
Always Connected: Generation Z, the “Digitarians” - ardeay
http://randyapuzzo.com/blog/opinions/generation-z-the-digitarians/
======
gregpilling
I have a gaggle of children, and I have noticed that my 5 year old son thinks
many devices have voice control, and he views this as normal.

My 11 year old son and 8 year old always think every screen has a touch
interface, but they don't use voice.

To me, it seems that there is a break in those generations. The 5 year old is
voice activating his tablet, amazon fire tv, watches his parents voice command
their phones driving - this is all totally normal to him and you can see he
will often try a voice command on a device unfamiliar to him.

The older boys think using a PC is novel, and look at me strangely when I tell
them about DOS and Windows 3.1 //// oh well...

~~~
walterbell
Do they think all the magic takes place on the devices, or somewhere else?
e.g. do they think of "syncing" as something that occurs directly between
devices, or that involves services in the middle?

~~~
gregpilling
I don't believe he thinks about it at all . It has just always been so to him,
like the sun comes up in the morning.

------
EdSharkey
Just got back from a family reunion and my relations' kids were glued to their
tablets playing mindless games and watching YouTube unattended for 4 hour
spells and more day after day. It was so depressing, all these boring consumer
drones in the making.

My kids get 1 hour of screen time a day, max (until they decide to become
coders, and then the cap is lifted. :)

~~~
nemo1618
I was raised by parents who strictly limited my computer time to one hour a
day. I spent most of it playing games, so perhaps their concern was justified.
But I loved the computer, so, so much. And of course, I would do anything to
sneak around the limits: wait until my parents went to sleep, binge while they
were away, etc.

It created a rather ugly tension between us; very adversarial. Upon later
reflection, I realized that the root of it was that my parents had never made
an effort to understand what compelled me to "veg out" in front of that screen
as much as possible. They never asked me what a particular game was about, why
I liked it, whether I was any good at it... in fact, I turned out to be
exceptional at a number of games, winning amateur competitions and the like --
but I never shared those achievements with my parents, for fear that they
would berate me for wasting my time developing useless skills.

My dad tried to teach me Java and Ruby, but gave up when they didn't seem to
stick. He didn't notice all the time I spent "programming" games of my own in
RPG Maker 2000. (I did wind up pursuing programming seriously in college.)

I guess my point is: before you limit something, make an honest effort to
understand it first. Maybe play a round or two of that game with your child.
Maybe ask them what sort of YouTube videos they like to watch (my younger
cousins watch endless hours of _other people_ playing games, which I still
struggle to understand...). As I matured, I was able to forgive my parents;
they did what they did out of love. I just wish it hadn't taken me so long to
realize that.

~~~
chipsy
I was allowed many hours on the computer(albeit often having to take turns
with my brother), but I concur that the emotional labor of listening and
understanding is the number one thing my parents never "got." As I got older,
their vicarious-living tendencies became more obvious - they wanted me doing
things they personally liked and that was the farthest they could see.

That would be fine, but if it wasn't on their radar of likes, they saw no
reason to bring it up or discuss it - and if I brought it up, they had a
pattern of dismissal with no pledge of support or further discussion -
sometimes using the Grave Serious tone, sometimes using the Explanatory,
That's Nice, or Maybe Later tone. If I escalated or presented work to them,
they would categorize it as a "career", "hobby" or "skill development" and
position it relative to their preferred activities in a way which induced
anxiety and discouraged me from continuing. The only thing I wanted was basic
interest or acknowledgement, and they consistently messed that up by wheeling
every conversation directly towards their comfort zone. To this day, if I try
to talk about a personal issue, they rush to provide unsolicited solutions and
explanations. I finally managed to unlearn the explaining pattern myself as I
got into my later 20's, as my friends brought it to light.

So, at least at that time, I gave up on parental engagement and hid my life
away in the computer instead, since at least there were people online, while
weathering the (relatively mild, compared with others) storms of their own
fancy. So too, I think, is the role of all of today's devices - when the
family doesn't care, the screen fills in. It's a symptom.

I think it's right to set down rules at an early age. That is one thing I
think my parents did do right, and the early years are probably more crucial
overall. But they had no idea how to proceed from there - kids aren't going to
be exactly like their parents, and that requires a lot of listening when they
get into adolescence and try to speak for themselves.

~~~
sandgaw
The thing that people are missing is, tech is being used as a baby sitter.
Just like TV was for me. Now it's worse because It's always connected. Parents
are fucking lazy today. I see it constantly. It's about being connected to
your kid that I'm for. That's fucking hard and people don't want to do hard
today when they come home from work. They would rather sit and watch their own
shit on their device because parenting is hard. Just look around the mall,
airport or a dinner table. We're not talking about 12 year olds. These kids
are 2, 4, 5, 7 and 9, etc... Their brains are developing and technology,
scientifically proven, gets in the way of brain development- just like TV and
video games in my gen. It's not bad, in moderation, just like everything else
in this world. So, it's not about the tech it's about the family. My 9 yr old
kid reads 5-10 books a week. She looses herself in her books to the point she
can't hear anyone. Learning, safely, for the most part. Using her imagination
instead of it being fed to her by the vast majority of the shit out there. she
gets to play learning and thinking games, not fruit ninja. What has changed
from my gen is being connected 24/7 has giving adults an easy way out from
doing something hard. I fucking want yell at a parent who is out to dinner
with 2,3,4 year olds at the table playing with an iPad. While the parent is
buried in their own. I limited the tech not because it's tech, trendy and cool
to do so but, because we want our kids to be able to communicate with other
human beings and the ability resolve conflict through something other than a
text or Facebook. They will have plenty of opportunities to be immersed into
technology and all troublesome things that come with it as a teen.

I know technology is empowering at the right age. But, I want both my kids to
be exposed to cooking, knitting, skateboarding, swimming, playing sports,
books, music and art by actually doing it versus it being fed to them on an
iPad. If either one of them wants to learn a different programming language
than me, I hope the fact that I've connected with my kid so we will be able to
discover it together.

Bottom line, Generation Z is being raise by Apple, Samsung and Amazon. As a
parent, I'm not OK with this.

~~~
nemo1618
For the most part I agree with your sentiment. You make a good point about the
parents being as sucked into technology as their kids.

Regarding books though...is a book objectively "better" entertainment than a
video game? Both require user participation, as opposed to the mindless
consumption of television. There are low-quality games, but there are low-
quality books as well. I'm inclined to agree that books are better, but I'm
having a hard time justifying that belief.

~~~
sandgaw
@ nemo1618 I agree, books can be bad, too. We try to monitor what they read,
but it's just as hard. They are going to sneak and hide the ones we don't want
them to read - human nature. But, as a connected parent, I make it priority,
even for just literally a few minutes, to sit down and ask about what she is
reading. That way, she knows I'm participating. It makes a big difference.
And, we do struggle with her reading constantly.. we get her out and go for a
walk, bug hunts, etc.

The downside to a connected parent? I see one TV show a week with my wife, I'm
tired, the laundry piles up and the living space is a lot dirtier.

Back to the point, I feel we are both making: It doesn't matter the medium,
too much of one thing is bad. But, it's so much easier to put 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
year olds in front of devices, because it's easy parenting. By the time they
are 7, they won't want to read - it'll be too boring.

------
brianstorms
With all due respect, what a bunch of b.s. Goes to show that always being
connected maybe isn't all it's hyped up to be. From the sound of it, it
doesn't appear to produce any lasting insights.

p.s. Whoever typed "exec" to run a DOS program?

p.p.s. "Software is a dead. Digitarians know apps, games, and web browsers."
WTF?

~~~
shillno1138
Digitarians know how to push big buttons, know nothing of how said buttons
work, progress indeed. Depends on your definition of progress.

~~~
daodedickinson
We rural farmers have found the ignorance of city folk about how their food
and electricity and water are produced depressing and hilarious in this
ambivalent way for decades. One can only wonder how far society can build
technical, monetary and moral debt in this matryoshka doll sort of way before
collapse...

In Haruki Murakami's "The Birth of My Kitchen Table Fiction" he mentions:

"It cost a lot less to open your own place back then [1974] than it does now.
Young people like us who were determined to avoid “company life” at all costs
were launching small shops left and right. Cafés and restaurants, variety
stores, bookstores—you name it. Several places near us were owned and run by
people of our generation... It was an era when, all over the world, one could
still find gaps in the system."

Children are pulled towards these gaps where the giant experience advantage
adults have are not already dominating, unless adults spend much one-on-one
time grooming children to take over their current roles. Most parents are in
roles that will not be around for their children, or the parents cannot give
such roles to their children. This inter-generational alienation has grown for
centuries.

I fear that our institutions will be, in particular, unprepared to cope with
the nigh-invisible problems that the very new increase in life-expectancy will
bring. What happens when groups and teams of people performing and designing
at unprecedentedly high levels due to abnormal extra decades of experience
start dying off, without ready replacements because the strongest minds went
to niche tech sectors with the least competition from more experienced older
people? I wonder if there is a cohort in some field where people with
elongated life-spans dominated limited positions to the point where
replacements with enough experience to keep things going will simply be
impossible to find. Is this happening already? Any examples? I definitely read
that there are a plethora of continuously unfilled job openings requiring too
much experience and growing crowds of unemployed who cannot build experience,
but maybe this is not too new or unendurable and a brutal transition is not
necessary. I hope it is just a neurosis of mine. I welcome any words in
response that will soothe this fear.

I think too, here, of how the average age of a Nobel Prize in Physics winner
is increasing at a superlinear rate. I feel a new Tower of Babel collapse will
come because technological change will outpace the rate at which human brains
can learn. I feel technical debt outpaces even national debts and idiocracy is
resulting. I had to stop reading (ironically) Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest
Generation because it was literally giving me panic attacks. I've always been
successful in school and the book just solidifies my conceit that I am king
turd of a shit mountain. What if we get too weak to hold on to the shoulders
of the

I can understand why society requires faith; maybe it's always been Wile E.
Coyote refusing to look down—and Spengler would hardly make one think
otherwise. But weren't many older generations working for future generations?
When have societies so obviously borrowed from the future instead of building
it? Straddled their children with debt instead of taking it on for their
benefit? I went to my eighth choice school out of eight to avoid debt and I'm
now at an even-worse graduate school (I got into the number 1 grad program for
my major, balked at $180k of debt, and am now attending an unranked school,
i.e. it's not even in the top 150) and all I get in exchange is worry that the
program is not challenging enough, and self-hate that I can't motivate myself
enough independently of school.

Todays kids build in Minecraft, just as I built in Legos, because neither of
us could fight through the massive amount of red tape to build something real
in, say, California. Why should kids go outside when they are allowed to do so
little? There's no treasure to be found at the local park, if there was, it's
been found by the crowds already, and you're not allowed to dig to try to find
some anyway. My mother is a gatherer (as in hunt and gatherer) at heart, and
her deepest love is to wander the mesas of desolate Wyoming, find artifacts
and weird rocks, bring them home, and add them to an ever-growing found-object
arrangement in her driveway that I consider a folk art installation (she is
more humble). It is very illegal. But when kids do this in Minecraft or I hunt
and gatherer in a Bethesda Softworks game, no one arrests me even if I get
caught. But I'm exercising once-valuable skills and instincts that I should
fast from and eventually eliminate if I want to gain advantage in my current
sociopolitical environment. I fear I'm merely an echo of a old way of life and
I find myself unable to enjoy Fallout: New Vegas without guilt or fear, and
stressed out when I try to build skills for the new world order.

I once had a vision that I interpreted to mean that absolute power is absolute
weakness. I haven't integrated it into my life, but when I think about how
people can learn how to push buttons without learning how to build the
machines those buttons control, I get an in to the truth, that the pursuit of
power, is the pursuit of comfort, is the pursuit of weakness, is the pursuit
of stress. And this flux is eternal.

------
oasisbob
Can someone please remind me how demographers defend treating post-WWII
generations as being 20 years in length when the evidence is very clear that
real generations are much longer?

[http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Generation_length](http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Generation_length)

I wouldn't care so much if it weren't for having to endure another round of
inane punditry.

------
swalsh
My son was born this year in March. I'm not sure if that counts as Z or if its
something beyond that... but i'm not sure technology is the thing that will
"Define" his generation. To be sure, I think VR and AI will definitely impact
them by a lot.... but I think more impactful is that he's going to be coming
of age at exactly the moment when some of the worst effects of climate change
(if we managed to slow it down very soon) are projected to happen.

I think his generation will be defined not by the new tech invented, but by
the global changes they have to adapt to.

------
zitterbewegung
This generation is fighting the largest class warfare battle in history and
guess what. There is only mutually assured destruction.

