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The 'Net Generation' Isn't
Kanel introduces this lengthy review in Spiegel Online this way: "Kids that grew up with the Internet are not 'digital natives' as consultants have led us to believe. They're OK with the Net but they don't care much about Web 2.0 and find plenty of other things more important than the Internet. Consultants and authors, mostly old guys, have called for the education system to be reworked to suit this new generation, but they never conducted surveys to see if the members of 'generation @' were anything like what they had envisioned. Turns out, children who have known the Net their whole lives are not particularly skilled at it, nor do they live their lives online." "Young people have now reached this turning point. The Internet is no longer something they are willing to waste time thinking about. It seems that the excitement about cyberspace was a phenomenon peculiar to their predecessors, the technology-obsessed first generation of Web users. ...they certainly no longer understand it when older generations speak of 'going online.' ... Tom and his friends just describe themselves as being 'on' or 'off,' using the English terms. What they mean is: contactable or not."
Many young people abandoned email for MySpace, then within a couple short years, abandoned MySpace for FaceBook, both times because spam made the previous system essentially unusable for them, and they didn't want to take the time to learn how to filter spam (not even to switch their email provider from, say, Yahoo, to GMail). They don't differentiate between "The Internet" and a service. To them, FaceBook is the internet.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I put forward a controversial/unpopular position.
For most technology most (99.99%) people just use what they have or are given and apply what they have known from the past. They lack the imagination or resources to create anything original. Life is just too complex to change what works. Yes, for most people the computer is just a typewriter, and that's what they will teach their children.
If you really want to continue with your quest for the 'Net generation then the place you are most likely to find them is in Africa, or those countries who will have to make a big leap from stone age to internet age. Africa has far more original/innovative uses of cell phones because they were not baggaged with land-lines.
The tech learning curve is important as well. Those who grew up with computers in pre-GUI times had a rather steep curve but as a consequence became much more proficient.
When the curve became flatter less understanding was required, however more people started using it. So I wonder if the mass adoption of technology compensates for the reduced required depth, i.e. if the first easy steps encouraged more people to take a deeper look at things compared to when you had no choice but to do that.
Data on the percentage of computer users in each generation which were hobby programmers at a certain would be interesting.
What the heck do you *do* then, that you have no interest in, or skills in, those things that make up technological civilization? Egads I simply can't imagine being that un-curious about things. Being a tool user is what separates us from the lesser primates. You say you use this or that that this "someone else" knows how to make work, to do what you want to do, so what is that, just be a media consumer, or what?
This is mind boggling to me, I grew up with a tool box and tearing stuff apart and building things, etc, ALONG with reading all sorts of things, being interested in nature and learning about that, etc. Granted, I don't program, and that is because my mind just doesn't work that way, linear and rote memory, I think spatially, which is why I have always preferred the GUI..but that still didn't stop me from learning to build/assemble computers either, have done that a bunch.
If you are a representative of this generation and demographic they are talking about in the fine article (or older I guess but with the same attitude), what the heck do you DO? Those kids, what the heck do they DO?
Note: not being snarky or flaming, not at all, your post just blew me away, I honestly do not know a single person in meatspace like the folks in the article and somehwat you who have no apparent interest in any technology that we all use, other than having someone else do it so you can use it.
If you declare a revolution and talk about how everything will change, you can get published. Present at conferences. Invited to speak. And maybe even get paid for it, or else get new job offers or consulting gigs.
And everyone is so desperate to improve education that they'll grasp at anything to prove to the public that they're making big strides in changing education, even if there's NO PROOF of any change in educational income. It's snake oil.
The expensive, commercial, packaged curriculum products have the same problem. There's little evidence to back up one versus the other, and few studies showing any educational benefit. But the districts, desperate to fend of being attacked for doing nothing, spend limited educational dollars on them.
My prediction? Perversely, schools will spend more money on technology and materials as their funding is squeezed and test scores count more and more. After a couple of years of declining scores, they'll abandon whatever the current efforts are and spend a ton on new ones. And it'll just keep going.
I'm probably a bit alone on this thing, but I may as well post my .02c
I am a seventeen year old high school student and this struck a chord or ten. I always had a love of the technical and the arcane, from when I disassembled and reassembled everything I got my grubby little hands on. I've had to work with my similar-aged, and it just keeps on ringing in my head just how this vast network of loosely connected fiber and copper with the rare bits of 3.2GHz in the short haul is taken so for granted by every other person near my age. Never did I really look at anything without at least some bewilderment and awe at just how far technology has advanced in my two short decades of life.
My first computer was an 80386 running MS-DOS, and I think I am not alone here (at least with the C64 crowd et al.) with how what I did mostly with it was spending hours and hours in the BASIC implementation, crappy as it as, it was definitely a thing I had a blast on, even if it wasn't a real programming language in all honesty. I remember just how astounding it was to look at the numbers when I migrated to a Tualatin Celeron with a jaw-dropping 1.2 GHz of raw processing power compared to something that didn't break the hundreds. And a GUI? And this strange mouse? What just invaded my desk? And... where did my system's guts go, over everything?!
That old jalopy still held quite a bit of good times and memories, especially when I managed the impressive task of making a bouncing square on an NES with it or a loud and high pitched 25% duty cycle pulse wave that'd wake up the whole family with a press of A. I never did any concerted efforts to make any homebrew for it, that said. I even remember after reading this one guy's paper on the inner workings of Metroid's engine and spending more time in hex editors altering the the levels slightly. Hell, my first connection to the internet was a blazing fast 28.8k!
Words can't describe how shocked I was at how carefree people were to the machines I studied so endlessly when I discovered in middle school most of the kids my age didn't even know what the NES is, let alone nifty little tricks like breaking the 10NES or bank-switching to deal with the low ceiling, or how I still can't understand how someone of any age has such a weak sense of wonder and amazement that they cannot care the slightest in how something works or why it works or why when you remove this little cylindrical thing the pretty pink smoke starts to puff from the magical box of P and N doped silicon. I couldn't leave anything alone and I made sure I knew what the hell happened in the appliances I used, simply because a black box is just dull and inviting to be pulled apart and (hopefully) put back together.
Nor can any words put just how much I enjoyed studying the computers of older times, and just that same wonder once more when I realize that the PDP-8 at its most expansive configuration can be fully emulated on a CPU and its cache these days, or spending a few weeks with my father's tools making a mechanical turing machine (with an impressively large tape - 80 spaces made from a notched meter stick), the days I'd spend just learning, learning, learning. When I discovered Wikipedia in 2007 it was as if the world was opened to me, a compendium of all human knowledge (or at least the "relevant" part of it *cough*) at my fingertips, and I'd only have to wait a few minutes for an in-depth explanation on any topic I'd ever think of. The world-wide web is the reason why I had any chance at all to really get so deep into computing before even reaching the age of majority.
And with this, I can say I really was born in the wrong generation. To get the chance to see the computing explosion and the rise of the internet as it happened than in retrospect is something I would kill to get, and it's a sad thing that nobody my age can give even a quarter of a damn about the engineering marvels they have in their homes. (I Am Not An Adult(tm), so YMMV on this statement and all that.)
I'm a philosophy student, and I often get a lot of flak for it. People think that philosophy doesn't matter, and that you need to be a productive member of society and contribute to technology or science or the economy or whatsoever. I think that's what you're trying to get at when you asked "Anything serious?". It seems like to you, you feel that there's some purpose in exploring how things in the world around you work, and to contribute to human knowledge or technology by creating new tools or discovering new principles. Of course, what you do, and what many people in the science and technology sectors do, are very important. I could not practice philosophy as comfortably as I do now without many of the conveniences afforded to me by our current level of science and technology. I recognize that science, technology, and business play a big role in our lives, and that the people who are in those industries are contributing greatly to society.
I don't think many people just exist, as you say. The vast majority of people work. Of those people who do work, a significant minority don't have the resources to do anything but work, eat, socialize a little, play a little, sleep, rinse, repeat. But even those people contribute to society. If we didn't have janitors or retail sales clerks or whatever the case may be, our society would look a lot different. Our society requires some people be at those positions. And while you may still believe in the American Dream, the reality is that most of those people just can't afford to have any drive beyond going to work 10 hours a day to make ends meet.
I suspect, however, that your question is directed more towards those who can afford to develop some sort of drive. And that's why I brought up that I'm a philosophy student. I philosophize. What does that mean? Philosophy means something very different to those who actually study it than to those outside of its sphere. Philosophy is more a way of life than anything. I've studied many subjects in philosophy, ranging from logic to ethics to metaphysics. Philosophy is what I enjoy, and that's my drive. I want to try to reconcile the disconnect between subjective experience and objective occurrences (neural activity). I want to examine why people hold certain systems of ethics and not others, and whether or not there exists some objective measure of morality. So I live my daily life using tools, while using the time I save not worrying about those tools to pursue my interests, and my drives.
Other philosophers are logicians. They examine how systems of logic work, and what types of logical moves are valid or invalid. Now logic is important because there's one problem that the scientific method faces, but most scientists are unaware of such a problem. Scientists wield logic as a tool to perform their work, but they don't examine it on a deeper level. The problem that the scientific method faces is that it centres around the logical move that we call inductive reasoning. I won't dive into the specifics of the problem here, but suffice it to say that I don't think it's a major concern that scientists rely on inductive reasoning even though they don't know exactly how it works, and why it is problematic. Scientists have a certain goal and they need to use certain tools. Their job is not to ensure that their tools work. It is the logician's job to make sure that scientists have good tools with which to perform their jobs.
Now all of this is a manner of saying that some people can't afford to have any drive, while others have different drives than you do. We're all doing something. It seems like you don't realize that there are other things that people can be interested in that are worthwhile. The problem of induction is an important problem in philosophy, as well as the concept of causality. In other disciplines, there are other problems that are interesting that people want to tackle. Some people want to fi
I can't pinpoint precisely when it happened, but it was pretty recent, probably around 2005. The Internet finally reached a real stage of maturity where basically everything humans wish to create was on it, where it was easy and accessible to use by all that can afford it and so on. It fully became the useful, fun, device it is today. As such it really does just blend in to everyday life. I don't marvel at it unless I stop to think about the development I've seen. Normally, it just fades in to the background, it is just another part of my life that I assume to be around, and get annoyed if it isn't.
I think that is something that geeks miss, they used the Internet early and used it as a geek toy. Thus they don't consider the larger development. When the Internet first started it really wasn't good for much at all. Universities could make some use of it for research but it was mostly just a communications toy. By the early to mid 90s it was getting fairly accessible. Most people could get a connection if they liked and you didn't have to be a geek to play with it. However it was largely useless still, other than to play. You could look at various websites people had tossed up, chat with people around the world, but that was about it. It wasn't a tool for getting anything done.
By the late 90s it was coming in to its own as useful. There were legit stores on there, like Amazon, and some unique services, like eBay. More and more useful information was online, companies were using it for business. Still wasn't fully mature though. There was plenty you couldn't do on the Internet. During the early parts of 2000 it just sort of grew and filled in most gaps. It matured to the point where nearly everything is online, you use it just like any other communications system. It is a primary way to get information, conduct commerce, and so on.
It was a fast, and rather seamless, process and hence hard to see. There aren't really any tipping points. The Internet just grew up and went from a toy just for geeks to something it is hard to imagine not having. As you said, it is now like the other services we have, rely on, and take for granted. That means it is fully integrated in to our lives, that it is a mature technology.
As far as I'm concerned, that is a wonderful thing.
Roberta Williams, one of the game designers at Sierra in the 80's had a slightly different take on it. Home computers started out being rather expensive, which meant that the average computer owner was older and more educated. Maybe buying the computer as part of a college education for instance or having a well-paying job which helped one afford the computer. When PCs became affordable for the average joe, the "average gamer" changed and Sierra could no longer afford to write games that catered to an educated audience. They were just too small a part of the market.
You could imagine that a similar impact was felt in all areas related to computers.