Description of the Internet generation, whose knowledge is wide but shallow.

Writing for The Huffington Post in December, Marshall P. Duke commented on a term which is perhaps more apt for the Net generation than “Generation Z, the Dreamer Generation, Generation Wisdom, or Generation I”:

All of these are either neutral/descriptive or mildly complimentary. However, there is one more that has not achieved the same degree of visibility, yet for me as a professor of psychology who has taught rising generations for forty years, it must be attended to and taken seriously. This is a term first used by playwright and ten time Obie winner Richard Foreman. He called the Net-Gen-ers by a less salutary name – Pancake people.

In March 2005, Foreman stated:

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance – as we all become “pancake people“ – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so—and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

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