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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
In an age of political animus, increasing hostility toward "others," and 24/7 media coverage that seems to focus on the negative, a recent article in Frontiers in Psychology provides a glimmer of hope, particularly for those who live in the United States.
Written by Yale University academic Gabriel Grant, "Exploring the Possibility of Peak Individualism, Humanity's Existential Crisis, and an Emerging Age of Purpose" aims to clear up two competing views of today's cultural narrative in the United States. First is the traditional view of the next generation—millennials—whom many view as individualistic, materialistic, and narcissistic. Some even refer to millennials as "Gen Me" in response to those who develop their "personal brand" with selfies and social media posts.
In stark contrast there is a view of millennials as rejecting selfish values and leading America into a "great age of purpose." Unlike previous generations, simply earning money is not enough for them—significant data shows that younger people are searching for purpose in their lives and their work. Consider the fact that the non-profit group 80,000 Hours (whose name represents the amount of time spent at work in the average lifespan) even exists. 80,000 Hours provides career advice to help young people build careers with social impact. Universities and businesses are increasingly following this path to help millennial workers achieve their goal of finding purpose in their lives.
Both sides can provide reams of anecdotal evidence that supports their view of millennials, and until recently, there have been few studies on the issue. In his article, however, Grant theorized that Google's digitization of millions of books and the Ngram Viewer, a tool that shows how phrases have appeared in books, could allow a quantified analysis of culture over the past two centuries, and he used this approach to quantitatively test the popular notion that a drive for purpose is increasing. What he found is encouraging.
Yeah, because people with a healthy ego would never possibly do volunteer work...
Source: https://opensource.com/article/17/10/rise-open-source
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:42AM (3 children)
Given that boomers combined with Xers still outnumber millennials and younger, how do they know that the Google Ngram results of a shift in phrase use isn't due to a shift in attitudes of those older generations or of all people? I don't think "a leopard doesn't change its spots" will hold up in a scientific paper - although there's probably something in it!
I personally think part of the growth in the open source movement is due to disgust and rebellion at the behaviors of the big tech companies with their short-termism, style over substance, dumbing down and exploitation of users for big data. A similar kick back is prevalent against politics and in that case it is particularly amongst the young because they're often more economically challenged by traditional policies. I suppose if tech is associated with youth as well I can see where this is being associated with the young. I'd like to see something like age of author used in the Ngram study though - but you'd need access to Google's database to do that.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:29PM (1 child)
Huh, wut? You're saying that proprietary software has STYLE?!?! So, "lump of shit" is a style now? Who'da thunk it?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:52PM
Well the "styles" certainly aren't to my tastes but a lot of management types certainly seem to have very strong ideas how their software product should look - which is usually very different to how the developers think (OK know) it should look.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @09:46PM
I personally think part of the growth in the open source movement is due to disgust and rebellion at the behaviors of the big tech companies with their short-termism, style over substance
No, it is simple, cost.
Take something like an Oracle or SQL server or windows server. The license costs are fucking nuts well into 250k per year for decent sized servers. Open source has mostly the same thing for 'free'. That is it. I currently work in a place that has litterally billions of dollars on the books. Everything is open source or going there very quickly. Not because they are altruistic. But because the recurring license cost is 0. Think they are contributing back? Not really. None of the developers in the org (and there is a 5k+ size of them) are allowed to do so by NDA.