Title: Grown up Digital

Author: Don Tapscott
Publisher: McGraw Hill

The recent explosion of mainstream media stories about Twitter (see our Twitter guide here) shows both the fascination we have with the collaborative/communicative internet of web 2.0, and the fear – in some parts – that it is unpredictable, out of control and potentially dangerous.

Two recently-published books tackle this theme: Don Tapscott's Grown Up Digital, written as a sequel to his seminal Growing up Digital, about how the younger generation is using the web, and Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom by Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta of INSEAD, the European Business School. They are two similar books, but which one sheds greater light on the usefulness of Web 2.0?

Grown Up Digital
Grown Up Digital is not only a sequel but also a counterblast to dystopian rhetoric such as 'The Cult of the Amateur' by Andrew Keen, which carries the strap line 'How today's internet is killing our culture and our economy'. Tapscott isn't convinced by the arguments of Keen and others, and carried out a $4m research project between 2006 and 2008 to get some solid data on what was happening. Most of the money was spent on questionnaires of, and interviews with, 6,000 'Net Geners'. That's one of four generations identified by Tapscott by their years of birth:

• The Baby Boom generation (1946 – 1964)


• Generation X (1965 – 1976)


• The Net Generation (1977 to 1997)


• Generation Next (1998 to present)

As a result of his research, Tapscott finds that the Net Geners are not addling their brains, but are using the internet productively and in a socially responsible way. Or, in a phrase repeated too often in various forms in the book, 'the kids are all right'. Despite his $4m of research though, he bases much of this not on his collected data, but on anecdotes – in particular drawing on his family for over 30 examples. He also manages to get at least one of his facts just plain wrong. Britain, says Tapscott, did not have a baby boom, which will be news to the Office for National Statistics.

Another issue Tapscott faces is his constant stereotyping of square 'boomers' vs. hep Net Geners. Here, he talks about his dissatisfied but impotent reaction to a PDA he was given: 'As a typical boomer, I took what I got and hoped it would work. Net Geners get something and customise it to make it theirs.'

Do they? Always? It is too easy to think of counter examples. These generalisations and anecdotes – and the book is peppered with them – prevent the data speaking as volubly as it should, and allow Tapscott to lapse into pumping the air with positivism on the basis of speculation rather than analysis on the basis of fact.

Beyond this cheerleading to suggest that our sons and daughters are not the spawn of Satan because they are canny users of the internet, does Tapscott have anything useful to say? Yes, he does. Almost despite himself he introduces two cautionary notes for Net Geners. The first is about privacy and the posting of sensitive personal data online, which he rightly points out is largely ignored by Net Geners (and just about everyone else) until it comes back to bite them at one of those moments when your drinking/slacking habits are not best displayed, such as during a job interview.

Strangely, he does not build this piece of advice into his seven homilies entitled 'Leadership 2.0: Seven guidelines for a new generation':

1. Go to college


2. Be patient at work


3. Don't buy bad products


4. Bring back the family dinner


5. Don't discount experience


6. Aspire to live 'a principled life of consequence'


7. Don't give up

This is all good advice, but one has to ask what it's doing in this book. After all, the target market for this advice is the children of the book's likely readers. Are they really going to listen more readily to mom and pops' lecture on going to college because it's backed up by Don Tapscott?

A lot of lucrative tripe has been written about the internet-driven descent of the young into mindlessness. These books have provocative titles such as The Dumbest Generation and Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Don Tapscott should be applauded for providing a dissenting voice against this angst. He would have done his cause more of a service, however, by providing more balance in his writing and not always choosing the sunny answer when faced with uncertainty.

Throwing Sheep in the Board Room
In Throwing Sheep in the Board Room, Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta allow themselves to fall into the familiar, recent, and annoying trap of adopting a down-with-the-kidz title that someone thought would be snappier than the subtitle which actually explains the book: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World. Throwing Sheep, we discover on page four, is an application that runs on one social network (Facebook).

However, the authors overcome this unpromising start to deliver a book that has some good content and some decent thinking on social networking, especially to those not deeply involved in it.

Fraser and Dutta break the book into three parts, to show how social networking will affect Identity, Status and Power. In so doing they take a truly - rather than tokenistic - international view, drawing on case studies not only from a wide range of countries, but also from across history.

The book has been dubbed 'a lazy cut-and-paste job', but many of the illustrative examples were new to me. In addition, when so many authors on each side of the Web 2.0 debate want to claim that today's salvation/madness (depending on your position) is a recent phenomenon, it's good to read sentences like 'Sites like MySpace and Facebook are teaching us a very old lesson: power resides in networks'. There is nothing new under the sun, and Fraser and Duttas' breadth of historical examples serve to show that, although their constant return to the Knights Templar often smacks of a desperate attempt to find a theme, rather than the best example.

Nonetheless, Fraser and Dutta find it difficult to remain neutral for long, and seem drawn to the idea that social networks are revolutionary while quoting evidence that they are not. They quote, for example, Erving Goffman's 1959 study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life but do not go on to say that contemporary behaviour in online social networks is only an accelerated extension of our normal, real-world behaviour, as described by Goffman. We do indeed choose which identity to show the world online, just as we do offline. We just do more of it, more often, online.

More than once they fail to put cause and effect the right way around. When discussing the future damage inflicted on people by posting wild behaviour in their youth, they state 'the problem is that real-world values have not caught up with online values'. The reality is the opposite: eventually online behaviour will adjust to take into account real-world values, when enough people have been burned by revealing more publically about their identity than is wise. And they contradict their position 10 pages later when they correctly state that "Google is essentially a 'reputation engine', the best way to ensure that you don't become its victim is by taking control".

The section on Status is worth reading for its focus on status in the world of the organisation. New, online social structures are horizontal rather than the traditional vertical command and control of the organisation. True enough, but the inference that this creates democratisation and a natural removal of bias is a non-sequitur that the authors do not support with evidence.

"Thanks to Web 2.0 tools, you don't need to flatter and cajole your way up the ladder ... Rewards are attributed on the basis of performance, not position." This is just silly. People are people and will – and do – use web 2.0 tools as they use any other to persuade, cajole and influence. The internet changes the speed and approach to the game, not the game itself. The authors say "when more people have a shot at fame, due to its increased supply, its rewards are more evenly, and justly, distributed according to merit." Or they could just go to the people most adept at playing the system. When Bletchley Park recently won the Wikes Building with Pride Award was it really because the home of British computing deserved it? Perhaps so, I even hope so, but it could also have something to do with a well-orchestrated blog and Twitter campaign. A classic web 2.0 approach.

In the field of Power – in particular economic power – there is no doubt that the internet and Web 2.0 technologies is a game changer. With the lowering of the cost of production and the reduction of the cost of reaching markets to almost zero, the music industry in particular has dramatically changed. This much we know, but Fraser and Dutta shed some interesting light on what's happening. For example they quote Richard Shell's work comparing the music labels approach to the internet to the reaction of US car makers to Ford 100 years ago – again some excellent historical perspective.

Fraser and Dutta don't underestimate what this means to the organisation. "By diffusing power downwards and outwards ... Enterprise 2.0 no longer needs managed hierarchies to organise production." This may be so in some cases, but it's all a little evangelical. It's almost as if, by the end of the book, they had whipped themselves up into a pro-Web 2.0 fever, epitomised when they say "Capitalism is no longer about the production of goods and services", leaving me to wonder where I'm going to buy this week's groceries.

Which should you buy?
Despite this bias in favour of their subject, and despite my often disagreeing with what Fraser and Dutta had to say, I found theirs the more interesting of the two books to read, because of the breadth and depth of material covered.
If you are a middle-aged technophobe who's concerned that the world is going to hell in a handcart because of the internet, then buy Tapscott's book. It will reassure you. If on the other hand, you want some interesting analysis, a truly international outlook and some historical context then Fraser and Dutta's book wins out. It at least tries to examine recent Web 2.0 advances neutrally, and AS its bias towards technology shows, it avoids Tapscott's tiresome cheerleading, and provides the occasional balancing argument.

Donald H Taylor is chairman of the Learning and Skills Group. He blogs at www.donaldhtaylor.co.uk

Title: Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom
Authors: Matthew Fraser & Soumitra Dutta
Publisher: Wiley