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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.
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The worst thing is that even though they understand the ways of computers better than most adults their skills are in reality scaringly limited to the relativly few youngsters that can comprehend the lower languages of computers. Todays 15-years-olds only know the top of it; how to surf the web and efficiently locate information, how to connect to IRC and communicate with their friends and how to interpret simple error messages and act on them. As children and young people they have an easy time learning languages, they've learned the GUI-language. How the computer GUI talks to its users and how they can talk to them, but they can't get deep down in the computer.
The worst thing about this is that the ones who do understand often is more educated than the rest but will become computer-engineers, -scientists or something else within those fields. The rest - who know the GUI-language - will make out the rest of the society. As Katz say they won't listen to older people and take the knowledge wich they have to offer because they belive they are intelectually superior. They're not, they just know a language older people hasn't had a chance to learn. These people are going to get the jobs like accountanting, nurses, teachers and if it gets really bad doctors and engineers. The knowledge average is falling and if todays 15 yearolds don't get a grip on themselfs it will be a free fall and a lot of F's will be given in school.
Look a monkey!
Hmmm, it seems to me that Katz is talking about a subset of 15 year olds, albeit a substantial one - that is, white, middle-class 15 year olds who own computers.
This leads me to say that I find it somewhat unenlightening to read attempts such as these to sum up a generation in just a few paragraphs (spread among a few articles). This has been happening forever, I know, (just look at all that has been written about the baby boomers) but I think that these writings tend to focus on shallow issues.
There are some interesting observations to be made about a generation where the middle-class and wealthy are raised via the Internet, but I think this sort of thing needs to be approached carefully and with much thought and research, which doesn't seem to be apparent here.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
But back to reality, and to the article. I don't see the widening gap. At least not with the 15 and 16 year olds I deal with on a bi-weekly basis.
One of my favorite stories is when on a youth retreat I was giving a short talk on "life'd dirty little secrets" ... which includes one of my favorites ... sometime, between the age of 25 and 30, you wake up one day .... and much to your horror, you realize ... mom & dad were RIGHT!
No lie, when I said that, one young lady put her hands on her ears and screemed "NNOOOOOOOOOO!".
Now I'm no expert. Heck, I'm a coder. But I'm at least cogent enough to recognize the following three things.
I'll say things, and/or give advice that their parents give ... but because it came from lips, and not that of their parents ... they are more likely not to roll their eyes and moan. Not because I'm some great sage, but because I'm convinced teens that age are wired that way so they don't wind up living in the basement when they're 45.
Second, 15 and 16 year olds get bored real fast. I've done some computer projects with them, for Boy Scouts, church groups, you name it. Alot of energy at first, but when it comes down to the maintenence phase of a project ... hello ? is anyone out there ... ? Nope, they're all at the Taco Bell snarfing down things that now keep this old fart up all night.
Third ... they do listen ... they just pretend they're not so they look cool in front of their friends.
The point is, teenagers are great, fun and a pain all at once. What I enjoy, and what I get out of them is their energy and their enthusiasm and hope for the future. While I would never want to be that age again, I do enjoy being around them as it keeps me a bit younger at heart.
The problem is, in many respects we ask teenagers to grow up too fast, especially when it comes to marketing and merchandising.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Being only a few years older than those children mentioned in this article, and having grown up with computers my views may be slightly slanted. but I have begun to notice that it is not only the children that are truly embracing and learning from the computers. It is also my grandparents generation.
Yes, they are not the ones that will help to extend the reach of computing know how, or probably ever isnstall software on their own. But they are eager to learn and willing to ask for help when they get into trouble. Something that I would like to see happen to all children is to have their grandparents get online. This would allow the children to teach the grandparents what they know, and the grandparents to impart some of life's wisdom on the children.
I think that in order to truly understand how computers are affecting the children, adults need to do little more than to sit down with their own kids and listen to them. Having just gone through those teenage years, I can tell you it is nice when an adult will listen to you and learn from you.
If you truly want to understand the way that a child views the internet, do not spy on their browsing or watch over their shoulder, get involved. You will find that most children are very receptive to learning from someone willing to learn from them.
I fiddled with them, learned the basics of programming, did some repairs. It was a hell of a lot of fun, but there really wasn't that much I could do, since I only got a few hours a day with them when I was lucky, and I had almost zero information on how they worked. I persevered, managed to find a couple of books and magazines, and stole time from classes to the point where I would have failed 8th grade if I hadn't moved to another city first and my records got "lost" (did I mention that these same Apple ]['s were used to store school records?). Anyway, the next year I was in a school with no computers and wound up on the football team, grew up to work in construction and then joined the Air Force as an electronics tech.
It's hard to describe what discovering the Internet while I was in the Air Force was like. Imagine you have this overpowering thirst, and all you have to drink through is a little cocktail straw. That was what my entire life had been like for me and learning, there was so much capacity for information in my head, and I couldn't even come close to satisfying it. The things I wanted to know weren't in the library, or if they were they were in this incredibly cryptic academic language I couldn't follow.
In 93, that changed completely. Here was an incredible amount of information at my fingertips, and people who understood it and were willing to explain it to me. It was like going from that cocktail straw to a 4 inch firehose: For the first time in my life, the only limit on how much I could learn was how fast I could read and how long I could stay awake.
I was still young enough to make the switch back to my geek roots, but I have to wonder, if I had been a few years older when the Internet came around to something the public could reach, what would have happened? How many bright kids, without the money to go to college or the discipline to work their way through, lapsed into discontented mundanity like I almost did?
Now, kids like I was don't have to deal with the conformity-hammering pressures that turned me into a jock and a construction worker. While still young enough to have flexibility of mind, and the physical support of their parents, they get access to this *incredible* resource, in which they can find out literally *anything*. So you get kids like Lebed and company, who can reach their full potential, and that potential turns out to be phenomenal.
Do they lack maturity? Yeah, they do. Only time and mistakes can confer maturity. That's not the important question. the important question, is maturity neccessarily the enemy of flexibility and capacity to absorb information? When these kids *do* grow up, will they be supplanted by a new batch and become the old guard? Or are we at a transition point of history, from one where most of our best and brightest are stunted by their upbringing to one where we can expect a *lot* of people who are extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgable, comfortable with change, *and* have the advantages that experience gives?
I officially became old the other day. I walked into a shoe store and looked at these shoes that could have been props from a sci-fi movie, and realized that I would feel completely ridiculous wearing them. It has to make me wonder: Right now, I'm working on the cutting edge, but in five years am I going to be looking at a 20-something who knows things about what the world has become I can't understand? Will that 15 year-old now, 20-something then, find himself equally supplanted in 10 more years?
It's been said that experience is nothing more than the opportunity to practice your mistakes. Is that joke going to become a truism?
--Dave Rickey
These "fifteen year olds" are simply a nose in the air term for people lesser than we. There are stupid people of all ages, and there are an incredible number of 15yolds who are incredibly intelligent and resourceful. To typify the young as being stupid and out of control is itself stupid and arrogant and sadly been going on for a looooong time..
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I bought him his fist machine when he was about 8 years old. When he was 9 he got himself into a little bit of "trouble" online. the appropriate authority figures threw a good scare into him and he's stayed out of trouble (so far as we know) ever since. I've probably spent between 8,000 and 10,000 dollars on his hardware and software. there have been times when I was worried that the computer would be his ruin, but in the end, I know I did the right thing. he's way ahead of the game when it comes time to earn his own living. My evening job is freelance technical writer. My son is doing technical edits for me before I submit the manuscripts to the publisher for further editing.
I'm damn proud of him. His social skills are improving, occasionally I can even drag him away from the computer for a day of fly fishing, or driving lessons (he swears he'll never buy a car with a clutch!). Overall he's turning out to be a positive contributing member of society. In the end, that's really what matters.
Exactly! I believe we need to bring back the concept of `senior', and not just as `matinee prices at the evening showing'. There are people who I respect because they have something to teach me---not some automatic prestige that gray hairs and potbellies imbue their owners with.
Yes, age can cause one to give the benefit of the doubt. But I know several adults who are, frankly, useless, irresponsible infants who just happen to be over forty.
Yes, experience is the greatest teacher. But that doesn't mean that everyone older than me has it. And, of course, age says absolutely nothing about raw talent.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Here's my point: Before this "digital revolution", do you think that 15-year-olds were just happy people who only pulled girl's hair? Of course not. They broke windows (like taking down web servers). They spraypainted walls (like defacing websites). They shoplifted (like negating copyright). The fact that they're doing it online now and in a virtual world does not negate the fact that they've been doing this for YEARS.
What, do you think that those kids weren't prosecuted back then? Of course they were. And don't tell me that real-world crime has lighter ramifications; I think it's the other way around. Get caught cracking somebody's computer, get your computer use restricted for a couple of years and put on probation. Get caught breaking a window, and you pay for the window. Which would you rather have?
Yes but to get to the stage you are at now you had to go through that stage and in my case I occasionally wonder why no one pused me off a cliff.
/. would agree that their education and experiences are non-main stream in one form or another but I think we would all agree most of us have *interesting* backgrounds. If the more interesting members of a community have arrived there by non-standard means then how can we create a standard non-standard way of creating interesting people?
Howevere it leads to an interesting discussion. I think most of the people on
These's a debate in the UK at the moment over the value of gap years - a year spent doing charity work / travelling overseas between finishing high school and starting at college. Originally it was an interesting way of gaining experience, maturity and learning to grow up. Now its a case of middle class kids being expected to do this and all following a set formula for where they go and what they do while away.
So are these script kiddies actually breaking the mould or doing exactly what the previous generation did but for the wrong reasons? I've always wondered whether the net community follows the three generation rule* or whether, because we get people from so many different backgrounds we mitigate the effects and avoid revolution. Any comments?
*Three generation rule - First generation do things because of a flaw in the system and to fulfil a need. The second generation are indoctrinated but usually dont question. Third generation question second and fail to get reasonable responses. Thus revolution and the next cycle.
For a man who decries negative images and stereotypes of geeks, Katz (who I do not think is nearly as bad as some thing) manages make this a hideously offensive column. In short, teens are smart a$$holes and we need to teach them ethics.
Wonderful. In one fell swoop he manages to both generalize and be shallow.
The part that galls me the most is that agression in teen online culture (which is there, but its in many online cultures) did NOT happen in a vaccum. Guess what? It came from their parents, culture, religion, media, etc. The violence and violent attitudes we see don't just appear, the kids didn't invent them.
It almost sounds like Katz blames the net by default.
Kids are young people. Teach them. Raise them. Be responsible and understand them. Nuff said.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Jon, you did such a great job with the first article, I don't really see the point of this one.
15 year olds have power, but they are still kids, and this dilutes their "power."
that sums up the first article.
this one is, "15 year olds on the net, but they are still 15 year olds."
really, I don't see the point.
skye
And they're not getting a tan, either.
Computer use *can* lead to great things, but that's a far cry from saying it *will*.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Also, anonymity allows for expression of many thoughts that might not come out in the 'real world' - hence, flaming. Personally, I've found that a majority of flames that I've received have been from the younger side of the population. I do agree with Katz on that point - you can see in the postings the difference between the type first, think later, and those who think their comments through. There are many stupid adults who shoot off their mouths (I've met plenty) and smart teenagers who think things through too, though.
Lastly, the theme for early comments seems to be that experience is vital. It is. Being a young engineer, I find I know very little, and find out constantly that paper is not the real world. There is no substitute for experience, and though at times certifications and degrees may seem like BS, it's not only the knowledge companies are looking for, it's the experience that comes with attaining that knowledge.
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. -Galileo Galilei
this has been studied and it looks like the reason teens think they're invulnerable is that they have to.
As humans are hunter/gatherers in order to get smaller (teen sized) folk out into the world they need a heavy dose of I Am Invincible or they'd never leave their mother's side.
This