Book excerpt: In the 1960s, during an era of rock music and war protests, the American media coined the phrase "generation gap" to underline the increasing animosity between older and younger Americans. The Next Generation Gap explores a deep cultural pattern in U. S. history that results in periodic generation gaps. The author discovers that the youth movement of the 1960s, far from being the first of these classic American confrontations, was actually the fifth. He finds evidence that a new generation will soon disturb the social consensus by hijacking Internet and electric vehicle technologies. The Next Generation Gap sketches a persuasive picture of American political, economic, and cultural life as the nation stumbles toward its sixth generational revolution.