that we probably never will.

What always boggles my mind, is that we are still in the first generation of users of the big game-changing-technologies like the internet and mobile phones. The internet’s origin leads back to the 50′s but it became mainstream around 1996 and mobile phones took off around then too.

We are still the kids learning to ride the bike. Only, we weren’t kids when we picked up the bike. But the second generation is on it’s way, kids who will never have known a world without the internet in their pockets.

I think of myself as Generation X. I grew up on the cusp of where people were brought up interacting with digital technology. I taught my parents to set the time on the VCR… it never sunk in though. Its amazing what a difference life-stage makes to how effectively we can learn. Children are geared to learn, they have an intuitive way of learning that makes them like sponges to new information. Adults have to pass all new information through the rigid reasoning we anchor ourselves with. The relationship is surely exponential between how early a subject is introduced and how effectively it can be mastered.

So far the key technologies have been supply lead. People make things, we use them and for the good ones, we can’t imagine living without them. Maybe the second generation will change that, the super-users who have only known ubiquitous information and technology. They will need technology like we needed Bugs Bunny on the TV. It will be embedded in how they see and interact with the world.

One can only imagine what advances will occur in response to their technological fluency, when supply will find an equal in demand.