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Gen Y Growing Up Online
Published on 03/02/08
by Will Pate
PBS Frontline has a new episode called Growing Up Online, about how the internet and connectedness is changing our experience in a radical way. Unfortunately I can’t embed the video here for you to watch, but you can watch the full program online, and it’s well worth the time.
If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.
This documentary really hit home for me. The show opens with teens bringing their computers to a friend’s house to have video gaming LAN parties on a Friday night. That was me only few years ago. My best friends in high school were part of one of the top ranked clans in the world for the popular tactical first person shooter game Counter-Strike. One time crammed a few dozen kids and their computers into every nook and cranny of my parents’ house for a whole weekend of gaming and caffeine. We even created a website where we blogged about our mischievous teen exploits, which we thought was secure, until one day I walked into the computer room at lunch and everyone had it up on their screens. We learned our lessons at the very beginning of the adoption curve, before the stakes got too high.
I spend a lot of time working with Gen X folks, I’m almost always the youngest person in any team. At 25, I often feel closer in culture to the teenagers in this documentary than my colleagues who are 30 plus. It’s become clear to me that current education and work structures are not well prepared for us Gen Y folks and our quirks. I’m hoping that will lead us to become a generation of entrepreneurs, of game changers.
Internet society researcher extraordinaire Danah Boyd does an excellent job in the documentary at cutting through the smoke about teens online. Her research papers are a great way to dig deeper into that subject, if you want more information.
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Comments on Gen Y Growing Up Online
5 Responses
Andy Howard
04/02/08
Interesting… watching a doco like that is like being on the outside looking in. It’s made me think about my own relationships and how I maintain them. Being 25 as well, I completely relate to feeling closer to the teens than I do to most colleagues and business contacts.
Yeah I’m with you on the game changing! Work isn’t somewhere you go, it’s something you do… and it doesn’t matter where you do it. ROWE is a great workplace model, and lends itself well to remote working
jakedahn
18/02/08
Huh pretty interesting. Kind of strange to see a documentary setup about the internet and kids my age.
Rommel
22/02/08
http://camoosta.com/content/frontline039s-growing-online
Alexandra V.
08/04/08
Great article. As the gen-X sister of some gen-Y kids, this rang true.
See also the Boston Globe article about all the tech keeping people from being bored and hence creative.
Do you have thoughts on this?
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/09/the_joy_of_boredom/?page=1
Cheers!
Derek K. Miller
08/04/08
What’s talked about in the documentary is the mainstreaming of something that’s been around for some time. Before LAN parties, my friends and I had mass floppy-pirating sessions in our parents’ basements — in 1984. We also learned tough teen lessons about the public nature of online communications pre-web, on bulletin board systems, also in the early to mid-’80s.
But those hazards and lessons didn’t reach a large proportion of the adolescent population until much more recently. I grew up online, but 20 years ago there weren’t many of us doing that. Now everyone is, and just as with television, comic books, rock ‘n’ roll, and other “crazy kids today” societal shifts, people need to learn their own lessons when they’re young — and most of them turn out just fine.
With luck, those of us who’ve had the experience ourselves can help our own kids (both of mine have blogs already, and they’re 8 and 10) figure out what’s going on, but they remain the ones who have to do the figuring, and the learning, in the end.
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