The following video is by Lia who is only 12 years old. She gave this speech to her 7th grade class. Are the public figures emerging?

Generation Y, my generation, is much more pro life than Generation X and the Baby Boomer generation. I can’t wait for the male baby boomer pro-life establishment to be augmented and replaced by young women.

From a public speaking standpoint I want to point out some observations.

• Lia has a great original introduction that grabs your attention and sets up the rest of the talk.
• Lia uses short stories to impact her argument.
• Lia doesn’t get bogged down in citing sources although she could briefly mention a few more particularly right before her statistical barrage towards the end.
• Lia kept her message short.  If this talk were 10 minutes long she may have only received a few thousand views. As it is it has already received over 500k views.
• Lia could have impacted the numbers a bit more. She shares a few statistics and the millions tend to get lost.What is the difference between 10 million and 45 million. Without impact they are both just big numbers.
• Lia is authentic. This video would not have been as powerful if delivered by a 12 year old boy.
• Lia is passionate without sounding extreme.
• Lia is cute. Her attractiveness fosters attention.  Conservatives often overlook the importance of physical appearance in the arena of ideas. We prefer hard facts and cold reason. We get defeated by good looking actors who tell stories. Is it stupid? Sure. But its how the world works.
• Lia stays focused on the main point and does not get distracted on side issues.

Those are my thoughts on the video. What do you think?

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Warning: gross generational generalizations. Please post your exceptions and disagreements in the comments section.

The Baby Boomers and Generation X both loved the telephone. As teens they spent hours chatting away but their children do not. The relationship between young people and the phone has fundamentally shifted. For generation x the phone was a source of freedom connecting them with their friends and the world around them. Then the internet happened. And so did the cell phone. Now, phones are from hades.

Limited Calling
While Boomers and Xers had unlimited calling, Yers pay by the minute. Why don’t they just use the land line? They don’t know the numbers. I would guess the average Gen X teenager had over a dozen numbers memorized. Maybe even dozens. Gen Y kids maybe have one or two. All their numbers are in their cell phone.

Generation Y is hopelessly dependent on cell phones that annoy, interrupt and haunt them everywhere they go. They don’t know even know the time without consulting their phone. This love hate relationship has caused them to embrace online phone alternatives.

Cellphones charge by the minute so Yers keep their phone conversations short and move longer discussions to cheaper mediums such as SMS, IM, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and email. These mediums don’t require constant attention and fit well for a ADD communication style. The problem is these mediums are shallow and not well suited for deep relationships.

A New Way of Learning
Not only are cell phones changing the way we communicate with each other they are also changing the way we learn. The old goal of education was to teach facts. Now learning facts is of little help when those facts can be googled from a cellphone. Now thinking and using facts are far more important skills in the work world.

Just like paper destroyed people’s long term memories (there was a time when it was not uncommon to memorize three hundred page poems or whole books of the Bible word for word) cell phones are destroying short term memories. It is getting to the point we never need to remember anything except our cell phone.

The Answer
I don’t know what the answer is. To keep up in our fast paced world of today you need a cellphone. To keep up tomorrow you need an Internet ready SmartPhone. I have an iPhone I don’t know how I could keep up without it.

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