Sunday is Mother’s day in the United States, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to forget to call her. 

Sorry, Mom. 

My mom, if you’ll believe it, is a complete technophobe, who doesn’t really understand what I do for a living; she kind of understands what a “blog” is, but the technical nature of networking is something that she’s not really interested in; for whatever reason, it’s only been very recently that she’s gotten into computers.  It’s partially a generational thing, and it gives a good reason why Nemertes Research sees such explosive growth of Internet use.

That is, Mom barely uses the Internet – she uses it for genealogy and some photo e-mailing.  (Flickr’s a bit beyond her…) Still, she’s using the internet just slightly more than a few years ago.

Which made me think – is it possible that the exponential growth in Internet usage might have something to do with the generation gap?

While there are kids who are technophobic and TF2-fraggin’ grannies out there, by and large, Internet use is generational.  The boomers, by and large, don’t use technology as much as Generation X does, and the technologies they use are typically not replacing the analog technologies they grew up with, like the landline telephone and the television set.  Generation X is slightly more likely than Generation Y to be mere passive consumers of entertainment on the Internet, while Generation Y is the “Generation of Generation” – the guys putting up all those YouTube videos out there. 

So as the Boomers die off, and are replaced by the tech savvy Generation Y, perhaps this is the main explanation of why the Internet’s development is exponential.  If true, this implies strongly that in 30-40 years, the effect will level off. 

Hopefully it will, as I plan on making tons of YouTube videos about how my neighbor kids are causing a racket playing with Aerosmith in Holodeck Guitar Hero.