Slashdot Mirror
Tech Tools Fostering "Mini Generation Gaps"
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has an interesting report on the iGeneration, born in the '90s and this decade, comparing them to the Net Generation, born in the 1980s. The Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently while the iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group, and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks. 'People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,' says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. 'College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.' Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says that the iGeneration, unlike their older peers, expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and don't have the patience for anything less. 'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen." Read below for another intra-generational wrinkle.
Another intra-generational gap is the iGeneration comfort in multi-tasking. Studies show that 16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages, and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television; while people in their early 20s can handle only six, and those in their 30s about five and a half. "That versatility is great when they're killing time, but will a younger generation be as focused at school and work as their forebears?" writes Brad Smith. "I worry that young people won't be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to," says Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Another intra-generational gap is the iGeneration comfort in multi-tasking. Studies show that 16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages, and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television; while people in their early 20s can handle only six, and those in their 30s about five and a half. "That versatility is great when they're killing time, but will a younger generation be as focused at school and work as their forebears?" writes Brad Smith. "I worry that young people won't be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to," says Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
I guess I'm Net generation. Except that doesn't sound right for anyone I know of my age group.
Furthermore, I've always adopted the best tools for the job, and ignored blatant fads such as twitter.
As for multi-tasking; Again, not a generation issue, as task switching just interrupts. Texting and facebook updating is a leisure activity, and doesn't mix with work at all.
They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone
And they're going to be quickly disappointed.
Rob
"I worry that young people won't be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to," says Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
I once read a story about Einstein. He was walking and thinking about one of his problems and didn't even notice a minor earthquake while he was walking.
Having the ability to concentrate at one time was considered to be an excellent character trait. Now, being able to "multitask" is considered to be a valuable trait. And we all know what the quality of work is of one who flits their attention between multiple activities - crap.
I'm from the beginning of the 80s...and not only that, I'm from a country that was under Soviet influence. Meaning "radio, telephone and TV" for a few decades; few generations knew nothing else. Till the first half of 90s I knew nothing else.
And yet, when reading TFS, I have a strong impression its description of people born in the 90s and 00s fits nicely to me. I guess in large part because I fully realize "our times were better" is only BS meant to make oneself feel better about youth that has passed or is passing away. And it causes harm by unreasonably valuing the past above present, which is almost universally better. You only have to embrace it (well, I do pick what I want; but the time of introduction doesn't play big role)
One that hath name thou can not otter
FAIL
I thought that one of the benefits of texting was that you don't have to have a response immediately, or even read it immediately.
Which all sounds like a polite way of saying that kids these days have been spoiled. Instant gratification, be it through next-day felivery net-based purchases, simplistic video games or instantly downloaded media, means they have no patience.
Younger people scratch their heads in amazement at the things people of my generation and older have done that required supreme patience, whether learning a complex skill or finely crafting a model. This comes right on the heels of lacking discipline. If you can't see the value or take the time to perfect anything, how will you ever get good at anything except the trivial?
Oh, and get off my lawn.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
I worry that young people won't be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to
Doesn't -every- older generation say that? First it was that comic books were killing novels, next it was MTV killing attention spans, now it is multitasking.
The thing is, most young people have no real need to focus and concentrate. With the increased importance placed on education, both high schools and colleges are passing more students because you need a degree to be successful. Just think, a hundred years ago a high school education was all most people needed and people could still be successful without it. Today most people need at least some college or vocational training to do almost anything.
With jobs, it is collective blame, no one person takes the fall usually a small team will take it. There are few occasions where young people really need to focus.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I suspect their expectations will change once they start communicating about things that can't be answered with OMG LOL.
Regards,
Jason
When I was a child, there was no public Internet. In my late teens we had dial-up web sites that would pass messages back and forth with each other as far as a local call would go.
I don't miss those days - I think information should be available more or less instantly 24/7 if possible.
However, the current constant phone texting, Facebook, etc crap is just that, crap. It's electronic substitution for true socializing, and I can't help but feel that when a bunch of people stand around unable to interact with the people in their immediate vicinity because they're texting with someone who couldn't be bothered to actually show up... well, I think there's something wrong with that.
Sometimes the younger generations ARE wrong. I think the problem is these technologies are fad technologies and the people making them popular haven't outgrown them yet.
Call me if the text-aholics of today are still rabidly texting when they're 30.
I'm in my early thirties and I avoid multitasking like the plague. My younger colleagues and siblings seem to have no problems with doing several things at once - but the flip side is they end up doing many things twice simply because they sacrifice focus for versatility. They're so busy trying to do too many things at once that they rarely get anything done properly.
As for being always in contact, I couldn't care less. I'll usually answer as soon as possible, but I have no qualms when it comes to ignoring calls or messages if I'm busy with something, or simply don't feel like talking to someone. I don't expect people to be available on my schedule and see no reason why I am obligated to be always available when it suits them.
Seems to me there was a study recently that showed that people were pretty bad at multi-tasking, due to the time lost in context switching. This would seem to indicate that the "iGeneration" would, in general, be poorer workers than their older brethren. Or have the new kids gotten better at the context switching somehow? (Maybe added cores to their brains? :)
The instant-gratification bit in the article regarding messages is certainly true, but it goes much further than that. Many of these people born in the 1990s feel that the entire world should instantly respond to them and they get extremely impatient when it doesn't. They also tend to have the attention span of a gnat. I see a lot of people in this age range at work and I swear that most of them can't sit still for more than 30 seconds before the phone comes out and they're texting away. Some will even just start texting right in the middle of a conversation.
There are really two big problems with their behavior. One is that they are extremely impatient and rush through everything, acting like huge spoiled brats in the process ("what do you mean I have to wait two days for this package to get here! I want it nooooooooooowwwwwwwwww!!!!"). The second is that their tiny attention spans and easy distractability are recipes for disaster if they are ever in a potentially hazardous situation that requires their full attention, such as driving or operating equipment or machinery. I think that their parents had an "epic fail" in allowing them to grow up in this manner.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Firstly, I think the designation of birth decades is completely bogus. Somebody who was born in 1980 is likely to have had a very different technology experience to someone born after 1985, but they are all lumped together. Someone born in 1980 would be 18 by the time the internet started to see mass adoption and computers started to become cheap, while someone born in 1985 would only be 13, and have their formative high-school years ahead of them.
And talking about the tech habits of people born in the 00s? They aren't old enough to have any entrenched tech habits yet! It will be the next decade that shapes them, not the past one.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Generations keep getting shorter and shorter somehow. This is because they're favoured by journalists who can't think of a better way to seem significant, so they have to keep finding more.
"iGeneration"? "Net Generation"? Come on, give some to...
- the Latte Generation
- the 9/11 Generation
- the Keyless Entry Generation
- the LOLcat Generation
- the "Juno" Generation
- the "Ima Let you Finish" Generation
They're still doing one thing concurrently with X others. Just because they all have iphones and can switch back and forth between facebook, texting, and music doesn't mean that they've magically gained the ability to do 3 things when we just used to "talk on the phone" with the radio on. They're still using the phone.
Maybe I'm wierd, but if I am talking to someone, it uses 100% of my wetware. I have to turn off the TV, ignore the computer, and stop having IM conversations. However, I can routinely have IRC open with a flowing conversation, several IM windows open, browse the net, read slashdot, and be watching discovery channel, as long as the vocalization center of my brain is not engaged. That may account for the rise in "multi-tasking" seen across generations as speaking is such an inefficient (in terms of resource usage per task) means of conveying information.
... would someone just FAX it to me and I'll read it while I'm on the toilet?
I think these guys have a point that different technologies affect the way we interact with people. I will fully agree that it is far easier to keep in touch with your grandmother when you can call her at night and fly cross-country to see her than it was back in the "day" when you had to send a letter in order to communicate with anyone at a distance and you had to take a stage coach cross-country. However, I always think such researchers begin to sound old and crotchety when they start making predictions that "the kids of tomorrow will have no attention span!" and whatnot. Tech changes, people change, but it's not always BAD.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
I would like to add this one:
As a member of the "Net Generation", I feel we have tuned ourselves to calling out Bullshit...
We have an ability to figure out that some stuff is the result of marketing vs. actual Buzz. That's why fake "viral videos" are so painful to watch.
Examples:
- Cyber Monday (We know this WAS fake, but stores use it to market now)
- MySpace Buzz (We knew this was dead years ago)
- CNN trying to be "hip" (We saw this from a mile away)
- The ACTUAL relevancy of Twitter vs. what is said on TV (Regis has a twitter account, it's officially uncool)
- 3DTV (A new one from this week due to CES. Seriously, I/We're not feeling it)
Now we can easily add the phrases "iGeneration" and "Net Generation"
We know these phrases are bullshit, but get ready to hear more about it.
Get off my lawn!
the number of articles being spewed out on how this same generation is ready and able to take over the running of the corporations and countries before they have even turned thirty. Since all the articles tend to be written by the baby boomer generation (who in their eyes are infallible) I await the results of all their predictions and their tendencies to mollycoddle their children and it's effects with interest.
iSwear, iF iHear another God-damn iPhrase iM going to kill everyone of those iFreaks. It's NOT a podcast, it's a SOUND CLIP you DOWNLOADED onto your MP3 PLAYER. People have jumped onto the iBandWagon the same way Businesses started calling all their services 'Solutions'... So yeah, definitely not a member of the iGeneration, oh how I hate that letter.
I'm 44. I can remember rotary phones, black and white televisions and when it was a big deal when televisions became solid state (with the exception of the CRT) in the mid 1970s, tube testers at grocery and drug stores and going to the library to do research using card catalogs and the Reader's Periodical Guide. Christ, I'm probably going to be processed into Soylent Green soon. Either that or the Sandmen are going to come and get me.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
2 long didnt reed
'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen.
Well, aren't we special!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
...and I find this experience to be accurate. I am teaching kids in this age range, and they will expect me to answer their emails near instantly and get frustrated if I take more than a few hours to answer them.
Unfortunately, the experience doesn't work both ways: While I'm expected to be available 24/7, I can't expect the same from them. Even though it should be a two way street, I can, for example, send them an email telling them to print something and bring it to class and half of the class won't do it and say "I didn't check my email before class."
But as far as that goes, it's good to be a college instructor, because those things are dictated on my terms. I can dock points from kids who don't come prepared for class, or use Facebook on their phone instead of paying attention.
A posted above hit the nail on the head - these kids are in for a reality check when they enter the "real world."
Sounds like this would make some great Phd research projects: "Generation Usage Patterns in Technology"
To say that you can't separate work/school behaviour from leisure behaviour is silly. I can be incredibly focused on singular tasks while working, and be rapidly task switching when that level of attention is not necessary. The article says nothing about the younger generations' ability to focus on work/school other than a supposition at the end based on their leisure time activites.
For whatever reason, I'm a "Net generation" that ... kept up with the times, I guess. I hate the phone (I think I have 8000 roll over minutes at the moment and only have a VOIP line at home because my wife likes having it), and I've noticed in the last year the only consistent use I have for email is online shopping (receipts & advertising) and bills/confirmations (mortgage got paid, lights will be on next week, etc ).
Texting/IM/Facebook have really become my main forms of personal communication, unless it's someone who ... erm, still uses email. And honestly that's few and far between - even my Mom stalks me on facebook these days, I don't know that we've exchanged an email in over a year.
Work? That's a different matter. If you're updating facebook every 5 minutes, you're obviously not focused. Email is king as the primary form of communication, with the occasional IM (which usually is asking if I'd read an email ... or if I could come over to their physical location to discuss something ... ).
And yes, the last part above should be enclosed in a sarcasm tag. But at the same time ... I find no harm in having IM up and running while I'm working on code. If I'm deep into it, I ignore the IM until later. When I come out of the code trance, I'll often take a little 5 minute break and check facebook and maybe respond to a text or IM. I might even check slashdot. It's healthy.
The younger (mid 20's), junior engineers I've worked with over the last couple years exhibit the same behaviours, so I'm going to call Shenanigans.
For the last 1000 years old farts like myself have had there worries about the youngsters and new technology. Please stop the worries, there is no need to be worried about our fine young generation. Every generation will go one step further up the evolution ladder, and old farts like my self should stop the we-are-so-worried-because-they-do-things-differently crap and go back to our chess boards, old Spiderman magazines or Commodore 64 emulators and just STFU.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
Gen X is in its peak earning years. 40 somethings are the people maintaining the infrastructure most of this runs on. Corralling the 20 and 30 something worker-bees. We're the ones that started working for the startups of the 80's after they became big and have the institutional knowledge to do things the correct way. Sure there are plenty of hot shot young-uns, but most of the economy is managed and maintained by people in 40's and 50's.
What do they think phone calls are? Speak into the phone and get a reply 5 minutes later?
You've accurately characterized the voice mail practice of a lot of the people I communicate with.
Nowadays, inkjet fax machines can also act as computer printers. So just print the article and read it while on the toilet.
The article makes a couple of leaps and doesn't seem to understand tech.
First off, the number of tasks in front of the tv. Is this a generation difference OR an age difference? They seem to claim that young people do more tasks because they are exposed to more modern technology at a younger age. HOWEVER this would ONLY be valid if they KEEP doing this as they get older. Else the conclusion must be that as you get older, you do fewer things at the same time.
And then they claim that instant messaging results in an instant reply. But SMS is NOT instant, voice is. So, if they want an instant reply, why do they send an SMS?
I think the author of the article tries to hard to make connections.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Another difference that I've noticed is that they changes accounts far more frequently than I do. I have had the same email address for 10 years. My young friends are constantly changing the email addresses and IM names.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"Studies show that 16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages, and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television;"
I count only 4 tasks not seven. The writer's generation fails to imagine more than 4 tasks.
Wow! Grade school kids and university/college students and grads have different interests and different social behaviors. Who knew?
Translation: They're a bunch of spoiled little brat.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think this might not be so much a generation difference as an age difference. As you get older, you mellow out. The urgency of your teen years seems silly in retrospect and you realize that not everything has to happen now and that you won't just die if xxx.
As you get a bit older, and see more then one younger generation, you will realize this. Or if you remember yourself a bit better.
About the only problem happens if a person doesn't grow up. If someone stays a teen to long, then they run into problem in the work place where adult behavior is expected. But teens being teens is not a problem.
If you watch young kids, they can jump from one topic to another faster then any adult can follow, but they are in fact doing 1 thing, talking to you. They just aren't very good yet at moderating their enthusiasms. A kid that plays with a dozen toys is doing 1 task: playing. A kid that talks about a dozen subjects, is doing 1 task: talking.
You can see children concentrate often enough, on say drawing with an intensity that is almost scary. You can call them and they don't ignore you because no child ignores a call for candy, they just are lost in their own universe, lost one doing on task really focused.
Teens have the same capability but when they are NOT focused on one task, they are struggling with a world that is full of new things and trying to find their role in it. How is a teen supposed to know what it wants to do later, if it doesn't try everything? A teens role is NOT to do one task very well, but to learn and you learn by trying lots of different things. And all the hormones rushing around make everything seem very urgent. A child has no concept of time because it doesn't happen to it, an adult knows its time is limited but so what? But to a teen, death is new and makes everything have to happen now.
And frankly, if you watch different generations and read accounts of teens far older then you, you realize that this sense of urgency and impatience with slow adults is universal.
Mind you, bitching about the youth of today is also universal.
The only problems occur if we start seeing teen behavior as desirable in an adult. Teens that don't grow up are the real problem.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Not sure if I agree with the assessment. I'm of the "Net generation." Which is a B.S. phrase in and of itself, but television is blatantly ignored, and the only reason I even have a cable coming into my home is for the internet itself. I rarely am on the phone longer than 25 minutes unless it's work-related. Otherwise, texting is one of my only means of communication. I actually prefer using instant-messaging systems as they allow me to type and construct my thoughts. My younger brother is 7 years younger than myself, and his activities are not much different than my own when it comes to communication and technology. I'd like to see where this "report" got its scientific data from. It sounds like people completely disconnected from the two generations are trying to analyze us, while failing miserably.
Try, a wooden box on the wall with the speaker on a cord, the mouth piece on the box, and a crank handle to get the operators attention. That was one granny had that, I remember talking on it. My other granny had an icebox, and some dude would trot down the alley with a horse and ice wagon and come in and put a huge chunk of ice in it. We had a rotary at home though, think it was made out of cast iron.
We had the first TV in the 'hood, a 9" philco IIRC, and a buncha neighbors and relatives would come over and sit around and watch TV, not a whole lotta channels though and it all went off at night.
Lemme see...35 cent indoor movies, that was the only place with air conditioning, nickle cokes, nickle candy bars, and a real five and dime store that had tons of stuff for a nickle or a dime.
I don't remember all the prices on stuff, but a lot of it, like hamburger 5 lbs for a buck. Lot of cars still under a grand brand new. A portable radio was half a suitcase with heavy batteries in it.
Oh man, my fav, REAL army navy stores that had all the great stuff, just everything, you could go nuts in there poking through the junk, they had everything including surplus rifles. Dang giant rubber rafts hanging from the ceiling, old torpedoes, tons of neat stuff like that.
Bicycles were like harleys with no engines., about the same amount of steel.
Wimminks all still wore real stockings all the time...err..that was major cool.... ;)
Dang, ain't a year goes by I don't regret losing my baseball cards, comic books, all my early sci fiction paper backs, stuff like that.
A lot of tech and some aspects of society today are a lot better, a lot isn't though. Leaving keys in the car was common, never locking the door, etc. No school massacres, but we could carry our .22s to school to go shooting after school, etc. It was no big deal at all, stick 'em in your locker.
Back then, most everything was fixable, and did get fixed, now..not much, it works or it is junk.
Would I trade..uhh "timezones"? Nope, not a straight swap, but I would if I could pick and choose various things from then and now.
When I first started programming I used a VIC 20 with 3.5K. At first I dreamed about getting the tape device. So all my basic programming vanished when turned the machine was turned off. Then with the tape drive the best way that I figured out to squeeze the maximum out of this was to first create an assembler to machine code converter which stored the machine code to tape as you created it. Then you loaded the program back from tape and poof you had the absolute most you could squeeze out of 3.5K. After that I cobbled together 8086s and put every version of DOS that came along as well as radical new upgrades like a mouse and a hard drive. I squeezed Windows version 1 onto a machine that it wasn't meant for and so on. I see my intelligent Nephews and Neices (all around 20) who would be hard pressed to install windows if there was any hurdle like having to manually install a network driver. Some geeks to be are jumping into the depths of Linux and are probably getting some awesome experience but I have met many a comp sci grad who would be hard pressed to properly set up a pretty basic LAMP server and then do the slightest of unusual configurations (say memcached). Yet these same Comp Sci grads might have built a basic compiler or OS at some point during their education. I think that my particular timing was pretty good in that I have had the time to digest the zillion little wonderful innovations (color codes in my IDE) without having them overwhelm me like someone who might have started in the 60's. But I agree with the premise of this article. Facebook is not important to many of my generation and I can't remember the last time I sent a text message. The kids of today are probably doing with their cell phones what I did with computers 30 years ago; that is to squeeze every erg of functionality they can out of them. Texts are cheaper than calls thus better. Also innovations like keyboards on reasonably priced phones are better than typing texts on a number pad. Also the incentives are different; My social life does not depend on my text plan or abilities.
I mean, I still miss my Atari 2600...
I'm seeing a lot of "bah, humbug" responses to this article, especially regarding the subject of concentration/learning/etc., but i think that it's quite possible that this shift in paradigms of communication has a broader reach than we are currently considering.
If more people are more connected, doesn't this mean that there will be more collaborative projects? maybe the "hive mind" will replace a lot of the expertise we currently value?
As a teacher, i am especially interested to see how this interconnectedness affects learning and schooling. It's conceivable that in 30 years, we won't be teaching the knowledge via memorization of facts, but instead teaching the knowledge of where to go to look/who to talk to in order to obtain those facts.
Will this affect how people assemble bits of information? sure, but maybe the collective mind can produce something as good as, or better than what one person can construct on their own...
maybe it's a load of hooey, but as a teacher i can't afford to not think about these things
Yeah, this a post, right?
Ok, i'm 57. My family had a telephone when I was a kid, we were on a party line and had to learn our ring so we wouldn't pick up calls for other families. OTOH, we knew who was getting a call and we learned how to listen in...
I remember when we got our first TV. it had no color, and a bunch of tubes inside. We got one channel. When it got to hot outside she would call us in and let us watch TV until it cooled down. The only show I remember was Liberace prancing on the keyboard painted along one edge of his piano shaped swimming pool. Mom kept saying "there is something odd about him..."
Skipping forward more than 50 years.
I use email all the damn time. I've had an email address continuously since '81. I have a cell phone. Unlike most of my friends I only use it to make calls. I keep it turned off. I only turn it on to make calls. I have linkedin and facebook accounts and I even have my kids as friends on facebook. I love facebook. I tolerate linkedin, because it is required for business. I run several web sites and have a blog. I have pretty much every channel the cable company provides (except sports, I never understood sports) and I have a PC with a broadband connection and a wireless keyboard hooked up to it so I can watch youtube and hulu and what ever from the comfort of my living room. Oh, yeah, I have *great* karma on slashdot.
The thing I have noticed is that my use of social technology is much more conditioned by the fact that I am a serious introvert than by my age. On the Myers Briggs I nearly peg the Introvert scale. I see that a lot. Introverts use social tech differently from extroverts. You just don't see them doing it because they are *introverts*. I've noticed that introverts are much more extroverted online than in person. It is much easier to act like an extrovert when you don't actually have to be around people.
Also, I was diagnosed in my early '40s as having ADD. These days they call it ADHD-PI. (In the '50s, 60s, and well into the '70s they called it "lazy" if you had mild to moderate levels and "brain dysfunction" or even "brain damage" at higher levels.) People like me do everything we can to minimize distractions. Even with medication (which can be *wonderful* when it works) I do not seek out distractions. BTW, my observation is that a lot of introverts have some form of ADHD. Another unsubstantiated personal observations is that those people with ADHD who don't wind up as career criminals, tend to wind up as engineers and computer scientists i.e. as geeks.
Watching the way social technology has changed the behavior of cognitively normal extroverts leads me to conclude that their lives are so boring that they will do nearly anything to be distracted from them. OTOH, there is so much exciting stuff going on in side the head of this cognitively different introvert that I am never bored. :-)
Stonewolf
P.S.
The meds I take to not make me anything like normal. They just make it a lot easier to function around all you weirdos :-)
P.P.S
Yes, check it out, the prisons in the US are full of people with ADHD.
"Studies show that 16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages, and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television; while people in their early 20s can handle only six, and those in their 30s about five and a half." These studies dont really show a generation gap. They show that older people can multitask less, possibly because they are older
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
It's reasonable to argue that the fact that professors mostly communicate to students and not vice versa is one of the biggest problems with our education system.
If these kids think one way communication is boring, can you blame them? How interesting is one way communication in other situations, like a relationship or at work?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Having to wait to save up cereal labels and then wait a month or two for an action figure in the mail was a complete pain in the ass. Where as now you can often sign up for something instantly and have your freebie in a fraction of the time.
I think the only reason my limited edition action figures are still sealed is because I couldn't be fucked to play with them when they came what felt like a year later.
I don't doubt Dr. Larry's finding! This is the same old poo-poo that social science has been cranking out since king John was forced to sign the Magna Carta. After gen-QXYZ, or what ever Next Dr. Larry Jr. will be calling them, ousts the next senior generation of worker, they too will be belly aching about technology induced job stress. What is a constant is that youth will vanish into middle-age! There are still baby-boomers that intend to work into their grave. Great, if you are the boss. Not so good if you are forced out by the new young IM-textin'-fill-in-next-new-trend boss! Better put some nuts in the tree, squirrel, and get off my lawn.
Progress is almost never purely good. Usually it's a mixture of good and bad effects, and what a person in one situation will see as good, another, in a different situation, will see as a cost. And the costs and benefits aren't evenly distributed.
So for each "progress" one should evaluate both it's costs and it's benefits from one's own position. There is much "progress" that I have chosen to pass by. E.g., I don't accept SMS messages. This is because (all of):
A) it isn't worth my effort
B) my carrier charges an unreasonable amount
C) I don't know anyone who wants to send me one (that I know of)
I could probably add other items, but that suffices. Probably C is the most important of the reasons. The only entity that I know who has wanted to send me an SMS message is my phone carrier. I should pay them to contact me by a way that I would prefer not to bother with??
OTOH, I occasionally do receive SMS messages, but I presume that they are spam, so I've never even looked at them. (I don't want to open up that cost center.)
I've become allergic to leather (probably to part of the tanning process) in the last couple of decades, so I went to get tennis shoes. What I ended up with was "cross-trainers" at a remarkably high price. I wasn't pleased by how the options had changed, and the new "cross-trainers" don't last any longer than basketball shoes did when I was in high school. Well, this is progress that I couldn't avoid, but given the option I surely would have. I'm sure *somebody* likes the change.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Write a program that can cook one of these did not read the [redacted] manual into the correct section of the hopefully online manual.
"Please pardon the auto response but im a bit busy creating %project% at the moment but if you check out %reference in the manual% this should get you started. I will check with you later"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Interest isn't relevant.
Do they want to learn? (Hopefully) Do the professor have the knowledge? (Hopefully) Do the professor have time to have one-on-one discussions with every singel student? (Unlikely)
Maybe they will have to get used to not recieving instant gratification, or learn some things the hard way.
---
The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
"My 2-year-old daughter surprised me recently with two words: “Daddy’s book.” She was holding my Kindle electronic reader. Here is a child only beginning to talk, revealing that the seeds of the next generation gap have already been planted. She has identified the Kindle as a substitute for words printed on physical pages."
Oh bollocks, she did no such thing. I don't even have to pull up Piaget's 4 stages of child development and point out a 2 year old's inability to abstract these things to substitute a complex concept for an observation. She knows Daddy. She knows book. She sees Daddy read. It's Daddy's book. In fact I'll bet the author even used the phrase previously and is using the incident as an excuse to make a point that doesn't really apply to the incident. This inaccurate at best and probably not best in this case formulation sets the tone for the rest of the article.
Everyone of the observations claimed by Rainee et al. are valid except they apply to every age group. There are people in each of the exceedingly arbitrary classifications that exhibit those behaviors they try to foist on only one of. They overgeneralize as though the technology were ubiquitous, ignoring the fact that many don't have the technology and thus don't have the chance to develop the behaviors, or else that serve as proof that the behaviors come first and/or independently. Again, the observations are valid, the classification isn't.
The whole things is bogus speculation presented as though it were determined to be an accurate description. If it had been presented as what it is rather that being hyperhyped at both theory and writing stages, I still wouldn't find it useful, but at least I wouldn't feel insulted.
Oh, and 'generation gap' contains a specification of age difference in the phrase. Calling a few years a 'mini-generation gap' is like calling a few months a 'mini-year'.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If this is right you will end up with more dis-functional idiots than there already are.
Kids need to be able to appreciate calm, read and think, all the tweeting and texting does is generate constant worthless meaningless noise.
Discovery is more about blowing stuff up than explaining science, the History channel seems to be nothing more than WWII and explosions.
Come on Discovery channel is way more than explosions. They got computer generated imagery of dinosaurs, shark bites, more dinosaurs, disgusting food from tribals, some more dinosaurs, disaster videos, and some dinosaurs, some more shark bites and did I mention dinosaurs?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I did 7 things at one tiem oh boy, of course none of them were any good because I divided my attention but hey they kind of done.
Take your pick. But any definition of stupid includes people who text trivia back and forth to each other. Thought is avoided completely. And any fool who bothers a teacher with a text message expecting a reply deserves an F for bad conduct. We are raising a pile of trash and calling them kids.
Between the time of the article submission and first post, a new generation gap has been created between the iGeneration and the WhatEverTheHeckWe'llCallThemNext Generation.
Shoot, there went another one.
I haven't yet used Twitter either, but it seems like Tweets can be useful when they contain links.
Thus a Twitter feed is like an RSS feed that is carried in links rather than content, and which is filtered by trusted sources rather than your own pre-selections.
It all comes down to privacy and free time. Their behavior will change once they no longer have to be concerned about someone overhearing their conversation, and they actually want to get a conversation done in a timely fashion. People in high school don't want their plans/problems heard throughout the house. Personally, I used to rarely use e-mail, but that changed after I got an iphone because I don't waste money on unlimited SMSs. E-mail is 100% superior to SMSs minus the fact SMSs have slightly better radio range than data does...
And I question this "7 things" number. Instant messaging, while surfing the internet, while texting, while watching TV, while playing WOW, while playing Xbox (on a second TV), while chowing down a hoagie? Or are they counting "7 windows open on the task bar" as 7 things? Cuz if thats the case I do 40 things at once at work...
Born in the early 60s. Still listen to vinyl and love vacuum tube amps though I do have an iPod video that I use all the time. I still like to work on old cars. Started surfing in the mid 80s on PCPursuit with a TRS-80 Model 3. I build and maintain my own computers. I'm online all day (laid-off software dev) to keep up with news and politics and use Firefox, Opera and Safari and only power-down the PCs once a week. Have four hobby related blogs and code my own web pages. I don't use Twitter although I can see how invaluable it can be for things like news gathering (read about last night's Cali earthquake as it was happening).
Doing seven things at once?!? Not me.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
I've got to say, this sort of behaviour just reinforces the common view of psychology as mostly worthless generalisations and unsupported theory.
WHERE ARE THE NUMBERS?
Let's see a proper study, using statistically valid numbers of subjects - taken from all races, creeds, famiily backgrounds and nationalities. Then there's be something worth discussing. Until then this is just a "aren't my children are wonderful" monolog. Boring.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
and don't forget:
D) on a 12 key pad the UI is so bad that it isn't worth the bother to try to send a SMS.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I can see collaborative social media overtaking a lot of traditional education. But telling professors to "use Twitter" will *not* be any use for anyone.
Getting professors to blog, perhaps giving students a window onto the ongoing process of research (as opposed to the sanitized version they can read in journals) might be a step.
Did I say getting? Hmm, professors seem to professionally blog more any than anyone else already (except VCs, startup founders, and a few other niche professions).
My brother is 5 years younger than me (I'm 44 now). That difference meant that when he was in high school he had the VCR and cable TV and I just missed those things. Amazing how different his experience was.
... they spend less time on my lawn!
Have gnu, will travel.
I use email and IM. I receive text messages, but prefer to reply to SMS messages by emailing people's phones. I ignore TV. If somebody sends me a link to a video of a lecture or speech on Youtube, I'll look for a text transcript. So where do I stand? Does it even matter?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Stink different.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I do one thing at a time. Everything else is a background process. Only difference between me and the macbook I'm using to type this post is that the macbook doesn't become stabbier than Hugo Stiglitz in a basement full of Nazis if expected to do too many context switches in too short a timeframe.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
B) my carrier charges an unreasonable amount
How can a SMS cost more than a voice call? I'm curious.
Only 365 days a year? Hope nothing breaks on 29 February.
With a voice call, a 2 minute conversation requires 2 minutes of call time. With SMS, it requires multiple messages sent and received. Assuming 10 cents for a sent message, 5 cents for a received message, and 35 cents per minute for voice time, you're looking at a case where 6 two-way SMS exchanges costs more than the 2 minutes of airtime. On top of that, I haven't gone over my voice usage minutes in years, and I have the minimum plan available, so I basically treat voice calls as free.
The Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently
Am I the only one here that, were it not for work calls, would not spend two hours per month on the phone? I cannot for the life of me see where you can can get enough of consequence to talk about for two hours every day (on average) with people that you do not also meet in person in the average day. My mistake, I think, is assuming that the "Net generation" is talking about anything of substance in that phone time.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Speaking as someone peripherally involved in marketing, let me say that we love to cultivate the notion that you are an independent, autonomous, and free-thinking individual. This is because about the only pure act of will possible in a peaceful society that's been largely drained of the sort of conflict that would otherwise serve as outlets for self expression is a financial transaction, so self-expression always takes the form of a purchase of a good. Yes, always. It's simply a question of whose goods you will be buying to construct your self-image. Naturally, I'd prefer that you associate my products with positive notions like autonomy and independence so you'll choose them and not my competitors. The alternative, of course, is to buy some land and raise chickens somewhere, in which case you've simply exited my particular market (creative/expressive/alternative) and are now a consumer in the self-reliant/survivalist/rural market.
Talking to a teacher I learned that the most feared weapon a teacher has is their cell phone. Seems that students start to behave better when you have instant communication with the parents.
Other pro-tips: never give out your cell phone number to students and disable text (or at least picture) messages. If you are the recipient of a sexting as a teacher you had until about 10 minutes ago to report it or you get a healthy dose of the legal system in the area of child porn.
Work Safe Porn
'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen."
Solution (and I am going to patent this as a business method) : the holding pattern interface
If an iGeneration member wants to communicate with an oldGeneration member ; they will receive an instant automated reply, followed by automated "i am working on it" reponses until the oldGeneration member finds time to get around to it.
"Hi [sibling] great to hear from you, busy doing a million things, will talk to you soon" ...
".. just let you know that I haven't forgotten about [thing] will talk to you later"
Customizable, 9000 canned responses (including "I am about to land in Hawaii.. waiting for signal") in 99 different languages.
Available sometime in the future at iHoldingPattern.com
Just like real life.
(Any parent knows that children want everything NOW, whereas us "grownups" try to juggle these demands in between the really important things. Like catching some TV)
Come on Discovery channel is way more than explosions. They got computer generated imagery of dinosaurs, shark bites, more dinosaurs, disgusting food from tribals, some more dinosaurs, disaster videos, and some dinosaurs, some more shark bites and did I mention dinosaurs?
Funnily enough they way I remember the programming of Discovery Channel going when I used to watch it (about from the late nighties to early 2000); was from almost pure WWII documentaries (the Armies! The Weapons! The Tactics! The Battles! The Generals! Etc!) to a wider range of shows. To speculate I would say that it is probably beneficial (from a numbers of viewers perspective) to intersect light entertaining shows between documentaries. And in our day light entertainment means anything that doesn't become over technical, include hosts/characters that can provide some measure of comedy, and at least a minimum level of explosions. Thus the success of shows such as Mythbusters, and Scrapheap Challenge (the UK version).
The Long Now Foundation
"Another intra-generational gap is the iGeneration comfort in multi-tasking. Studies show that 16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages, and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television"
Too bad they aren't really paying attention to at least half of it.
-Oz
Bah! I was born in 1967. In my day we had 300 baud modems that feed us 30 chars per second in both directions and we loved it! Of course, I've always been an early adopter of anything faster that gets me my pr0n. :D
... and they wan't their focus back. I can multitask e-mail, phone/SMS, 3 IM chats at a time while watching TV and at the end of the day I can't really remember is a blur (I born in the '80s). I'm trying to scale back on all this distractions by having a call whitelist on my cell phone which is also muted most of the time (SMS is actually better for managing distraction), my e-mail client checks for e-mail every hour or two (or I just leave it closed and open it once or twice a day).
A "multi" prefix doesn't necessarily make tasking better. It's mostly hype if you ask me.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
Come on Discovery channel is way more than explosions. They got computer generated imagery of monsters, shark bites, more monsters, disgusting food from tribals, some more monsters, disaster videos, and some monsters, some more shark bites and did I mention monsters?
Fixed that for you.
Discovery channel "dinosaurs" don't have much to do with dinosaurs.
"The Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently while the iGeneration -- conceivably their younger siblings -- spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group, and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks"
..
They may spend considerably more time instant-messaging, but does anything of real value get communicated. Instant messages are invariably vacuous and shallow, contain no real value and tend to instantly vanish into the ether
There was a real show called "kicked in the nuts" which is basically the same thing as "ow my balls," except the testicular trauma was always delivered by a guy in a rainbow wig.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F90A548588017D8D&search_query=kicked+in+the+nuts
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Interesting, I grew up in a small little town in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and my technology adoption time-line follows both yours and the parent's almost exactly. I wonder if I can use this as evidence to my friends who have yet to leave my hometown that it really is an oppressive regime from whence escape should be the first priority....Either way, as an American that also didn't have a personal computer until the early 2000's, hadn't seen a PC before about 1994, and didn't even adopt a cell phone until 2004ish, I can at least say its good to know that there are some other 80's babies in the same tech boat that I was =)
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Another useful teaching technology? Podcasts. One of my professors recorded every single lecture he gave and podcast it openly on his website (you didn't even need to be registered to download or tune into it. It made review and studying so much easier and relevant when test time rolled around. Sometimes technology really is good.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I'm sure folks said that about Usenet back in the day, and look--apart from the endless shit and spam, it's an excellent resource, containing a great deal which is useful reading even years later.
Similarly, I was absolutely convinced that instant messaging was nothing but a wasteland of lowercase misspellings and canned shibboleths. But like any form of communication, it's what you make of it. The people I communicate with over IM are generally like-minded, and type in complete, grammatical sentences, one thought to a message. It's a perfectly useful form of communication to use when hashing out ideas; if you log your chats, it can serve as an integral part of a project's development record.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Fixed that for you.
Discovery channel "dinosaurs" don't have much to do with dinosaurs.
Now that's just not true! Just last week I watched a show entitled "Four Digit UID's"...
I disagree with SMS being easier to multi-task, but then I can't blind type, but I could talk to someone while typing this post.
But the second point is interesting and never occurred to me. "I am not going to do it" over the phone almost invites an argument, with SMS it has been a statement of fact.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I know it's old-fashioned, but surely multi-tasking means more than just not paying attention to more than one thing at once? If you're (say) reading a book and watching TV, you're not multi-tasking, you're at best flitting between the two.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There is no difference between SMS and email. They are both text messages send async. Even the phone is often a voice message sent async via voicemail/answering machines. Unless you are famous, there is little difference between twitter, SMS-to-a-list-of-friends and a facebook update and a old fashioned telelphone tree.
Sure, digital technology has made it easy to send lots of messages at once, but since it did that there is little difference between the various wrappers it comes in.
Some people are social and like to send lots of message, the form doesn't really matter. Some don't. Big news, teenagers are more social than old people, on average.