The 'millennials' usher in a new era
For their grandparents, the bicycle was a symbol of childhood independence. Today, for many kids, it is the Internet.
The 'millennials' usher in a new era
By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
November 18, 2005 4:00 AM PT
The future can be found in the virtual stacks of the International Children's Digital Library.
The "simple search" feature at the 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 Allison Druin, 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 library offers 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 as blogs, 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 research on Google. Honestly, the only reason any one of my college friends use the library is for group meetings."
"Millennials" is one term sociologists use to designate those youths raised in the sensory-inundated environment of digital technology and mass media at the millennium. Unlike Gen X, which referred generally to people born in the 1960s and 1970s, this generation has yet to carry a name popularized by mainstream culture. Also known as "Echo Boomers," as the children of Baby Boomers, millennials were born from the 1980s on.
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 whether this is desirable," Papert wrote in his testimony. "The presence of technology in society is a major factor in changing the entire learning environment."
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
The 'millennials' usher in a new era
(continued from previous page)
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
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 any sense."
"Where do they go outside of the parental eye? Lacking a public sphere, they create one in the 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't use 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.
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
The 'millennials' usher in a new era
(continued from previous page)
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 standards for 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 to incorporate "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 given 60 terms to define and discuss. Because wikis maintain histories of posts and edits, teachers can verify 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 system called First Class. With it, teachers can send an e-mail with a study question to a group of children, and when one student replies, it starts an e-mail thread that is consolidated into a file accessible to all, rather than a series of messages in an in-box. This teaches children to read information in threads. "Independently they're learning new ways of expressing themselves that will cause the definition of writing to change. There is a new form of literacy developing that is informal," Davis said. "You have this immense sea of possibilities with the Internet, and good teachers don't have the time to navigate 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 and I'm IM'ing them. Or I'm doing research on Google. Honestly, the only reason any one of my college friends use the library is for group meetings."
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 designer at 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.
"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 been developed.
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 different ways." 
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
The 'millennials' usher in a new era
By Stefanie Olsen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
November 18, 2005 4:00 AM PT
The future can be found in the virtual stacks of the International Children's Digital Library.
The "simple search" feature at the 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 Allison Druin, 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 library offers 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 as blogs, 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 research on Google. Honestly, the only reason any one of my college friends use the library is for group meetings."
"Millennials" is one term sociologists use to designate those youths raised in the sensory-inundated environment of digital technology and mass media at the millennium. Unlike Gen X, which referred generally to people born in the 1960s and 1970s, this generation has yet to carry a name popularized by mainstream culture. Also known as "Echo Boomers," as the children of Baby Boomers, millennials were born from the 1980s on.
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 whether this is desirable," Papert wrote in his testimony. "The presence of technology in society is a major factor in changing the entire learning environment."
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
The 'millennials' usher in a new era
(continued from previous page)
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
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 any sense."
"Where do they go outside of the parental eye? Lacking a public sphere, they create one in the 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't use 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.
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
The 'millennials' usher in a new era
(continued from previous page)
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 standards for 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 to incorporate "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 given 60 terms to define and discuss. Because wikis maintain histories of posts and edits, teachers can verify 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 system called First Class. With it, teachers can send an e-mail with a study question to a group of children, and when one student replies, it starts an e-mail thread that is consolidated into a file accessible to all, rather than a series of messages in an in-box. This teaches children to read information in threads. "Independently they're learning new ways of expressing themselves that will cause the definition of writing to change. There is a new form of literacy developing that is informal," Davis said. "You have this immense sea of possibilities with the Internet, and good teachers don't have the time to navigate 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 and I'm IM'ing them. Or I'm doing research on Google. Honestly, the only reason any one of my college friends use the library is for group meetings."
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 designer at 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.
"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 been developed.
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 different ways."
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann