
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20’s - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10stone.html?src=tptw
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intellectronica
I think this is a lazy journalistic essay that desperately tries to sell
feelings of fear and nostalgia with no real substance. I have not seen any
reason to believe that people who 'grow up with' a technology treat it any
other way than people who were already adults at the time when the technology
was introduced. Not in any fundamental way - they sometimes make more
extensive use of the new technology.

For any of the earth shattering novelties that appeared in the last few
decades, you will find that after they established themselves, people of all
ages, regardless of whether they were children or adult when the technology
was introduced, use it in very similar ways. When I have to divide the quality
of use people I know make of the Internet (which became pervasive and popular
around the time when I transitioned from adolescence to adulthood), for
example, it seems to me that the divisions are more along professional lines,
or interest, than age. I know people in their 50s, 60s and even 80s who make
frequent and engaged use of most internet technologies, and young people, born
into a world in which the net is everywhere, who make only casual and
uninspired use of it.

I think I know the reason for it, too. Technological innovation is usually not
something created by children. Even the youngest inventors and developers are
at least old enough to be called young adults. The needs they see, their
values and their incentives are all linked directly to the world they live in
- a world in which people several decades older than them, as well as some
younger, live.

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jacquesm
"And after my 4-year-old niece received the very hot Zhou-Zhou pet hamster for
Christmas, I pointed out that the toy was essentially a robot, with some basic
obstacle avoidance skills. She replied matter-of-factly: “It’s not a robot.
It’s a pet.”"

That's so sad it isn't funny.

If someone would give my kid a robotic hamster it would go in to the trash
faster than you could blink.

My kid has a real-life dog and I can assure you that it is the better choice.

I'm sure it's less convenient, you can't shut it down, you need to take care
of it but that's exactly why it is better.

Life doesn't come with an on/off switch and children need to interact with
real live beings in order to learn valuable lessons that no battery operated
simulacrum/surrogate can provide.

~~~
antipaganda
In the trash? Come on, you could at least take its skin off and, along with
your kid, turn it into a papier-mache artistic creation which actually moves.

~~~
jacquesm
Or give him a screwdriver and let him take it apart :)

(hopefully that would then not be repeated on real-life creatures).

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jerf
There's a flip side, though. Are your children using Facebook in new and weird
ways? Well, maybe... but you're on Facebook too, aren't you? (Well, I
personally am not but you know what I mean.) Looking up slang terms has never
been easier, and you don't even have to corner a teenager and try to pry it
out of them. Music crosses age gaps now because there's not much you can
"scare" a current 30-year-old with; after German acid industrial death mega-
rock there's not much freakout left. (The closest thing to musical rebellion
I've seen in the past ten years is a cousin of mine who took up Elvis. Now
_that's_ rebellion.)

The gap may be growing, but at least for the moment the bridging is actually
growing faster. The future is fragmented subcultures anyhow and we're all
going to be pretty used to dealing with people on those terms anyhow (said
"jerf" to subculture fragment "hackers interested in entrepreneurship" sub
"people who clicked through comments on the title called "The Children of
Cyberspace", a subsubculture fragment with an expected life span of about ten
hours).

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Tichy
"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. "

Um, yeah, those aren't exactly "tasks" as I would define them... What scares
me a little is that every single kid I have met in the last two years was
unable to concentrate on learning anything (like how to solve a puzzle -
concentrating on TV is not really an achievement). Could be normal, but I am
not sure - I still hope it is just a phase...

~~~
robryan
Yes, sure you are performing these tasks but your not really concentrating
properly on any of them. It's like when my housemate plays WoW and watches a
show at the same time, I question the point, your not really playing the game
properly and your not really getting the whole show.

I do this at work when I find myself with code opened, but also HN, facebook,
MSN, and maybe an ecommerce site, it mostly is during the bug fixing/
finishing stage where it's hard to make much quick progress on things.

------
araneae
When I was little I called dogs bears.

She'll call it a Kindle when she grows up, don't worry.

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alexgartrell
I think we can expect to see something interesting in the next couple decades,
in that the stereotype of the 'Hacker' will completely disappear. When ALL
kids are exposed to technology at the very beginning, I think computer
programming will become increasingly mainstream. I think the end result will
be a lot more 'hackers' who are actually a lot better. I also think this will
result in a boom of Open Source, as 'scratching his/her own itch' will jump
from version control/web browsing to a much larger variety of things.

~~~
makmanalp
I think that's far too optimistic. Using technology is not the same as making
/ hacking it. Far too many people don't care.

~~~
wallflower
True. I see people everyday on the train, using their mobile devices to
fritter away time. They're consumers of technology, not producers.

However, the ongoing democratization of technology(1) will make it easier to
make. Or at least for them to share something. Or at least for non-technical
people to do the stuff that they want. My brother-in-law had a PC for years.
He got a MacBook and suddenly he was making DVDs, slideshows, editing video.
Was it just the technology or was it the fact that Apple makes it easy to do
things most people would like to do be able to do with their computers (the
iLife software)?

Why do you think YouTube became so successful? They took a really hard problem
(how to allow people to upload and share a video and made it easy).

"Over the span of one week two million people downloaded [Tap Tap Revenge] to
their iPhone or iPod Touch devices.

Something has changed. It has changed for good. Has it changed for the better?
I’m not yet sure – but I am sure there’s no going back."

<http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67>

(1) This essay by one of the coders behind Tap Tap Revenge that was posted
yesterday on HN (but kinda got buried) goes more into the democratization of
technology, wherein the people don't care about big software, they want Pop
Software, they want to do cool stuff with their mobile devices.

------
Alex3917
It's weird to think that for kids who are in fourth grade today, odds are
their first girlfriend will be someone they meet using their cellphone.

Also, this article quotes Mizuko Ito. If you haven't already read her book
Person, Portable, Pedestrian, it's really good. It's all about the
anthropology of cell phone use in Japan. It's probably starting to get a
little bit dated, post iPhone, but there is still some really cool stuff in
there.

------
olliesaunders
It's worth taking this entire article with a pinch of salt. I'm sure the
anecdotal observations are correct but the analysis of their implications is
far from certain.

~~~
hzzn
I agree. It seems you could have written this article during Jane Austen's
time. "Children growing up are going to be SOOOO much different from the
previous generation because the post is delivered as often as SIX times a day
and OMG will this kind of instant communication breed a new race of hive mind
humans?????????//?/?"

(Perhaps not the most believable pastiche of 18th-century written English
ever.)

    
    
        Another bubbling intra-generational gap, as any modern parent
        knows, is that younger children tend to be ever more artful
        multitaskers. Studies performed by Dr. Rosen at Cal State 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.
    
        People in their early 20s can handle only six, Dr. Rosen found, and
        those in their 30s perform about five and a half.
    

I think that the physical differences between the brains of those three age
groups is pretty significant. Isn't it possible that a fifteen-year-old would
lose her multitasking prowess by her mid-twenties, whether or not she was born
with an iPhone in her hands?

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dc2k08
I was thinking recently that the largest single obstacle to growth for social
networking sites is probably the generation gap. I don't think many new-timers
will be comfortable using a social site their parents use - and therein lies
an opportunity.

