GenZ: what will it be like?

Well, I've certainly seen toddlers doing this. However, I have to say that I also find myself hovering, finger ready to tap when I read books. A family member confesses to having tried the reverse squeeze gesture (opening out finger from thumb) in order to see a magazine picture better (and obviously failing):

... some toddlers attempting to treat magazines like iPads and TVs like touch screens. So Gen Z will be tech-fluent in many ways, and certainly more connected than any generation before it. One consequence will be a multicultural a nd globally oriented mindset —even more so than the Millennials that preceded them. Kids are already Skyping with friends and family on the other side of the globe. A quarter of Gen Z participants in this study said all or most of their social-network friends live a plane journey away. Expect even more linguistic and cultural borrowings and consistencies across nations and regions. F_INTERNAL_Gen_Z_0418122.pdf

  So, while these things are undoubtedly true. We must be careful not to let them hide the continuities with our own experience. We must also be wary of thinking that it makes others somehow completely different to us. The truth is that many things remain the same. We still hunger and thirst, we tend to be attracted sexually to others, we normally desire physical closeness with others and we seek to establish emotional bonds with others for mutual support. Culture never takes those things away; it merely refracts them through varying mental contexts, artefactual opportunities and habitudes.

So yes, we need to understand the differences, but we need to do so in a way that does not alienate them from us. And by recalling that they are still trying to achieve common human things, the same sorts of things that we try to achieve, then it starts to help us to understand them. Only then should we try to get a sense of how the technology changes things, and in particular the way that they most automatically focus on the world and expect things to work.