Why is Generation Y Resisting Social Networking Tools?

Ryan Healy, a Gen Y who writes the blog Employee Evolution, recently published a post about why Generation Y is not buying into the new Web (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). One of the reasons he cites is that they may have an innate sense that too much connectivity and too much time online is unproductive. (If you're wondering why this interests me so much it's because I do PR on the side.)

Here are some of the observations I’ve made in regard to mainstream Gen Y's resistance to the new Web. I think there are some lessons here for us all.

Virtually every member of Gen Y knows someone who has been fired for a blog post, tweet or status update. While Gen Y once lacked a certain amount of inhibition, they have become all too acquainted with the potential career consequences of social media. As Healy points out, mainstream Generation X was not the early adopters of these social media tools (think Friendster, MySpace). By the time they did jump on the band wagon as the early majority or even late majority, they had already read many a cautionary tale from Gen Y about social media and proceeded with far greater caution.

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Most members of Generation X graduated high school before (get this) email. Thus, if you wanted to stay in touch with friends after school, it required real work and effort, and even then, could prove impossible. For the most part, those days are over.

Facebook, Twitter and search engines offer a far greater degree of permanence as it applies to human relationships and connectivity. There’s nothing wrong with being forever friends, but human development comes in stages. I think the maturation process is best served when there is distance created between the present and past. Isn’t this essential to gaining perspective – to seeing ourselves outside the confines of junior high rejection, high school drama or college failures? Besides, if we never leave the base of the mountain we have no idea how far we have to climb.

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So, imagine graduating high school or even college and never being able to leave the old group behind. I loved high school, but when it came time for me to go to college, I was ready for a new adventure away from the beauty, shadows, reigns and relationship obligations of the past.

Imagine in the past you were a total screw-up, bully or snob. Maybe you were labeled in high school as a math flunky or known for being overly promiscuous. Social networking has now ensured less distance between you and your past personal brand, making it harder to re-brand or reinvent yourself. This could not only have implications in college but on career, and thus, to control all these variables, Gen Y has walked off the virtual stage. I don’t blame them one bit.

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It is one thing for Generation X or Baby Boomers to search for and reconnect with old classmates and colleagues via Facebook and classmates.com. Half of them have changed their names; a percentage of them have died. The pool of possible reconnections is limited. This is not the case for Generation Y, who based on age, is more “findable.” This makes a possibly painful or disappointing past less “losable.”

I could be wrong, but I think these are a few of the reasons mainstream Gen Y has put the social networking tools back in the sandbox. Eventually, they’ll take them back out, but only after they’ve created a healthier distance between the present and their childhoods and youth.

Why do you think mainstream Gen Y is resisting social networking? What is your generation and what is your favorite Web 2.0 tool?