New Media for Children & Young Adults, 2010-11

I hope you’ve all been as intrigued by the reading this week as Rob — I selected it because it’s provocative and represents a strong view of young people as enabled by technology.  It also hints at lives constrained, more or less, by technology: people unable to start their day without Facebook or Twitter, always on and constantly connected, seemingly dependent on technology use as a defining aspect of their lives, even as it appears seamlessly integrated (flows like water or surrounds them like air, both commonly used metaphors).

Tapscott’s view is one of many that have emerged in recent years attempting to define the role of media in the lives of young people, and in particular attempting to identify the effects of media on a generation of connected youth.  We have extreme detractors, such as Mark Bauerline’s treatise on the Dumbest Generation.  Or Nicholas Carr, who poses the question of whether Google Makes Us Stupid.  More balanced approaches, which document both the risks and opportunities can be found in books by John Palfrey and Sonia Livingstone, both significant scholars with a wealth of empirical evidence for their claims.

A recent interview with Howard Rheingold frames the challenge of defining a generation that many regard as “digital natives” but might better be thought of as digital naives: “I think we need to dispense with the assumption that a majority of young people are skillful users of social media.” It’s one thing to be connected, another to understand what to do with the information you find or assess it effectively. Where do you stand with regard to these portraits of young people?  Since many of you are of this generation, what do you think of these depictions of yourself and peers?  How good is your “crap detector” (to borrow from Howard’s interview)?

Of course I can’t comment on everything within these chapters, so I’ve just chosen a few points I found interesting.  So I hope other people have taken some other stuff from later on in the chapters (like the section on working from home and entrepreneurship as opposed to office work…  cool stuff!)  Anyway, here goes:

I think, out of most of the reading, this was my favourite line put forward by Tapscott.  And I think it’s very true.  I’m honestly still unsure of what “generation” I am from, but I really don’t care for the purposes of this reading.  I think a bit like Tapscott’s son, and I’m hoping to start thinking more like Tapscott.  Indeed, his son was looking at Mars through the Hubble Telescope from his bedroom thinking how awesome Mars is, and completely forgetting how incredible the technology is that is letting him get such a great view of the planet.  I am much the same way, and for the purposes of this course, I suppose that will need to change.  This blog, for instance, to me, is a place where I put my words down through my keyboard, and then the computer amazingly does things and this all ends up in the ether for you all to read.  I never think about the behind-the-scenes technological makeup of the internet, or the coding that went into creating WordPress.  I can only hope that I will soon be starting to think a little bit more critically about the things that allow me do to do what it is that I do on a daily basis.

I think what I’m curious about is what other people think about some of the broad assumptions that go into Tapscott’s understanding of the Net Generation.  I do believe that whatever generation I happen to be a part of is very involved in technology, and there are certainly some who I would consider to be overly-involved with their technological thingamajigs, but I hesitate to say that our use–and perhaps reliance on–technology has made us in any way less able to express ourselves or work or think critically.  Of course, maybe that’s just me being defensive or something.  Who knows?  I like to think that it’s about how we utilize new technology that makes us different, and not that we are somehow lesser in any way.  New Media just forces us to think about things more, and to consider what we used to do before these new bits and pieces showed up on the technology stage, as it were.

But what do you all think about some of the assumptions in the reading?  Did you agree with the majority of what Tapscott had to say?  Or do you think he went overboard with his theories?

Thanks for listening!