millenials new era

8/7/2019 millenials new era

1/5

The 'millennials' usher in a new era

ByStefanie Olsen Staff Writer, CNET News.com November 18, 2005 4:00 AM PT

http://international.com.com/2009-1025-5944666.html?tag=txt

The future can be found in the virtual stacks of the International Children's Digital Library.

The "simple search" feature atthe Web site, which was designed in part by schoolchildren,

provides as many as 50 choices to find the right title while displaying large buttons that link to

fairy tales, adventure stories or books designed in favorite kid colors. It also offers personalized

bookshelves and three types of software to read them, including a child-inspired viewer that

shows pages in a spiral rack so that kids can jump to any page.

It's hardly a sophisticated algorithmic index, but it makes perfect sense to children who may not

know how to search like an adult or spell a keyword. That is precisely why the University of

Maryland, which built the site, continues to invite children to test its software and suggest new

designs.

"If there's only one way to find or read a book, to a child it doesn't make any sense," said AllisonDruin, associate professor of the university's College of Information Studies and director of its

book project, which was started in November 2002. "Our traditional educational tools limit how

children access information to learn or fit us into one way of learning things."

The libraryoffers an important view into the minds of what some sociologists are calling "the

millennials"--a generation of children and teenagers who came of age at the dawn of the

millennium.

Members of this generation are thought to be adept with computers, creative with technology and,

above all, are highly skilled at multitasking in a world where always-on connections are assumed.

Their everyday lives are often characterized by immediate communication, via instant messenger,

cellular conversations or text messaging. No member of this generation, it can be assumed,would ever wait on a street corner for a late friend.

The changing ways that members of this generation can learn, communicate and entertain

themselves are a primary reason behind the viral popularity of socially oriented technologies such

asblogs, wikis, tagging and instant messaging. Children who were born when Netscape

Communications went public are now 10 years old and have been raised on a steady diet of

digital technologies that have fundamentally shaped their notions of literacy, intelligence,

friendship and even the anxious adolescent process of learning who they are.

For their grandparents, the bicycle was a symbol of childhood independence. Today, for many

kids and young adults, it is the Internet.

"It consumes my life," said Andrea Thomas, a senior at Miami University. "If I'm not texting my

friends over the cell phone, I have my laptop with me and I'm IM'ing them. Or I'm doing researchon Google. Honestly, the only reason any one of my college friends use the library is for group

meetings."Who are 'millennials'?"Millennials" is one term sociologists use to designate those youths raised in the sensory-inundatedenvironment of digital technology and mass media at the millennium. Unlike Gen X, which referred generallyto people born in the 1960s and 1970s, this generation has yet to carry a name popularized by mainstreamculture. Also known as "Echo Boomers," as the children of Baby Boomers, millennials were born from the1980s on.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.icdlbooks.org/index.shtmlhttp://www.icdlbooks.org/index.shtmlhttp://international.com.com/An-open-source-rival-to-Googles-book-project/2100-1025_3-5915690.htmlhttp://international.com.com/An-open-source-rival-to-Googles-book-project/2100-1025_3-5915690.htmlhttp://international.com.com/From-ape-to-Homo-digitas/2100-11395_3-5873735.htmlhttp://international.com.com/From-ape-to-Homo-digitas/2100-11395_3-5873735.htmlhttp://international.com.com/Study-Teenagers-favor-IM-over-e-mail/2100-1032_3-5944265.htmlhttp://international.com.com/Blogging-101--Web-logs-go-to-school/2100-1032_3-5895779.htmlhttp://international.com.com/Blogging-101--Web-logs-go-to-school/2100-1032_3-5895779.htmlhttp://international.com.com/2310-10784_3-0.htmlhttp://international.com.com/2310-10784_3-0.htmlhttp://international.com.com/2310-10784_3-0.htmlhttp://www.icdlbooks.org/index.shtmlhttp://international.com.com/An-open-source-rival-to-Googles-book-project/2100-1025_3-5915690.htmlhttp://international.com.com/From-ape-to-Homo-digitas/2100-11395_3-5873735.htmlhttp://international.com.com/Study-Teenagers-favor-IM-over-e-mail/2100-1032_3-5944265.htmlhttp://international.com.com/Blogging-101--Web-logs-go-to-school/2100-1032_3-5895779.htmlhttp://international.com.com/Blogging-101--Web-logs-go-to-school/2100-1032_3-5895779.htmlhttp://international.com.com/2310-10784_3-0.htmlmailto:[email protected]


2/5

Jonathan Steuer, technology consumer strategist for Iconoculture, a research firm, said those like

Thomas are simply using today's technologies to express a sense of belonging that young people

have always desired. "What sets millennials apart is that they use technology to push the

boundaries of the values that have been associated with their generation in ways not possible

before."

By only their seventh birthday, most children in the United States will have talked on a cell phone,played a computer game and mastered a TV-on-demand device like TiVo, much to the

amazement of technically challenged parents. By 13, researchers say, the same children will

have gone through several software editions of instant messaging, frequented online chat rooms

and downloaded their first illegal song from BitTorrent.

College-age millennials will likely own a laptop and take for granted ubiquitous broadband

Internet access. They may also be intimately familiar with the feeling of "highway hypnosis"--the

ability to drive or multitask with little memory of the process of getting there.

Their inevitably short attention spans are the reason Seymour Papert of MIT's Media Lab coined

the term "grasshopper mind" five years ago, for the inclination to leap quickly from one topic to

another. A mathematician and founder of artificial intelligence, Papert addressed the effects of

this behavior as far back as 1995 in congressional testimony about technology and learning."The question at stake is no longer whether technology can change education or even whetherthis is desirable," Papert wrote in his testimony. "The presence of technology in society is a majorfactor in changing the entire learning environment."

A recent study from Pew Internet and American Life found that more than half of all teens online--

12 million kids--create original material for the Web, whether it's through a blog, home page or

school Web site, with original artwork, photos or video. A large portion of that active group also

will creatively "remix" other material from the Web to create something unique.

"Some of the best designed pages on MySpace are by 14- or 15-year-olds," said Kyle Brinkman,

co-founder of the MySpace social network. Judging by the network's popularity, it must be doing

something right: MySpace surpassed Google in traffic a few months before the site's parent

company was sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million in July.The facility with technology among millennials is not genetic; they are comfortable with computers

simply because they are products of their environment and upbringing in an increasingly digital

world. Yet their immersion in the Information Age is not always positive.

For example, it is nearly impossible to shield even young children from the gruesome details of

news reports, and this is a generation that has grown up with the Columbine shootings, Amber

Alerts, Sept. 11, and at least one Persian Gulf war. Exposure to disturbing events online may also

be unwittingly exacerbated by parents who restrict their children to in-house activities out of

pervasive fears about abductions and molestations.

For their Gen X predecessors, malls and cafes were among the few sanctuaries away from

home. But many proprietors have restricted the amount of time teenagers can spend at these

businesses, leaving cyberspace as the hangout of choice where youths can begin to exercise

their independence.

"If there's only one way to find or read a book, to a child it doesn't make anysense."--Allison Druin, project leader, International Children's Digital Library

"Where do they go outside of the parental eye? Lacking a public sphere, they create one in the
http://international.com.com/Attention-deficit-disorder-Try-video-games/2100-1043_3-5940181.htmlhttp://international.com.com/Attention-deficit-disorder-Try-video-games/2100-1043_3-5940181.html


3/5

digital," said Danah Boyd, a doctoral student at the University of California's School of Information

who also works at Yahoo Research in Berkeley.

Boyd, who has been studying how teenagers use technology for the last year, has identified their

primary activities as chatting over instant messengers and mobile phones, playing games,

blogging with tools like LiveJournal and socializing on networks like MySpace. "MySpace--your

friends are on it, your parents hate it. That just makes it more desirable. If it's not cool they won'tuse it. It's that simple," she said.

America Online is the most popular instant-messaging tool for the age group, but Boyd said

sometimes kids will use Yahoo or Microsoft's MSN when they want a break from their regular

friends or to talk with mom and dad. "They use largely a combination of mobile phones and IM

chat. Ninety percent of their conversation has no content--it's a recapturing of the day and a way

of understanding the world they're living in," Boyd said.

But amid this seemingly idle chatter lies significant information. Today's youths turn to each other

for news and facts in much the way that children of another era sought out parents or teachers,

read the newspaper and watched televised news.

"I can't remember the last time I picked up a newspaper," university student Thomas said.

Iconoculture's Steuer said the evolving ways of consuming news is tied directly to interactivity."That's why blogs and MySpace are such a huge deal, because they're not weaned on just mass

media but also interactive media," he said.

In just two years since MySpace was created as an indie music community, it has grown into a

cultural phenomenon where teenagers grapple with such formative issues as body image, peer

pressure, drugs and relationships. Social networks like MySpace allow them to play with their

identities or try on new ones.

"Last year it was all about AIM, and this year it's all about MySpace and chatting with boys," said

Sarah, a sixth-grader. "But you have to be careful who you're talking to."

Educators, too, are seeing the role of such social networks grow in children's lives--and they don't

always appreciate their influence. Many English teachers openly deride the Internet in general as

a detriment to developing minds. The Web and its billions of pages have no universal standardsfor writing or communication, they say, and children can easily develop bad habits at a time when

they don't know the definition of a homonym or when a sentence needs a capital, comma or

semicolon.

"It's a bastardization of the language," said one teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area who

asked to remain anonymous for the sake of parents and students at her school. "And it

normalizes for them that they can ignore conventions."

Others argue that such criticism is futile because technology is here to stay. Instead, these

scholars worry that schools should be taking more initiative with the Internet's potential to help

students learn.

Andrew Davis, who teaches social studies to seventh and eighth graders, said he's working

informally to integrate technology into many classroom environments. In one case, Davis wants toincorporate "study wikis" into social studies to let students collaborate on a subject more easily.

A wiki could be created as a glossary to study Islam, for example, and the children could be given60 terms to define and discuss. Because wikis maintain histories of posts and edits, teachers canverify which students worked on particular parts of projects and grade them accordingly.

One technology that's becoming fairly popular in PC-equipped classrooms is an e-mail systemcalled First Class. With it, teachers can send an e-mail with a study question to a group of


4/5

children, and when one student replies, it starts an e-mail thread that is consolidated into a fileaccessible to all, rather than a series of messages in an in-box. This teaches children to readinformation in threads."Independently they're learning new ways of expressing themselves that will cause the definitionof writing to change. There is a new form of literacy developing that is informal," Davis said. "Youhave this immense sea of possibilities with the Internet, and good teachers don't have the time tonavigate that sea. I fear that, mishandled, the Internet will become like the TV 20 years later."

"If I'm not texting my friends over the cell phone, I have my laptop with me andI'm IM'ing them. Or I'm doing research on Google. Honestly, the only reason anyone of my college friends use the library is for group meetings."--Andrea Thomas, senior, Miami University

Some cultural observers don't think that would be the worst thing that could happen. Steven

Johnson, author of "Everything Bad Is Good for You," posits in his book that video games, reality

TV and other presumed villains of popular culture are actually making us smarter. One reason is

that digital interactivity forces constant decision-making.

"For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining

path toward lowest common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want

dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But

in fact, the opposite is happening: The culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less,"

Johnson writes. "I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not

dumbing them down."

The millennials would seem to agree. When a group of Maryland schoolchildren were asked last

week if they understood technology more than their parents did, they answered in unison with a

resounding "Yes!"

"I can fix the computer but my mom can't," said 8-year-old Jamie, who said his favorite

technology is videoconferencing "because it's fun to talk to somebody hundreds of states away."

His friend Zeik added: "My parents can't even play my video games."

But what about the quality of thinking that results from these hyperactive brain synapses? After

studying how teenage girls interact with technology for the last year, researcher Wendy March

said her subjects were so adept at typing on the computer that they didn't have to think anymore.

As a result, she said, they were often on automatic pilot.

"A few girls talked about moving away from computers to force themselves to think about their

college essays in a different way so they would be concentrated on thinking instead of the

process," said March who has been doing her research as an interaction designerat Intel's

People and Practices research unit. "They've realized that technological fluency was not all it was

about. And they have to slow themselves down."

That sentiment was illustrated on a wall at the computer lab of San Francisco's Hamlin school for

girls, where a sign advises against this tendency, as least in jest: "Caution: This machine has no

brain, use your own."

Teenage girls have been especially receptive to the influences of technology, researchers say,

because they tend to be highly communicative and use mobile phones constantly. For privacy,

they prefer text messaging or IM.

Sixth-grade girls at Hamlin write a biweekly online journal for and about the school during their e-

journalism course. The girls, who are all about 11 or 12 years old, said their library cards get little

or no use because much of their time is spent on MySpace or AOL Instant Messenger.
http://www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/people/bios/march_w.htmhttp://www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/people/bios/march_w.htmhttp://www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/people/bios/march_w.htm


5/5

"It is a different way of growing up, if you always had it," MySpace's Brinkman said. "It's like the

telephone for us. You can't imagine functioning without it. The fusion of mobile, IM and Web, and

it keeps getting more so. Each successive generation is going to be more like this."

If technology has generally fostered independence, it can also have the opposite effect in some

forms. Phones companies have planned to insert location-detecting sensors into mobile phones,

for instance, and software that can monitor text messages and Web browsing has already beendeveloped.

That conjures a worst-case scenario for many teenagers, the possibility of parents finding out

exactly where they are and what they're doing practically at all times--showing that some social

dynamics never change from generation to generation.As March noted: "Technology doesn't change what we do. It allows us to do it in slightly differentways."

Documents

millenials new era