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Rise Of The 15-Year Olds, Part II
Small wonder the kids believe that older people have little or nothing to teach or tell them. It's often seemed true. The Net fosters a "Hey, I can do this, too" value system.
Sometimes, the outsiders, younger than most successful business executives, score big -- with successes like Netscape, Gnutella, Linux, IM, WinAmp. Even though they're more than 15, Lewis would argue that such pioneers help drive the status revolution. But they're exceptions, too.
Look at the allegedly-overturned powerful institutions and their upstart rivals. The music industry is in less trouble than Napster. Microsoft still makes far more money than Open Source systems. The broadcast network's audience steadily erodes, but their evening news shows still have greater reach and clout than Matt Drudge.
The strengths of 15-year-olds are also their weaknesses. Certain traits of the Net-connected 15-year old form recognizable patterns. They tend to confuse hostility with communication; they shoot (or type) before they think. They can be arrogant and posturing as well as creative and energetic. They are sometimes narcissistic: they fixate on "me" media, blocking and filtering people and ideas they don't like or agree with. Too often, they see reality only as what they (or the people on their mailing lists, blogs or p2p forums) think.
Although they consider themselves ferocious defenders of free speech, in theory, in practice many find differing opinions infuriating. Online, they have not grown up in a civil culture. Often, their hostility is a posture, a veneer.
They have profound, impressive grounding in technology, gaming and software, but big blank spots in many other areas of knowledge, including history, politics, mainstream culture -- fields not necessary to navigating online but definitely helpful in running the world.
No question they're among the leaders of the technological revolution spawned in cyberspace. But they are also kids, unprepared for the political, civic, ethical and headaches of leadership, or the responsibility that comes with running institutions. The first generation of computer kids is now running the tech world, and they've been universally sobered by the realities of economics and politics.
Does childhood end when computers come into their lives, as Jonathan Lebed's father laments in "Next"? I suspect there's some truth to the idea that things can get lost and values skewed when any single value system or interest -- computing, sports, music -- overwhelms a person's days and nights and crowds out everything else. The computer geeks and nerds I know seem healthiest to me when other powerful things in their lives help keep them grounded: close relationships with friends and parents, religion, a passion for chess, dogs, hiking ... whatever.
Despite the widening cultural gap, I still think older people have some things to teach them. One of the surreal things about being a kid, of course, is that you have no idea what you don't know or might need. Life's lessons and experiences, along with history, ethics and context, can be invaluable, and they're hard for 15-year-olds to come by on their own. The reality isn't so much that kids are taking over the world, but that the world has sometimes made them technological orphans, abandoned them to sophisticated machinery that few adults bother to comprehend.
Margaret Mead wrote years ago that the pace of cultural change in the West was accelerating so rapidly that the young were coming to believe they had nothing to learn from their elders. And that was before the Net. Her prediction has been fulfilled, more than even she imagined.
(Next -- Your feedback.)
Think about it; when you were 15, what did you do? I'm willing to bet you snuck out of your house to go make some hell on the town, just like today's kids sneak down to their daddy's computer to do some packet sniffing. I'm willing to bet that you told your parents that you were going to a friend's house but instead went out joyriding with friends, just like today kids say they're using the 'net to "just look around" when they're downloading the latest 0-day exploits.
Come on, let's keep things in perspective here. Just like Brittney Spears, it's the same song, just with a different group of backup singers.
I know a bit about geeky 15-year-olds; I've written a book and a number of articles about them.
Once, I was at the Tower of London with a friend. We were looking at the crown jewels, and both of us were convinced they had to be fake. As we were discussing this, a woman in front of us overheard our conversation.
She turned around and looked at us very gravely and said, "Oh no, those are real."
To further cement her authority, she followed her assertion with a whispered explanation -
"I've been here before."
For somebody who likes to bash mass media - you sure love to cater to their stereotypes of the internet today dont you? I mean most 15 year olds on the net are either sitting on AOL (some on
The Net does not cause this. Children have always been this way to a certain extent (as our society gets more liberal - the children become more uncontrollable it seems). For you to simply point the finger at the internet and say "thats why" all while assuming that this is the product of some deviant open source, copyright infringing lifestyle - is fickle to say the least. And yes that if anything would be the deviant lifestyle. You seem live under this wonderful assumption that all children today have access to computers and all of the kids are up and coming computer scientists willing to work for free. Bullshit.
Jon - come back to earth. The Net is not life. Life is not the Net. Perhaps you should begin writing fictional stories (some might argue that you do already) instead of editorializing. I believe you might find more acceptance on that platform. The fact is most kids online just sit around and IM their buddies on AOL or yahoo all day long. Some look for MP3s. Some check email. Most of them are not future Fortune 500 CEOs.
Get back in touch man.
Gam
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
On the other hand, I'm glad to see you only need to know "a bit" about a subject to write a book about it.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Exactly! Just because they know something their parents don't, doesn't mean it's useful.
And I can't tell you how infuriating it is every time I hear someone declare themselves l33t simply because they found more Jenna Jameson porn on the SMB network, or kick ass at Half-Life, or anything that doesn't require any significant self-education at all. It's sad; if more people wanted to learn this sort of thing, it's easier than ever, but a lot of folks just don't want to dig deeper into the mystery.
The scary part isn't how many kids become hackers, it's how many don't.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Margaret Mead wrote years ago that the pace of cultural change in the West was accelerating so rapidly that the young were coming to believe they had nothing to learn from their elders. And that was before the Net. Her prediction has been fulfilled, more than even she imagined.
There is a long held stigma that teenagers have no respect for their elders, teenagers think they're invincible, teenagers know everything...the list goes on. Not that it doesn't have some truth, but the fact is, this idea has been around long before everyone flooded the net.
The net isn't making kids any more disrespectful of their elders, or any more invincible, or any more knowledgable. It is, however, making them more of a presence. 30 years ago the geek in the corner was the geek in the corner. Now the geek in the corner has met up with hundreds of others.
It's quite possible that this isn't such a negative thing -- for every obnoxious, annoying kid on the net there's another one who is getting a lot of support from it.
It's just easier to focus on the troublemakers -- they're the ones that want to be noticed anyway. But to say that the net made them that way isn't really correct. It just made them more obvious.
If you, ANY of you, are interested in the subject, you owe it to yourselves to read Neil Postman's very thoughtful analysis of the sad subject, "The Disappearance of Childhood".
Postman posits that the phase of human development we commonly refer to as "childhood" is a social construct, one that came about primarily as a result of the public educational system created in America only a couple hundred years ago.
Childhood was a period in which the institutions of society (from schools, to government, to families, to churches) actually "protected" children from information. (I can hear you squints groaning already, but please, let me finish). This was easily managed because there was a rather universal morality that the various institutions that made up our society subscribed to- and- terror-of-terrors, it was pretty much the Judeo-Christian one that most of the founding fathers (Deists, Puritans, Christians, Agnostics all) believed in. Children, brought into the public education system, were not only taught math, science, etc.- they were taught the ten commandments, the pledge of allegiance, etc. (They were taught patriotism and morality- by the schools! ARGH!!!)
Childhood, then, was a period in which children were taught a standard of right-and-wrong, and were also kept innocent from much of the harsh realities that their minds were deemed not yet ready to contextualize.
Information was tightly controlled and regulated. There was no ratings-driven-and-and-advertising-subsidized-mas
I know, it seems terrifying. There are a million bad things to say about such a society, and I've no doubt that hundreds of you will re-appropriate all the bile and vitriol you've stored for diatribes about the evil menace that is Microsoft in eviscerating the evil menace that was "America" until recently. We know too well that such a system is capable of legislated racism and sexism (truly and inarguably terrible legacies of America 1.0). We know it is capable of gross violations of civil liberties, with impunity (government-sponsored biological experiments on its own citizenry, wiretapping, etc...).
But there are benefits and advantages to having universal standards in a societal system- and I don't just mean for those institutions determining the standards. I'm talking about the people. One of the greatest benefits of such a societal system was a public education system that was, in its time, unparalleled in the entire world for providing a quality of education to any willing citizen. Another benefit was that shame was a powerful psychological force for discouraging behavior that was not in the society's best interests. Seem puritanical? It was! But many of today's societal ills- especially those that affect children- were all but unimaginable then. Teenage pregnancy? School shootings? Drug-addiction in teenagers? They weren't a problem. Why? Because it was "WRONG" to have sex before marriage, "thou shall not kill", and "what are drugs", respectively?
The human mind is, in a very real sense, akin to the computer it ultimately conceived of in its image. The best and most productive minds are like the best and most productive computing systems- the have a tested, feature-rich operating system controlling the activities and information storage/retrieval of information itself. When humans don't get taught a worldview (a comprehensive perspective on right, wrong, truth, value, etc.), they are less effective when it comes to contextualizing information. You can have the biggest hard-drive in the world, and if you're running DOS 1.0 on an IBM-PC, you're pretty much going to be limited to a dull-ass computing life.
In answer to the original question, "does childhood end when computers come into (kids') lives?". No. Childhood ends when children are given unrestricted access to uncontextualized information. So often, when the subject of school shootings comes up on Slashdot, it descends into arguments about gun-control, videogame violence, first-amendment issues, etc. But every so often, someone nails it by saying, "Parents should teach their children right from wrong". Parents now are the sole institution with the authority to teach their children a worldview. And sadly, more and more parents are abdicating this profound responsibility by turning their kids over to be taught by television sets and now, the Internet. (Divorce happens in half of all households, showing children that even the parental institution isn't reliable or trustworthy). Childhood, as we've known it, is going to become an outdated concept. And it is more fitting to ask, "can childhood ever begin?".
I've hardly done justice to Postman's wonderful book- go and buy it now if you've any interest in a thoughtful, NON-CHRISTIAN examination of the issue of the eradication of childhood.