Kids & The Future, Now & Then
The NYTimes on mini-generation gaps:
Researchers…theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.
“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”
NBC, are you listening?
The iGeneration…spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks.
Hortense looks back at a NYTimes piece about her generation:
Electronic play is now a routine part of schooling. In September, 11-year-old Murphy Stein, who has been surrounded by electronic objects since infancy, will be going into the sixth grade in a Los Angeles public school. Last year his classroom contained one laser disk player, 35 Macintosh computers, a few television monitors, a tape player and a video camera. The computers, donated by Apple Computer, are used for writing and for creating interactive books that include video, sound and text.
The video camera was used for a project in which the children wrote, produced and filmed their own television news shows.
”Every kid I know,” Murphy said, ”feels comfortable with electronics.”
Remember the laser disk?
Interactive laser disks are also available commercially from the Voyager Company. They include AmandaStories for kids who cannot yet read: – three disks of interactive tales in which the child moves the characters from one adventure to another. Other Voyager disks might perhaps one day replace the home encyclopedia: an electronic version of the National Gallery of Art already available, for example, comes complete with reproductions that can be sorted and viewed using a computer.
Whatever. Tech costs money.
Sadly, Marco Rubio notwithstanding, kids born poor (and there are more of them) are likely to die poor. “By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults.”
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This trend will only continue and there will quite possibly come a time when the “internet gap” will become the “access gap”. Every so often the death of broadcast TV is invoked at conventions and other gatherings of media pundits and executives. This has been going on for a few years now. In addition AT&T is pushing for an end to the existing analog phone system. What if it did happen? What if alongside the death of “free” television and the old type of phone system with dedicated voice access, unfettered access to the internet as a means of communication and study become so important that it becomes a true handicap to not have that access in the home for poor students? Would a tax for “emergency” access to communications become viable, much as the existing system to subsidize phone service that we have now? Would it need to be more extensive as homework and class projects over the internet become more ubiquitous? Or is a permanent underclass acceptable now? Waiting until we are confronted with a full blown problem that has been going on for years before being confronted should be oh-so-twentieth-century. Too bad it probably isn't.