Cisco Systems has published the second of its annual Connected World Technology Report, focusing on the importance of the Internet to the daily lives of college students and young professionals. Considering the fact that Cisco interviewed a generation of people who have never lived without the Internet, The VAR Guy finds the results less than surprising but more than a little sobering.
In a nutshell, the report found a full one-third of survey respondents believe the Internet is as critical to their lives as food, water, shelter and air. And almost half said it was “pretty close” to that level of importance.
Also not totally a surprise to our resident blogger were the findings that 55 percent of respondents said they could not live without the Internet and 64 percent said they would choose an Internet connection over a car.
The VAR Guy may not be surprised, but he is a little disconcerted by these results.
Scott Gainey, director of product marketing for Mobility Solutions at Cisco, said the company chose this particular demographic for the survey to help companies gain insight into the future of work. “What do companies need to be ready for?” he said. “They need to prepare for not just the technology shift but the attitude shift as well.”
In other words, long gone are the days when folks resorted to plain old paper and pencil to brainstorm ideas or figure out problems. Today, productivity comes to a screeching halt when the Internet goes down.
The VAR Guy is a little old school, having grown up in an era when computer programming classes in high school were ruled by uber-geeks who carried around floppy disks (the 5.25-inch versions) and worked on TRS-80s and VAX systems. And rather than meeting friends in online chat rooms or MPG environments, our resident blogger and his friends met up at the park or the fast food joint on the corner, causing trouble physically rather than virtually.
Nowadays, however, the Internet is more important than dating, going out with friends or listening to music — at least for 40 percent of the survey respondents.
That just makes our resident blogger depressed.
Obviously, the report findings point to incredible opportunity for channel partners to help their enterprise — and even SMB — customers prepare their IT infrastructure for this new generation of workers. But there’s another takeway that shouldn’t be ignored — the chipping away of humanity.
Have we, as a society, raised a generation of antisocial, Internet-addicted young adults? Did we succeed in our mission to ensure instant access to information anytime, anywhere, yet fail in our quest to raise well-rounded kids who understand the importance of human relationships? If Cisco’s report is to be taken seriously, then all signs point to yes, we have both succeeded and failed.
Cisco’s report is the first of three subjects to be covered by the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report. The second survey will focus on mobility and the bring your own device movement while the third will focus on security and IT policies. Both are due by the end of 2011.
If you’re interested in reading the report, you can access it here.
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I sure say the internet is important. Convenience of information can save lives, progress future technology, save time, and so much more. Anyways, you can stick me in that 60% percentile that would choose a internet over a car.