Francisco Miraval
It seems I am asking a very ridiculous questions because, after all, nobody will ever put a 12-year-old person in charge of complicated and difficult decisions. However, recent events seem to indicate that the so-called “Generation App” is not waiting to occupy a leadership position in our world.
Just a few days ago (April 8, 2015), National Public Radio broadcast a story about Maddie Messer. She is 12 and she likes to play games in her smartphone. But there was a problem: few games include a female as the main character of the game and those games who do include females you have to pay to activate that character.
So, if you are 12 and you are upset with your videogames, what do you do? Go to your room? Complaint to your parents? Download more and more games until you find one you like? Maddie did nothing like that.
She decided to do her own research about which game among the top 50 (in her list) included or not female characters as protagonists. Then, based on that information, she wrote an editorial that was published by The Washington Post.
Just a few days after the editorial was published, videogames makers changed the games to include more female characters and one company even developed a new game where the virtual version of Maddie is the protagonist.
I am almost certain that nothing of what you or I write, regardless of its quality, will ever be published is such a prestigious and influential national newspapers. And even if that one day miraculously happens, probably nothing will change. Yet, 12-years-old people like Maddie seem to have a special power. And she is not the only one.
Sam Holtz, 12, lives near Chicago. He recently tied for the first place in the ESPN national competition to select the winners of the brackets in the NCAA men basketball tournament. However, he can’t get his $20,000 prize because, well, he is 12. And it doesn’t matter he defeated many so-called “experts” to win first place.
ESPN promised to give Sam another prize. Also, it seems there will be changes about who can play and win in certain drawings. Because of what happened to him, Sam has been invited to national television shows.
What is happening here? How is it possible for 12-years-olds to get national attention, to defeat experts, and to cause almost instant change in large corporations?
In their book The App Generation, Howard Gardner and Katie Davis say the new generation use apps to create deeper relationships and a strong identity, and to stimulate creativity. The result, as we can now see, is a generation with “great creativity and great aspirations”.
Perhaps, as writer Jordan Shapiro recently pointed out in one of his columns for Forbes, apps are causing changes in the psychological development of children, enabling them to achieve almost unthinkable things.
Millennials are clearly impatient with previous generations. But the new generation seems to demand immediate results. And they are getting them.