The San Jose Mercury News on employees under 30 in the workplace: 'Hiring Gen Y may be hazardous to your business.'

The article is based on a survey of IT managers, who are often the most conservative, change-resistant stakeholders in any corporation. So I don't put much stock in its conclusions, though I do agree that workers need to be educated about the dangers associated with social networks.

I talked about this at Digital Hollywood in October; excerpt from my blog post:

We've seen a shift from closed, proprietary networks like AOL toward open and semi-open networks and platforms. Traditional norms of privacy are falling away as the digital generation, and the young in particular, embrace the ethos of transparency, media sharing and, to some extent, GPS location awareness. And mass media continue to give way to fragmented niche media at an accelerating pace.

Chris Tolles and I were not concerned, as another panelist was, about the media consumption habits of young people coming up in the workforce. As Chris said, when that 24-year-old office worker is stumped by a problem, he'll have a much larger support network to draw upon, including old friends he went to high school or college with.

JD Lasica is founder of Socialmedia.biz. We work with large companies and nonprofits on social media strategies and campaigns. See JD's business profile, contact him or leave a comment.