The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20’s | Hacker News Reader

The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20’s

nytimes.com

I think this is a lazy journalistic essay that desperately tries to sell feelings of fear and nostalgia with no real substance. I have not seen any reason to believe that people who 'grow up with' a technology treat it any other way than people who were already adults at the time when the technology was introduced. Not in any fundamental way - they sometimes make more extensive use of the new technology.

For any of the earth shattering novelties that appeared in the last few decades, you will find that after they established themselves, people of all ages, regardless of whether they were children or adult when the technology was introduced, use it in very similar ways. When I have to divide the quality of use people I know make of the Internet (which became pervasive and popular around the time when I transitioned from adolescence to adulthood), for example, it seems to me that the divisions are more along professional lines, or interest, than age. I know people in their 50s, 60s and even 80s who make frequent and engaged use of most internet technologies, and young people, born into a world in which the net is everywhere, who make only casual and uninspired use of it.

I think I know the reason for it, too. Technological innovation is usually not something created by children. Even the youngest inventors and developers are at least old enough to be called young adults. The needs they see, their values and their incentives are all linked directly to the world they live in - a world in which people several decades older than them, as well as some younger, live.

"And after my 4-year-old niece received the very hot Zhou-Zhou pet hamster for Christmas, I pointed out that the toy was essentially a robot, with some basic obstacle avoidance skills. She replied matter-of-factly: “It’s not a robot. It’s a pet.”"

That's so sad it isn't funny.

If someone would give my kid a robotic hamster it would go in to the trash faster than you could blink.

My kid has a real-life dog and I can assure you that it is the better choice.

I'm sure it's less convenient, you can't shut it down, you need to take care of it but that's exactly why it is better.

Life doesn't come with an on/off switch and children need to interact with real live beings in order to learn valuable lessons that no battery operated simulacrum/surrogate can provide.

Um yeah I don't disagree, but there is also this thing kids do, I think it's called "make-believe" that some would say is an essential skill that is all too quickly lost.

You know, it might go the other way. What happens when your kids get on/off switches? (The answer to this has, of course, been explored in decades of fiction.)

I theorized about this a while ago and reached the conclusion that if children would have 'pause' buttons most of them would not make it past their 10th birthday ;)

In the trash? Come on, you could at least take its skin off and, along with your kid, turn it into a papier-mache artistic creation which actually moves.

Or give him a screwdriver and let him take it apart :)

(hopefully that would then not be repeated on real-life creatures).

There's a flip side, though. Are your children using Facebook in new and weird ways? Well, maybe... but you're on Facebook too, aren't you? (Well, I personally am not but you know what I mean.) Looking up slang terms has never been easier, and you don't even have to corner a teenager and try to pry it out of them. Music crosses age gaps now because there's not much you can "scare" a current 30-year-old with; after German acid industrial death mega-rock there's not much freakout left. (The closest thing to musical rebellion I've seen in the past ten years is a cousin of mine who took up Elvis. Now that's rebellion.)

The gap may be growing, but at least for the moment the bridging is actually growing faster. The future is fragmented subcultures anyhow and we're all going to be pretty used to dealing with people on those terms anyhow (said "jerf" to subculture fragment "hackers interested in entrepreneurship" sub "people who clicked through comments on the title called "The Children of Cyberspace", a subsubculture fragment with an expected life span of about ten hours).

"16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television. "

Um, yeah, those aren't exactly "tasks" as I would define them... What scares me a little is that every single kid I have met in the last two years was unable to concentrate on learning anything (like how to solve a puzzle - concentrating on TV is not really an achievement). Could be normal, but I am not sure - I still hope it is just a phase...

Yes, sure you are performing these tasks but your not really concentrating properly on any of them. It's like when my housemate plays WoW and watches a show at the same time, I question the point, your not really playing the game properly and your not really getting the whole show.

I do this at work when I find myself with code opened, but also HN, facebook, MSN, and maybe an ecommerce site, it mostly is during the bug fixing/ finishing stage where it's hard to make much quick progress on things.

When I was little I called dogs bears.

She'll call it a Kindle when she grows up, don't worry.

I think we can expect to see something interesting in the next couple decades, in that the stereotype of the 'Hacker' will completely disappear. When ALL kids are exposed to technology at the very beginning, I think computer programming will become increasingly mainstream. I think the end result will be a lot more 'hackers' who are actually a lot better. I also think this will result in a boom of Open Source, as 'scratching his/her own itch' will jump from version control/web browsing to a much larger variety of things.

> When ALL kids are exposed to technology at the very beginning, I think computer programming will become increasingly mainstream.

"I’ve been working on an education project, which is another place where, again, there’s tremendous potential for Google to do stuff. What we're working on, having passed the gauntlet of Google’s trademark lawyers, is called App Inventor for Android, and the idea is to make it easy for beginning computer science students, non-computer science students, maybe eventually high school students, to build mobile apps. Right now we are thinking about where this project wants to go when it grows up. Even where it wants to go come 2010. There’s a range, from focusing it more on education, to focusing it more broadly – i.e. making it so anybody can easily make Android apps."

-Professor Hal Abelson of MIT

http://research.google.com/university/relations/visiting-fac...

I worry a little that the inability to focus will negate a lot of that fluency with technology. Every major technical innovation took a long period of focused, dedicated work to come to fruition. Woz worked on the Apple I for a year before it was ready, Larry and Sergey worked on Google for 3 years before it became a company. That seems like an eternity when you're used to getting feedback within 10 seconds of typing something in.

We saw a lot of this in the Web 2.0 boom of 2005-2007. Lots and lots of people started companies because they were fluent with the technology - but most of those companies were simply "me too" copies of the latest fad, because that's all you can do in the 3-month timescales that were being promoted for new startups. Real innovation happens over much longer timescales, as you take what you've learned, discard the bad parts, build on the good parts, and finally come out with something the world has never seen before.

Heck, I've got a compiler sitting in one of my background windows that I've been working on, on and off, for 3 years, with little progress. Because it's in the background. Instead, I'm posting on Hacker News, where I can expect a response in an hour or two. And if you're responding - don't you have a big hairy audacious project that you could be working on but aren't?

I think that's far too optimistic. Using technology is not the same as making / hacking it. Far too many people don't care.

True. I see people everyday on the train, using their mobile devices to fritter away time. They're consumers of technology, not producers.

However, the ongoing democratization of technology(1) will make it easier to make. Or at least for them to share something. Or at least for non-technical people to do the stuff that they want. My brother-in-law had a PC for years. He got a MacBook and suddenly he was making DVDs, slideshows, editing video. Was it just the technology or was it the fact that Apple makes it easy to do things most people would like to do be able to do with their computers (the iLife software)?

Why do you think YouTube became so successful? They took a really hard problem (how to allow people to upload and share a video and made it easy).

"Over the span of one week two million people downloaded [Tap Tap Revenge] to their iPhone or iPod Touch devices.

Something has changed. It has changed for good. Has it changed for the better? I’m not yet sure – but I am sure there’s no going back."

http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67

(1) This essay by one of the coders behind Tap Tap Revenge that was posted yesterday on HN (but kinda got buried) goes more into the democratization of technology, wherein the people don't care about big software, they want Pop Software, they want to do cool stuff with their mobile devices.

I think what you're overlooking is the LOADS of kids that go off and become Mechanical Engineers, Civil Engineers, and mathematicians. Lots of people care about developing solutions to hard problems, but they just aren't exposed to technology in the same way as most of us were. I think that this is changing.

No amount of technocracy will change how people solve problems.

The are basically two ways:

1. Apply predefined solutions to solve a problem (i.e. Use gadgets and applications someone else programmed).

2. Develop a custom solution to a problem (i.e. Put together your own program that solves your problem).

Arguably the next generation will learn to apply more complex predefined solutions to problems, but they won't magically start to migrate to the second mindset.

It's weird to think that for kids who are in fourth grade today, odds are their first girlfriend will be someone they meet using their cellphone.

Also, this article quotes Mizuko Ito. If you haven't already read her book Person, Portable, Pedestrian, it's really good. It's all about the anthropology of cell phone use in Japan. It's probably starting to get a little bit dated, post iPhone, but there is still some really cool stuff in there.

It's worth taking this entire article with a pinch of salt. I'm sure the anecdotal observations are correct but the analysis of their implications is far from certain.

I agree. It seems you could have written this article during Jane Austen's time. "Children growing up are going to be SOOOO much different from the previous generation because the post is delivered as often as SIX times a day and OMG will this kind of instant communication breed a new race of hive mind humans?????????//?/?"

(Perhaps not the most believable pastiche of 18th-century written English ever.)

    Another bubbling intra-generational gap, as any modern parent
    knows, is that younger children tend to be ever more artful
    multitaskers. Studies performed by Dr. Rosen at Cal State show that
    16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free
    time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and
    checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television.

    People in their early 20s can handle only six, Dr. Rosen found, and
    those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

I think that the physical differences between the brains of those three age groups is pretty significant. Isn't it possible that a fifteen-year-old would lose her multitasking prowess by her mid-twenties, whether or not she was born with an iPhone in her hands?

I was thinking recently that the largest single obstacle to growth for social networking sites is probably the generation gap. I don't think many new-timers will be comfortable using a social site their parents use - and therein lies an opportunity.

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