Immigrants To Tech

I'm about halfway through Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, David and Goliath. It's OK, if a little Gladwell-esque if that's not too harsh.

One of the most interesting vignettes Gladwell illustrates is where he refers to the metaphor 'immigrants to wealth' first coined by Jim Grubman and Dennis Jaffe. Term was used to articulate the notion that people who work their way to positions of personal wealth from a starting point of social adversity can often have trouble adapting their social values when it comes to parenting.

In short, while they grew out of impoverished, working class backgrounds and were self-made successes, fighting for every penny and luxury along the way, their children subseqently experience a more privileged social environment and consequently there's often a breakdown in parenting when the self made parents share fundamentally different value systems from their children. Somewhat akin to first generation immigrants.

It's interesting to consider this framework when applied to the emerging era of social/mobile/cloud tech where forty-something upwards diehards of the PC generation struggle to adapt to the new, hyper-connected world we now inhabit, while their kids crack on as it had never been any different.