Digital Adolescents Stuck in Digital Puberty

Adjusting to change has to be one of the hardest things to do in life, yet we all have to do it as we age, so it's one of the most universal of themes. As societies go, healthy societies adjust well to change, less healthy ones don't. The least healthy societies get stuck and close themselves off from any outside influence in order to stay the same: just think of Cuba and North Korea.

Recognizing this state of Digital Puberty that we've entered is not unlike going through the five stages of grief in the Kubler-Ross model , because such significant change involves a death and a rebirth. In the end, allowing yourself to be reborn, to reemerge from the process of change, involves accepting the death of the previous state. Until then, you're stuck.

The stages are:

Additionally, the change in circumstances does not always have to be a negative one, just significant enough to cause a grief response to the loss (Scire, 2007). Accepting a new work position, for example, causes one to lose their routine, workplace friendships, familiar drive to work, even customary lunch sources.

At first, we deny that the change is all that significant, many even don't know what you're talking about. But then years pass, companies rise and fall, and society changes. Who can argue that we are not significantly different than we were 10 years ago, a blink of an eye when it comes to history? A mere decade ago, who had even heard of broadband, of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, etc., etc., etc.?

Recognizing these changes and doing something about them is not easy. We have all kinds of terms for those who fail to grow up, from the Peter Pan Syndrome to the recent Failure to Launch. My personal favorite in this genre is the 1986 Rob Reiner film classic, Stand by Me, which chronicles that awkward point in our lives when some of our gang have moved on to be interested in more mature matters, while others lag behind. And for comedic effect, Arrested Development is hard to beat at capturing the inanity of growing up, or failing to do so.

Part of the challenge comes from the lack of leadership. When we have leaders who look back instead of looking forward, as a society we're hamstrung. We're stuck in distracting and unproductive debates that stall our progress, diverting our energies from adjusting to change to preserving the status quo.

As I write this post, I'm streaming audio from NPR, which just reported on Al Gore's acceptance of the Nobel Prize for his work in getting the world to accept the very real and significant fact that the world is heating up, which may very well threaten life on the planet. Now there's a hard reality to accept, especially since dealing with it involves dealing with the death of our very modern, relatively carefree lifestyles of consumerism and blissful ignorance of its consequences.

I'd argue that we persist in acting like rebellious teenagers, holding on to our childish ways in the face of change, denying the need to accept our progress into an adult world of hard decisions and consequences.

Consider then this list of societal issues that have been neglected over the past decade, look at them through the lens of Functional/Dysfunctional Change discussed in this post, and consider to what degree the problems we face stem from our clinging to the status quo in denial of the need for change. And while you're at it, add Broadband Infrastructure to the list.

Climate Change
Global & Domestic Politics
Health Care
Energy
Infrastructure
Telecommunications (incl. Broadband Infrastructure)

We need to get busy, because the longer we stay stuck in the Five Stages of Grief, the longer we fail to deal with these issues and the worse they become.