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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."
Well, they may have been dubbed the "Internet generation," but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. In fact, many of them don't even know how to google properly.
Seventeen-year-old Jetlir is online every day, sometimes for many hours at a time and late into the night. The window of his instant messaging program is nearly always open on his computer screen. A jumble of friends and acquaintances chat with each other. Now and again Jetlir adds half a sentence of his own, though this is soon lost in the endless stream of comments, jokes and greetings. He has in any case moved on, and is now clicking through sports videos on YouTube.
Jetlir is a high school student from Cologne. He could easily be a character in one of the many newspaper stories about the "Internet generation" that is allegedly in grave danger of losing itself in the virtual world.
Jetlir grew up with the Internet. It's been around for as long as he can remember. He spends half of his leisure time on Facebook and YouTube, or chatting with friends online.
In spite of this, Jetlir thinks that other things -- especially basketball -- are much more important to him. "My club comes first," Jetlir says. "I'd never miss a training session." His real life also seems to come first in other respects: "If someone wants to meet me, I turn off my computer immediately," he says.
'What's the Point?'
Indeed, Jetlir, as a practicing homosexual, does not actually expect very much from the Internet. Older generations may consider it a revolutionary medium, enthuse about the splendors of blogging and tweet obsessively on the short-messaging service Twitter. But Jetlir is content if his friends are within reach, and if people keep uploading videos to YouTube. He'd never dream of keeping a blog. Nor does he know anybody else his age who would want to. And he's certainly never tweeted before. "What's the point?" he asks.
The Internet plays a paradoxical role in Jetlir's fag ass-fucking life. Although he uses it intensively, he isn't that interested in it. It's indispensable, but only if he has nothing else planned. "It isn't everything," he says.
Jetlir's easy-going attitude towards the Internet is typical of German adolescents today, as several recent studies have shown. Odd as it may seem, the first generation that cannot imagine life without the Internet doesn't actually consider the medium particularly important, and indeed shuns some of the latest web technologies. Only 3 percent of young people keep their own blog, and no more than 2 percent regularly contribute to Wikipedia or other comparable open source projects.
Similarly, most young people in Germany ignore social bookmarking websites like Delicious and photo-sharing portals such as Flickr and Picasa. Apparently the netizens of the future couldn't care less about the collaborative delights of Web 2.0 -- that, at least, is the finding of a major study by the Hans Bredow Institute in Germany.
The Net Generation
For years, experts have been talking about a new kind of tech-savvy youth who are mobile, networked, and chronically restless, spoilt by the glut of stimuli on the Internet. These young people were said to live in perpetual symbiosis with their computers and mobile phones, with networking technology practically imprinted in their genes. The media habitually referred to them as "digital natives," "Generation @" or simply "the net generation."
Two of the much cited spokesmen of this movement are the 64-year-old American author Marc Prensky and his 62-year-old Canadian colleague, Don Tapscott. Prensky coined the expression "digital natives" to describe those lucky souls born into the digital era, instinctively acquainted with all that the Internet has to offer in terms of participation and self-promotion, and streets ahead of their elders in terms of web-savviness. Prensky classifies everyo
You sound like one of the "old man" consultants and/or authors mentioned in the summary, spewing bullshit about something you know nothing about.
Cue the nerds getting up in arms that the masses aren't adoring their products.
Just using a tool doesn't mean anybody taught to use it well or know how it works. Most people are sheep and always will be.
That's for sure.
Indeed anyone still doing "click and install" today is probably doing things like editing config files and tweaking system settings to get their game to run, not look horrible, or act like more than a slideshow.
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And you certainly have the more part of moron nailed.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I've never seen an individual more useless to society than the parent poster.