Inventor Of The Wind-Up Radio Complains About 'Google Generation'

from the wait,-you-used-to-have-to-wind-up-radios? dept

I love luddites. They're just so damned consistent. I haven't completely worked out the details yet, but I'm positive there is a math equation out there that would accurately predict after what year a person thinks everything new sucks. Maybe it'd look something like: (year of current date) - (age of person) / (IQ) = (year after which everything sucks). Okay, that's clearly far from perfect (and I hear Douglas Adams may have done it better), but I would expect something along those lines could predict people like a DHS boss that doesn't use anything online ever. Or Andrew Keen and Sherry Turkle, who team up to claim that social media is making us less private, but more lonely, which seems to work at cross conclusions but the math formula is the math formula so screw social media.

Look how lonely all these people are together!
Image source: CC BY-SA 2.0

Those examples aside, I have to admit this is a new one for me. Apparently there once were radios that you had to wind up to use and Trevor Baylis, the guy that invented them, says Google is making younger generations brain dead.

"Children have got to be taught hands-on, and not to become mobile phone or computer dependent. They are dependent on Google searches. A lot of kids will become fairly brain-dead if they become so dependent on the internet, because they will not be able to do things in the old-fashioned way."

Let's see if I can break down the pure wrongness of this kind of thinking with a couple of fun little analogies.

1. Children have to be taught how to tend to their horses and not become dependent on automobiles or public transportation, otherwise they may not be able to ride horses any longer.
2. Children have to be taught how to use an abacus and not become dependent on calculators, otherwise they not be able to use abacuses in their adult daily lives.
3. Children have to be taught how to unhook a chastity belt, otherwise they may not be able to have sex once they are married and somehow chasisty belts come back into circulation because....yeah, because.

Get the point? Once the old way is no longer the way, we don't have to teach it any longer. I use Google searches every day, both for work (part numbers for technology parts) and for personal use (explicit search terms for naughty human parts). That's where that stuff exists, on the internet. In fact, learning how to properly use a search engine to get the most out of its results is probably one of the most worthwhile things you can teach a child today. There is nothing wrong with learning the old way of doing things, specifically if that old way builds a foundation for understanding the new way, but blaming Google for making children brain dead is just silly.

Filed Under: generation gap, luddite, thinking, trevor baylis

Back In My Day, We Didn't Have These Young Whippersnappers With Their Facebooks And Their Googles

from the where's-my-sliderule? dept

It looks like Nick Carr is actually a bit late to the game in blaming the internet for making people dumb these days. Someone else is coming out with an entire book called The Dumbest Generation, which claims that today's kids are totally screwed up thanks to the internet. This book has received enthusiastic reviews from folks, such as a Chicago Sun Times columnist, trotting out the modern version of the "those young whippersnappers" lines. The evidence? The fact that kids use the internet more to communicate with others, rather than to suck at the teat of the established "authoritative" media.

Romenesko, however, points us to a fantastic response from another reporter, Steve Rhodes, who points out how dumb it is to call this generation dumb thanks to the internet. In fact, he makes the point quite clear, by noting that the idea that the established media, such as the Chicago Sun Times, is somehow a bastion of intelligence is easily debunked:

And I'm not sure where a Sun-Times columnist gets off complaining that the Internet is dumbing down America while the paper is running a "Which Team's Fans Are Hotter?" contest.

As for all that communication going on? That helps make people smarter:

I'm a Facebook fan. It's very powerful, and I've hardly begun to exploit all of its capabilities.... I feel smarter after spending time on Facebook; I feel dumber after reading the local newspapers....

He then gets the other columnist to admit that he's never even seen Facebook, despite bashing it as being a terrible thing for kids to be using all the time.

I'm not trying to pick on Lazare - well, actually I am - but he's emblematic of a newspaper creature that is just beyond me. See, he didn't want to know what he was talking about. He just didn't want to know....

But newspapers went off the rails at just the moment the Internet flourished as an even better place to do journalism and communicate with people. It should have been a glorious melding of the minds for a better, more creative and fun and civically inspired tomorrow, but all newspaper people could see was the threat, not the opportunity.

So, again, just as with every generation, there will be a group of folks who complain that today is somehow worse, and "back in my day" things were somehow better. None of it's true. Things change, the world adapts -- and if you choose not to, things may seem worse, but it isn't in any real objective sense. But, in the meantime, for those folks who are scared of change and afraid of actually recognizing how the changing world is full of opportunities, it means there's an opportunity to sell silly books with provocative headlines. Moral outrage ahead! The kids are using Facebook rather than flipping baseball cards and throwing jacks!

Filed Under: dumbest generation, generation gap, internet, stupidity

Old School Journalists Still More Resistant To Conversational Journalism

from the we-tell-you-the-news,-we-don't-discuss-it dept

We recently discussed how the mainstream press was finally catching on to a concept that had been obvious for years: younger news readers don't look on the news as being reported to them. It's something that they're participants in. They want to share the news, discuss the news, analyze the news, break the news and make the news all at the same time. A new study shows that old school journalists still haven't fully realized this. The study found that there's a significant gap between the way editors and readers think a newspaper site should work. Editors are against the idea of anonymous comments being allowed (only 30% thought it was okay). Yet 55% of readers felt that allowing anonymous comments was a good idea. 58% of editors didn't think that journalists should join in the online conversation and give out opinions, but only 36% of readers agreed. You can certainly see where the old school journalists are coming from -- having grown up in an era where journalist objectivity was everything, but it's becoming increasingly clear that people don't believe journalists are objective -- and they're much more upset by journalists pretending to be objective than those that are willing to be open with their views and willing to discuss them. Once again, newspapers need to start realizing that the very nature of journalism has changed.

Filed Under: anonymity, conversations, generation gap, journalism

The Reality Facing Those Who Rely On The Copyright Crutch

from the it's-not-pretty dept

Whenever I write things like the post yesterday about the fact that too many people are relying on copyright as a crutch that allows them to avoid putting any effort into more innovative business models, people accuse me of being some sort of "idealist" who is not in touch with the real world. That always strikes me as a funny thing to say, because my discussions on copyright have nothing to do with idealism -- but are simply based on the reality of what's happening in copyright. If you want further evidence of that, just take a look at David Pogue's latest column where he discovers that college kids don't view this as a moral issue at all. They just don't see why anyone would think it's "wrong" to copy content. No education campaign, no legal campaign, no change in laws is going to change that. That is the reality anyone who relies on copyright is going to face in the near future, if they aren't facing it already. So, given that reality, why not look into business models that embrace it, rather than pretending we live in an idealistic world where everyone respects the artificial barriers of copyright? Is it really so idealistic to try to build business models based on reality?

Filed Under: copyright, generation gap, morality

Email Is For Old People?

from the get-with-the-program dept

A few years ago, we pointed to a report in Asia, where kids were saying that email was for old people, and they were more focused on things like text messaging. This may have just been foreshadowing a larger trend, highlight by an article in Slate about how, just as older generations have embraced emails, kids have moved on to many different forms of communication from instant messaging to text messaging to private messaging through social networks to broadcast messaging through Twitter and Facebook news feeds. And, while it worries the reporter a bit, he's come to accept it and realize that kids are simply figuring out the best, most efficient way to communicate different messages -- where email as a one-size-fits-all communication system is a bit clunky. That's not to say that email is going away any time soon -- but that it's not nearly as important a communication tool as many "older" people seem to assume it is.

Filed Under: email, generation gap, kids, private messaging, text messaging