The new website “Unithrive” aims to match Harvard students in financial need, with Harvard alumni who are willing to make interest free loans to support these students in their educational pursuits.
What makes Unithrive particularly interesting is that most of this “social networking” “lending” and “borrowing” will most likely take place between different generations.
Most broke college students will probably belong to generation Y. The wealthy members of Generation X, Baby Boomers, and Veterans will help out by providing loans.
These “transactions” will probable stimulate a great deal of intergenerational interaction. It may even help establish actual relationships between parties, since borrowers are required to provide a certain number of “updates,” regarding their education.
Also, this site may be one of the first networking sites in which power dynamics have greatly shifted, and traditional hierarchal structure floats back to its roots.
On Facebook, our mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, and even grandparents, beg us to simply “friend” them. We’ve got to explain the point of blogs, and the way to tweet.
Although older generations catch on quickly, younger generations still seem to have the “upper hand,” which comes from their sharp intuitiveness.
However, a site like “Unithrive” potentially changes everything, as it gives older generations their power back. The job networking site “Linked In,” is perhaps similar in the sense that it also shifts online power structures. Older people are often more experienced, have better job positions, more work connections, and therefore more to offer than most young people on the site.
Just like in the real world, the appearance of money and job status in the online world, changes everything. It’s as if the “online cliques” that are so precisely segregated by age group, suddenly bust open, stimulating dialogue and relationships between generations.