The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - Softcover

Watkins, S. Craig

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807006165 ISBN 13: 9780807006160

Verlag: Beacon Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In The Young and the Digital, S. Craig Watkins skillfully draws from more than 500 surveys and 350 in-depth interviews with young people, parents, and educators to understand how a digital lifestyle is affecting the ways youth learn, play, bond, and communicate. Timely and deeply relevant, the book covers the influence of MySpace and Facebook, the growing appetite for “anytime, anywhere” media and “fast entertainment,” how online “digital gates” reinforce race and class divisions, and how technology is transforming America’s classrooms. Watkins also debunks popular myths surrounding cyberpredators, Internet addiction, and social isolation. The result is a fascinating portrait, both celebratory and wary, about the coming of age of the first fully wired generation. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

S. Craig Watkins writes about youth, media, technology, and society. He is Professor of radio-TV-film at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement and Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema.

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From chapter one, "Digital Migration: Young People’s Historic Move to the Online World"

The diffusion of the Internet in American homes was considerably more rapid than the computer. The Census Bureau’s Current Popu­lation Survey began probing Americans about home Internet use in 1997. That year 18 percent of households in America reported using the Internet. At the start of the millennium, in the year 2000, four in ten households, or 40 percent, were connected to the Internet. By the close of 2001 more than 50 percent of American homes were access­ing the Web. Sixty-two million households, or 55 percent, had Internet access by 2003. That was more than triple the proportion of Inter­net households in 1997. Nearly all households with a computer in 2003, 88 percent, had access to the Internet. Indeed, by the late 1990s the Internet was the primary motivation for purchasing a computer, as the two, in effect, became synonymous. Our lives, needless to say, have never been the same.

The generation of young people we met came of age in technology-rich households. In fact, they were the first generation of American teens to grow up with computers and the Internet literally at their fingertips. It was their presence in the household, more than any other factor, that correlated most consistently with the presence of computers in the home. In 2003, 76 percent of homes with school-age children, six to seventeen years old had a computer compared to 57 percent of homes without kids. Also, homes with school-age children were more likely than homes without them to be connected to the Internet, 67 and 57 percent, respectively.

Not surprisingly, many of the young people we talk to share stories of how the Internet has become a routine part of their everyday lives, shaping how they learn, live, play, and communicate with their peers. Many of them were introduced to computers at an early age, around nine years old. Many of their earliest memories involve computer games, the gateway experience to computers for most children. But not long after that, many of the young people we met were introduced to the Internet. As twenty-one-year-old Jonathan told me during an inter­view, “I can’t imagine living without computers because I’ve never really known a world without them.” Like many of his peers, Jonathan has also never known a world without an Internet that offers unprecedented access to information, entertainment content, and, most important, his close circle of friends.

The initial attraction to the online world for many young Internet users was e-mail. Twenty-year-old Allison recalls e-mailing her friends when she was ten. “At the time, “Allison said, “e-mail was the cool thing to do and it was new and a lot of fun too.” Allison laughed at herself now: “I would call my two closest friends and ask them to go online and respond to my e-mail.” Early in the Internet’s history, researchers often considered e-mail the “killer app” because of its heavy use. Young people’s new media behaviors turned a pivotal corner in 1997. That was the year AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was introduced and became an immediate hit with teenagers.
When we asked young people to describe their first true adven­tures online, they easily shared vivid memories of IM and the time they spent communicating with their friends on the service. As young teens they rushed home from school to use IM. For decades, when American youth arrived home from school, they turned on their television screens. But the enthusiastic embrace of IM reversed, almost overnight, a four-decade-old habit of daily life in America. IM was a way to extend the time teens spent with their friends. The rise of the instant messaging generation was a harbinger of things to come, namely, the Internet as an emphatically social and communal space. It would take a while before the larger public began to realize what was happening, but young people were making their way to the digital world.

For the first generation of online youth, IM was one of their first truly independent experiences with the Internet—that is, time spent on­line alone rather than under the direct supervision of an adult authority figure like parents and teachers. It was around this point in their lives that they began going online, not because someone thought it was a good educational or novel activity but rather because they wanted to. Research suggests that the early teens, ages thirteen to fourteen, rep­resent a digital tipping point. A 2005 Pew Internet & American Life Project report writes, “Starting junior high seems to be the moment when most teens who were not previously online get connected.” In 2005 about 60 percent of the sixth graders Pew surveyed used the Web compared to 82 percent of seventh graders. Among twelfth graders, 94 percent were using the Internet. Online services like AIM were tailor-made for teenagers transitioning toward their own peer networks and greater independence from adults. At a time in their life when the world as well as their own bodies and behaviors were undergoing profound changes, adolescents were offered a chance to assert a modicum of con­trol over their lives with IM. Later, with the rise of social-network sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, they asserted even more con­trol over their bodies by producing and performing elaborate online identities.

Twenty-year-old Victoria believes that IM was thrilling and liberat­ing at the same time. “IM was like the best of both worlds,” she recalled. “I could do my homework, chat with my friends, and surf the Internet at the same time without getting into any trouble.” IM was also a great way to get the dish on all of the latest drama in school. In Victoria’s words, it became “kind of addictive.” In fact, her parents, like most other adults, had no idea how much Victoria used IM. Young people’s migration to digital left an indelible mark on family life. Many parents found them­selves confronting new challenges regarding the impact of computers in their children’s lives. A New York Times article on the phenomenal role of IM in young people’s lives maintains that the application turned many teens into “the overconnecteds,” that is, a generation of youth that became obsessed with the state of almost constant connection to their friends and social networks. Before long, Victoria, like many other teens, found herself awake and online as late as one and two o’clock in the morning on school nights. After a number of bleary-eyed morn­ings and suspicion that Victoria was doing more than homework on her computer, her parents established stricter rules that limited her time online.

Despite all of this, the young people who grew up in technology-rich homes were no different than the generations of youth who pre­ceded them. Like most teens since post–World War II America, the so-called “digital natives” eagerly embraced opportunities to break away from their parents and establish their own cultural milieus, indepen­dence, and identities. It just so happened that for this and successive generations, digital technologies allowed them to branch out in some hyper-efficient and extraordinarily creative ways. The use of e-mail and IM in the 1990s established one fact about young people’s online behav­ior that remains true today: staying connected to peers is paramount. According to one group of researchers, “IM satisfies two major needs in adolescent identity formation—maintaining individual friendships and belonging to peer groups.” Young people were drawn to online plat­forms that facilitate opportunities to develop extremely...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Beacon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807006165
• ISBN 13: 9780807006160
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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