Michael Jamieson Bristow 
GENERATION GAP
Today the 'aged' represent a social burden for both the state and their families. For their part, young people, a model for the mass media, are also a burden because they are finding it increasingly difficult to access jobs and housing. In addition, they are perceived as a rebellious, even dangerous generation. An intermediate generation that seldom features in this fixed picture of the generations is missing. Referring to the 'parents' generation: adults of active age who barely have time to devote to the other generations because of their work obligations and the need to 'be competitive'. And while people reach old age with better health and quality of life and live longer, the youth stage is also prolonged, with postponement of the transition to adult life represented by joining the labour market and emancipation. The economic, social and cultural conditions of 'maturity' and 'ageing' are changing at high speed.
The generations stretch 'like chewing gum' and have difficulty finding their space and meaning in this society, which brings forward the retirement of one generation for the sake of profitability. Thus, retirement is earlier, while life expectancy, fortunately, increases. The result is the 'clash' between a 'third age' that is younger and more active than ever, and the birth of a 'fourth age'. These changes demand dignified spaces, where the former can remain active and feel useful and the latter can be duly cared for. Unfortunately, this is not happening, and 'old people', although there may be twenty years age difference between them, share the same resources, with genuine intergenerational clashes, since while one group needs to stay active and involved in society, the other requires rest, dominoes, and gentle excursions.
On the other hand, we find an intermediate generation. These are the parents (in respect of grandchildren and grandparents), who have less available time and fight to stay active, 'recycling themselves', trying to keep their place in society. Dissatisfaction and anxiety cause new pathologies in adults, young people, and the old. many are seeking an active space where they can play central roles. Young people and adults attempt to adapt to an everchanging, unpredictable society that is desperately seeking modernity, 'eternal youth'.
The 'legacy' that the older person tries to incubate is rejected by the young person. In most cases it is not that the adult is unable to educate, but, today, is unable to 'teach how to live' and make this legacy stimulating. In many case, conversation between young people and adults is deaf, unfriendly because on the one hand adults communicate in 'vernacular language' about their experience, and young people answer in their 'digital language' from their own isolation and closedness because they feel they are being observed and analyzed by parents, bosses, teachers, politicians and consumer brands. There is rejection of experience because for the first time in recent history, the young are better at understanding and handling technology, rules, forms of communication than their parents. Adults are no longer the voice of experience, they no longer transmit knowledge. On the contrary, they often have to ask their children for help to cope with sophisticated mobile phones or computer software, which the latter, like 'digital natives', use completely naturally. Age has a bad image, older people hold obsolete ideas which are rejected by the young and, consequently, by a society where youth is everything. But the feeling of rejection may be mutual. When the kids stop being kids, they frighten the adult. To the eternal rebellion and self-sufficiency of youth is now added a novel power status, because the young control and speak the language of digital technology and, especially, because of the changes in personal relations brought about by this technology, where horizontality reigns and authority is not trusted.
Adults represent to the young the obstacle to accessing wellbeing and freedom. It is adults who own inner city housing, who fix the price of rents and thousand-euro salaries, who buy and sell assets and hold the power to command and decide politically in parliaments because they are the masters of information. They are inaccessible and defend themselves against the young so as not to loose their jobs.
For us, there is a generation - the young - which for the first time is able to manage on its own with the aid of technology and the information it generates and obtains from technology. These young people live between the real and the virtual, taking refuge in this habitat that is inaccessible to adults and the elderly. Virtually provides an escape hatch from their surface reality. Salaries, jobs, housing problems, the problems of living with parents - all this forms part of their surface reality. The response of young people in the form of an increasing belief in and involvement with non-governmental organizations and a rejection of politics as we understand it today is a signpost to where as adults they may come to direct nations.