The Dumbest Generation (11 page)
Read The Dumbest Generation Online
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
It’s eleven o’clock on Friday morning and only 20 customers, all adults, have entered. By tomorrow afternoon, though, the Atlanta mall will overflow with teenagers, and packs of 16-year-olds and resolute young stragglers will pile into the Apple Store for an hour of sampling, surfing, and (sometimes) buying. An affable clerk with three-inch spikes in a Mohawk from forehead to nape responds with a smile when I ask him how many kids will arrive. “Oh, it’ll be crazy,” he chortles. On a weekday morning you can wander freely, but on Saturday afternoon with the kids in force, he says, “It takes a little bit of ‘intentionality’ to get around.”
No other spot in the mall, at school, or at home provides so much concentrated and inviting fun and experimentation. Three doors away, Abercrombie & Fitch lures young shoppers with a 10-by-12-foot black-and-white photo of a shirtless male seen from the rear, his jeans sliding down his hips as he peers into a turbulent sky. Two floors below, the music/video shop f.y.e. stocks compact discs and movies in the standard layout, and a single bored employee nods behind the cash register. Farther down, the theaters have closed, but in the food court diners gobble pizza and cashew chicken while watching
Entertainment Tonight
on eight plasma screens hanging from the ceiling.
Entertainment Tonight
on eight plasma screens hanging from the ceiling.
They sound like tepid fare set beside the joys and wonders of Apple offerings. And not only is the machinery ever-improving, ever more prosthetic. It has a special relationship to teens and 20-year-olds. More and more, it seems, the technology itself is their possession, their expression. The press release for a 2005 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on online usage has the grand subtitle “Youth are leading the transition to a fully wired and mobile nation. ” The report marvels that half the teenagers in the United States are not merely passive consumers. They are “content creators,” making their own Web pages or posting their artwork, photos, stories, or videos online. People at Pew’s Research Center call them the “Dot-Nets, ” director Scott Keeter says, “because of their technological savvy.” They form the first generation reared on Google, never knowing a time when television meant ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and a local station showing reruns. They blink at the terms “LP,” “station wagon,” “Betamax,” “IBM Selectric,” “rabbit ears,” and a thousand other apparatuses from their parents’ time, and if they encountered them now they would hoot at the primitivism. A world with only land lines impresses them as ridiculously inconvenient. No cohort has witnessed such enabling advances in personal gadgetry. What perplexes their elders they act out as the natural thing to do, passing days and nights rapping comments into a blog, role-playing in a chat room, surfing paparazzi photos, logging onto
Facebook,
running
Madden NFL,
checking for voice messages, and uploading pictures of themselves while watching TV shows at the same rate they did before the other diversions appeared.
Facebook,
running
Madden NFL,
checking for voice messages, and uploading pictures of themselves while watching TV shows at the same rate they did before the other diversions appeared.
Keeter calls them savvy, and countless commentators recite their tech virtues with majestic phrases, as does
Get Ready: The Millennials Are Coming!,
a 2005 Forrester Research report whose Web summary announces: “The ‘Millennials’—those born between 1980 and 2000—have an innate ability to use technology, are comfortable multitasking while using a diverse range of digital media, and literally demand interactivity as they construct knowledge.” Young users don’t just possess good skills—they have “innate ability.” They don’t just tinker online; they “construct knowledge.” In his
Philadelphia Inquirer
op-ed, Jonathan Fanton effuses about digital kids who’ve “created communities the size of nations . . . mastered digital tools to create new techniques for personal expression . . . redefined the notion of ‘play’ ”—all through games, message boards, and social networking. As we shall see, some research questions the Millennials’ digital wisdom, but nobody doubts the connectedness of their lives. Indeed, the degree of their immersion in digital technology and screen media itself sets them apart.
Get Ready: The Millennials Are Coming!,
a 2005 Forrester Research report whose Web summary announces: “The ‘Millennials’—those born between 1980 and 2000—have an innate ability to use technology, are comfortable multitasking while using a diverse range of digital media, and literally demand interactivity as they construct knowledge.” Young users don’t just possess good skills—they have “innate ability.” They don’t just tinker online; they “construct knowledge.” In his
Philadelphia Inquirer
op-ed, Jonathan Fanton effuses about digital kids who’ve “created communities the size of nations . . . mastered digital tools to create new techniques for personal expression . . . redefined the notion of ‘play’ ”—all through games, message boards, and social networking. As we shall see, some research questions the Millennials’ digital wisdom, but nobody doubts the connectedness of their lives. Indeed, the degree of their immersion in digital technology and screen media itself sets them apart.
Political commentators often observe that blogs have altered the way campaigns and elections work, but in 2004 a little more than half of the 4.1 million blogs counted by Perseus Development Corporation were kept by 13- to 19-year-olds. A July 2007 report sponsored by the National School Boards Association (“Creating and Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social—and Educational— Networking”) found that 30 percent of students with online access run their own blogs, and “More than one in 10 (12 percent) say they upload music or podcasts of their own creation at least weekly.” Many of them, the study affirms, “are adventurous nonconformists who set the pace for their peers.” Indeed, Glenn Reynolds, pioneering host of
,
believes that blogs have produced an “army of Davids,” young and inquisitive Net users who free knowledge and information from the control of mainstream media and Big Government, although in truth, few of the under-30-year-olds’ blogs have much political content (Pew found in 2005 that only 7 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds go online for “political news”). And in the cell phone field, an August 2006
Wall Street Journal
article headed “Dialing into the Youth Market: Cellphone Services and Products Become Increasingly Tailored to Teenager Users” explains that teens provide most of the growth for the industry. Furthermore, they bring new demands that steer innovations in the market: “Phone executives say a high priority is making it possible for teens to access, from their cellphones, blogs, online photo galleries and social-networking sites” (see Ricketts). Indeed, a
Wall Street Journal
story seven months later predicted that cell phones will soon be the primary medium for streaming news clips, sports, network television shows, video and photo sharing, and advertising (“What’s New in Wireless”; see Sharma), and we may expect youths to be the earliest adopters.
,
believes that blogs have produced an “army of Davids,” young and inquisitive Net users who free knowledge and information from the control of mainstream media and Big Government, although in truth, few of the under-30-year-olds’ blogs have much political content (Pew found in 2005 that only 7 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds go online for “political news”). And in the cell phone field, an August 2006
Wall Street Journal
article headed “Dialing into the Youth Market: Cellphone Services and Products Become Increasingly Tailored to Teenager Users” explains that teens provide most of the growth for the industry. Furthermore, they bring new demands that steer innovations in the market: “Phone executives say a high priority is making it possible for teens to access, from their cellphones, blogs, online photo galleries and social-networking sites” (see Ricketts). Indeed, a
Wall Street Journal
story seven months later predicted that cell phones will soon be the primary medium for streaming news clips, sports, network television shows, video and photo sharing, and advertising (“What’s New in Wireless”; see Sharma), and we may expect youths to be the earliest adopters.
The daunting size of Generation DotNet energizes the digital trades, and the intensity of its digital thirst never seems to wane. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s ongoing research project demonstrates how steadily screen activities saturate the younger populations. As noted earlier, Kaiser’s Study of Entertainment Media and Health conducts surveys of the home and leisure lives of children and families, highlighting media types and exposure. In 2003, it released
Zero-to -Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers,
a study of children’s media exposure in the first six years of life. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to keep two-year-olds and under away from the television screen altogether, and to restrict older children to one to two hours of educational programming per day. But the 1,000+ subjects in the Kaiser study, ranging from six months to six years old, went well beyond that. They averaged fully one hour and 58 minutes per day on screen media. That’s three times the amount they devoted to reading or being read to (39 minutes per day). Children pass as many moments in front of a screen as they do playing outside (two hours and one minute), and the number of kids who let a day pass without enjoying screen images is less than the number of those who spend a day without opening a book.
Zero-to -Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers,
a study of children’s media exposure in the first six years of life. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to keep two-year-olds and under away from the television screen altogether, and to restrict older children to one to two hours of educational programming per day. But the 1,000+ subjects in the Kaiser study, ranging from six months to six years old, went well beyond that. They averaged fully one hour and 58 minutes per day on screen media. That’s three times the amount they devoted to reading or being read to (39 minutes per day). Children pass as many moments in front of a screen as they do playing outside (two hours and one minute), and the number of kids who let a day pass without enjoying screen images is less than the number of those who spend a day without opening a book.
The home environment supports the behaviors. One-third of the subjects (36 percent) reside in homes in which the television is on “always” or “most of the time.” Half of the children occupy homes with three or more television sets in use, and 36 percent of them have one in their bedroom. Half the households have a video game player, and 49 percent of them have Internet access (since 2003, of course, that figure has climbed steadily), while only 34 percent subscribe to a newspaper.
We might assume that with children at such tender ages the screen activities follow a parent’s directive. While father fights the traffic, mother must prepare dinner, and so she sets their two-year-old on the living room carpet and starts a
Sesame Street
video that the child soaks up agreeably for 30 minutes. In truth, however, most of the children have acquired enough knowledge of the screen to form preferences of their own, and they act on them. Fully 77 percent of them, the study found, turn the TV on by themselves, and two-thirds request particular shows, 71 percent a preferred video or DVD. Sixty-two percent change channels with the remote control, 36 percent install their own music CDs or tapes, 23 percent insert CD-ROMs into the computer, and 12 percent surf the Net in search of favorite Web sites. The media selection habits don’t quite parallel the selection of a book from the shelf, either. Book browsing is sometimes an exploratory thing, with children finding stories and pictures they hadn’t seen before. Each book is a new world, and the object itself is unique. Parents see the process unfold every time they take their four-year-olds to the public library and have to narrow down the checkouts to five books. The screen, however, is always the same, a generic object. There is nothing magical about it except its function as gateway to something else. Kids usually know exactly what they want and where they want to go, and they get there with a few mouse clicks or channel changes.
Sesame Street
video that the child soaks up agreeably for 30 minutes. In truth, however, most of the children have acquired enough knowledge of the screen to form preferences of their own, and they act on them. Fully 77 percent of them, the study found, turn the TV on by themselves, and two-thirds request particular shows, 71 percent a preferred video or DVD. Sixty-two percent change channels with the remote control, 36 percent install their own music CDs or tapes, 23 percent insert CD-ROMs into the computer, and 12 percent surf the Net in search of favorite Web sites. The media selection habits don’t quite parallel the selection of a book from the shelf, either. Book browsing is sometimes an exploratory thing, with children finding stories and pictures they hadn’t seen before. Each book is a new world, and the object itself is unique. Parents see the process unfold every time they take their four-year-olds to the public library and have to narrow down the checkouts to five books. The screen, however, is always the same, a generic object. There is nothing magical about it except its function as gateway to something else. Kids usually know exactly what they want and where they want to go, and they get there with a few mouse clicks or channel changes.
In the Kaiser study, television tops the list, but other screen habits fill ample daily minutes as well. In fact, while 73 percent of infants to six-year-olds watch TV every day, an equal percentage watches videos and DVDs. Eighteen percent use a computer and 9 percent play video games. For the four- to six-year-old group alone, the digital side of screen media jumps. One-quarter of them (27 percent) use a computer in a “typical day,” and 64 percent know how to use a mouse.
For the
Zero-to-Six
report, surveyors collected data in spring 2003, and certainly the numbers have risen since then. The preschoolers in the study have almost finished elementary school by now, and they’ve refined their screen acumen at every grade level. Another study from Kaiser, released in March 2005, picked up the older age group and asked similar questions. Aiming to provide “reliable and objective data documenting the patterns and trends of media use among young people,”
Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds
collected information on recreational consumption—not school or work—from 2,032 third- to twelfth-graders through questionnaires and week-long diaries. The foremost conclusion: the total amount of leisure time kids spend with media “is the equivalent of a full-time job.” On average, the subjects in the study log six hours and 21 minutes a day. And because they spend many of those minutes multitasking, playing a video game while listening to the radio, for instance, eight- to 18-year-olds actually take in eight and one-half hours of media content. Here’s a breakdown of the percentage of kids who consume different media in an average day and for how long:
Zero-to-Six
report, surveyors collected data in spring 2003, and certainly the numbers have risen since then. The preschoolers in the study have almost finished elementary school by now, and they’ve refined their screen acumen at every grade level. Another study from Kaiser, released in March 2005, picked up the older age group and asked similar questions. Aiming to provide “reliable and objective data documenting the patterns and trends of media use among young people,”
Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds
collected information on recreational consumption—not school or work—from 2,032 third- to twelfth-graders through questionnaires and week-long diaries. The foremost conclusion: the total amount of leisure time kids spend with media “is the equivalent of a full-time job.” On average, the subjects in the study log six hours and 21 minutes a day. And because they spend many of those minutes multitasking, playing a video game while listening to the radio, for instance, eight- to 18-year-olds actually take in eight and one-half hours of media content. Here’s a breakdown of the percentage of kids who consume different media in an average day and for how long:
• watch television: 84 percent (3:04 hours)
• use a computer: 54 percent (48 minutes in online usage alone)
• read a magazine: 47 percent (14 minutes)
• read a book: 46 percent (23 minutes)
• play video games: 41 percent (32 minutes at console, 17 minutes with handheld)
• watch videos/DVDs: 39 percent (32 minutes)
• watch prerecorded TV: 21 percent (14 minutes)
• go to a movie: 13 percent
Add up the television times and they reach three hours and 18 minutes, and coupled with 49 minutes with a video game and 48 minutes online, they yield a daunting screen time of 295 minutes a day, 2,065 minutes per week. Book reading came in higher than the results from studies of late teens cited in the previous chapter, suggesting, perhaps, that the lower ages, eight- to 14-year-olds, pull the average up, or that many responses included homework reading with leisure reading. If reading included class assignments, the voluntary rate looks positively negligible alongside the screen options.
Once again, the home environment supports the pattern. Here’s a tally of media access in the homes and in the bedrooms of eight- to 18-year-olds.
• television: in the home (99 percent), children’s bedroom (68 percent)
• VCR/DVD player: home (97 percent), bedroom (54 percent)
• computer: home (86 percent), bedroom (31 percent)
• video game console: home (83 percent), bedroom (49 percent)
The 10-year-old’s bedroom has become, as Kaiser puts it, a “multimedia center.” Children leave the dinner table, which is often accompanied by network news, reruns of
Seinfeld,
and other 6 P.M. fare, and head off to their rooms to turn on their own shows or crank up iTunes while poring over some homework. Bored with that, they can check a
MySpace
forum, or play
Mortal Kombat,
or look at school pictures. The long division exercises await while the computer dings a new email coming through, the cell phone buzzes with a new message, and
Toonami
comes on in a half hour. They never need exit their bedroom doors, and in most households, parents won’t interrupt them. For 55 percent of the eight- to 10-year-olds, parents don’t lay down any rules for TV. For older teens, only 5 percent have parents who set limits on the video games they can play. The private access continues outside the home, too, with 55 percent of eight- to 18-year-olds taking a handheld video game player with them, and 65 percent carrying a portable music player.
Seinfeld,
and other 6 P.M. fare, and head off to their rooms to turn on their own shows or crank up iTunes while poring over some homework. Bored with that, they can check a
MySpace
forum, or play
Mortal Kombat,
or look at school pictures. The long division exercises await while the computer dings a new email coming through, the cell phone buzzes with a new message, and
Toonami
comes on in a half hour. They never need exit their bedroom doors, and in most households, parents won’t interrupt them. For 55 percent of the eight- to 10-year-olds, parents don’t lay down any rules for TV. For older teens, only 5 percent have parents who set limits on the video games they can play. The private access continues outside the home, too, with 55 percent of eight- to 18-year-olds taking a handheld video game player with them, and 65 percent carrying a portable music player.
Cell phones provide the mobility, and they encourage more initiative on the part of the kids. In a 2004 survey by NetDay, an initiative of Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit education group, more than half (58 percent) of the students in sixth through twelfth grade carried a cell phone, and 68 percent of those students took them to school. On campus, one-fifth of them had text and video/photo capabilities, no doubt producing thousands of funny and embarrassing snapshots that got passed around the cafeteria. A year later another NetDay survey came out, the findings published as
Our Voices, Our Future: Student and Teacher Views on Science, Technology, and Education
(sponsored by Bell South and Dell). Using the Internet to collect data from 185,000 students and 15,000 teachers, NetDay concluded that “Younger students are continuing to adopt more sophisticated technologies in the footsteps of their older siblings.” Researchers asked students if they use various tools in a typical week, and while computers and cell phones came up at the expected high rates, other gadgets scored big as well.
Our Voices, Our Future: Student and Teacher Views on Science, Technology, and Education
(sponsored by Bell South and Dell). Using the Internet to collect data from 185,000 students and 15,000 teachers, NetDay concluded that “Younger students are continuing to adopt more sophisticated technologies in the footsteps of their older siblings.” Researchers asked students if they use various tools in a typical week, and while computers and cell phones came up at the expected high rates, other gadgets scored big as well.
• digital camera: 25 percent of third- through sixth-graders, 43 percent of sixth- through twelfth-graders
• video camera: 16 percent of third- through twelfth-graders, 22 percent of sixth- through twelfth-graders
• DVD or CD burner: 31 percent and 59 percent
• video game player: 55 percent and 61 percent
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