Hello peeps!

It's Alaz Han. I'm on a mission to make diverse, inclusive, and healthy cultures (which means enthusiasm) in workplaces with meaning and belonging. 

I have been writing the newsletter in this field for a while in Turkish. However, I wanted to share the more scientific side of the work as an article here. I wanted to examine the path to the “New Generation” concept in my first article by going from the macro to the micro level.

In the rapidly changing and the transforming world, what does the term "New Generation" mean which we use for almost every definition (new generation tablet, new generation learning, new generation technology, etc.)?

The fact that we have reached hundreds of thousands of information per second, coming from the very beginning of the historical ages, namely hunting and gathering, actually tells a great evolution of us as a society. It is valuable to understand this evolution without examining the concept of generation.

• There were groups of people who were living by hunting and gathering and lived in harmony with nature, up to about B.C 13,000. These groups were defined as “Society 1.0” in the first place in the evolution of the concept of society.
• Starting from the B.C. 13.000's, until the AD 1700s, a sedentary lifestyle was gradually adopted with agricultural activity and livestock. At this point, the farm society laid its foundations and took second place as “Society 2.0”.
• We met the concept of "Society 3.0" with the industrial revolution and the start of mechanical production with water and steam power in the mid-1780s. That is industrial society. Charlie Chaplin's Factory Work video helps us to think about this term.
• Society started to discover IoT(Internets of Things) with the invention of the computer and, now began to access information more easily. This revolution introduced us to “Society 4.0”. The rapid integration of information and technology into life has brought great changes in society, and our concepts of value and culture have diversified and become more complex.
• Building a super-intelligent society on the information society begins exactly at this point (Fukuyama, 2018). The idea of using information and communication technologies in the most efficient way has started to be adopted in order to solve the increasing problems in society and world resources, established connections with the Internet of Things (IoT) and created new values.
• In January 2016, 'Society 5.0' is presented as a core concept in the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan by the Japanese Cabinet. At the CeBIT fair held in 2017, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe explained the philosophy of Society 5.0 and aimed to build the new era experienced after the Industry 4.0 revolution in Tokyo (Develi, 2017).

Society 5.0: Human Ability

Society 5.0 basically focuses on finding solutions to the social challenges of innovation and rapid growth that comes with Industry 4.0 and creating a human-centered society where people are fully active and have a high quality of life.

The most important aspect of Society 5.0 is its emphasis on the necessity of creating a comfortable society for all, without distinctions such as race, religion, language, gender etc. (Akın, Mayatürk & Sürgevil, 2021)

And here the philosophy of "Society 5.0", which is described as a super smart society, is starting to spread rapidly into our lives.

Now, when we stop and look at the definitions we have come to so far, we can clearly see that at the centre of Society 5.0 is an approach that includes “human” and “a human-centred society”. At that point, when we examine the micro level of society generations will welcome us. According to the generation theory, generations include feelings and thoughts about events such as socio-economic change processes, unemployment, security or famine that have taken place in the society during the lived period. (Lamm and Meeks, 2009: 615) When we look at the changes in generations starting from this definition, we can see how each social model shapes the generation it is in and the next generation. It would not be wrong to say that the expectations of Society 5.0, which were defined just 5 years ago, are inherited exactly for Generations Z and Alpha.

For this reason, it is critical to be familiar with these concepts in order to understand the new generations.

References

• Arı, E. S. (2021). Süper akıllı toplum: Toplum 5.0. Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 23 (1), 455-479.
• Akın, N., Mayatürk Akyol, E. ve Sürgevil Dalkılıç, O. (2021), Akademik Yayınlar Işığında Toplum 5.0 Kavramına İlişkin Bir Değerlendirme, Atatürk Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Dergisi, 35(2): Sayfa: 577-593, https://doi.org/10.16951/atauniiibd.792750
• Fukuyama, M. (2018). Society 5.0: Aiming for a new human-centred society. https://www.jef.or.jp/journal/ July/August
• Saracel, N. & Aksoy, I. (2020). Toplum 5.0: Süper Akıllı Toplum. Social Sciences Research Journal, 9(2)