These Kids Today
As I reach 30, I'm starting to realize it's probably a very slippery slope to developing the attitude of a curmudgeon. Granted, I don't consider myself very old, but technology has grown by leaps and bounds since I was a teenager. When I was in high school, cell phones were far from ubiquitous. Smart phones were the stuff of science fiction and a book Bill Gates was wrote at the time.
Naturally, we're now living in a time when teenagers can't really a remember a time when such technology wasn't everywhere. They're getting their driver's licenses after they've been blogging, Facebooking, and tweeting for years already, which has interesting implications for how they're going to deal with mobile devices while driving.
Marc Pensky coined a term for this generation of kids: digital natives. And while it's very easy to grumble about "these young whipper snappers" when they almost walk into you on the sidewalk while mindlessly thumbing a touchscreen, there are other interesting and more important trends.
Today's teenager is much less of a content creator than a mere consumer. In the face of the Internet, communication is easier than ever before, and that has afforded creative collaboration amongst groups online. They've learned cooperative creation through technology. (These kinds of studies are documented at Pew.)
One of the more astonishing facts: today's teenagers are two to three times more likely to spend their time helping someone else create their website, instead of just their own. This is, I think, an immensely important point. They're not just better collaborators, but in some ways they have a greater sense of generosity than their older counterparts. This makes sense, since participation is more fun if you're acting as part of a larger group.
That's something we old people shouldn't scoff at. We could learn a thing or two from them.
Naturally, we're now living in a time when teenagers can't really a remember a time when such technology wasn't everywhere. They're getting their driver's licenses after they've been blogging, Facebooking, and tweeting for years already, which has interesting implications for how they're going to deal with mobile devices while driving.
Marc Pensky coined a term for this generation of kids: digital natives. And while it's very easy to grumble about "these young whipper snappers" when they almost walk into you on the sidewalk while mindlessly thumbing a touchscreen, there are other interesting and more important trends.
Today's teenager is much less of a content creator than a mere consumer. In the face of the Internet, communication is easier than ever before, and that has afforded creative collaboration amongst groups online. They've learned cooperative creation through technology. (These kinds of studies are documented at Pew.)
One of the more astonishing facts: today's teenagers are two to three times more likely to spend their time helping someone else create their website, instead of just their own. This is, I think, an immensely important point. They're not just better collaborators, but in some ways they have a greater sense of generosity than their older counterparts. This makes sense, since participation is more fun if you're acting as part of a larger group.
That's something we old people shouldn't scoff at. We could learn a thing or two from them.