Their inevitably short attention spans are the reason Seymour Papert of MIT's Media Lab coined the term "grasshopper mind" five years ago, for the inclination to leap quickly from one topic to another. A mathematician and founder of artificial intelligence, Papert addressed the effects of this behaviour as far back as 1995 in congressional testimony about technology and learning.
"The question at stake is no longer whether technology can change education or even whether this is desirable," Papert wrote in his testimony. "The presence of technology in society is a major factor in changing the entire learning environment."
A recent study from Pew Internet and American Life found that more than half of all teens online — 12 million kids — create original material for the Web, whether it's through a blog, home page or school Web site, with original artwork, photos or video. A large portion of that active group also will creatively "remix" other material from the Web to create something unique.
"Some of the best designed pages on MySpace are by 14- or 15-year-olds," said Kyle Brinkman, co-founder of the MySpace social network. Judging by the network's popularity, it must be doing something right: MySpace surpassed Google in traffic a few months before the site's parent company was sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580m (£340m) in July.
The facility with technology among millennials is not genetic; they are comfortable with computers simply because they are products of their environment and upbringing in an increasingly digital world. Yet their immersion in the Information Age is not always positive.
For example, it is nearly impossible to shield even young children from the gruesome details of news reports and this is a generation that has grown up with the Columbine shootings, Amber Alerts, 9/11, and at least one Persian Gulf war. Exposure to disturbing events online may also be unwittingly exacerbated by parents who restrict their children to in-house activities out of pervasive fears about abductions and molestations.
For their Gen X predecessors, malls and cafes were among the few sanctuaries away from home. But many proprietors have restricted the amount of time teenagers can spend at these businesses, leaving cyberspace as the hangout of choice where youths can begin to exercise their independence.
"Where do they go outside of the parental eye? Lacking a public sphere, they create one in the digital," said Danah Boyd, a doctoral student at the University of California's School of Information who also works at Yahoo Research in Berkeley.
Boyd, who has been studying how teenagers use technology for the last year, has identified their primary activities as chatting over instant messengers and mobile phones, playing games, blogging with tools like LiveJournal and socialising on networks like MySpace. "MySpace — your friends are on it, your parents hate it. That just makes it more desirable. If it's not cool they won't use it. It's that simple," she said.
America Online is the most popular instant-messaging tool for the age group, but Boyd said sometimes kids will use Yahoo or Microsoft's MSN when they want a break from their regular friends or to talk with mom and dad. "They use largely a combination of mobile phones and IM chat. Ninety percent of their conversation has no content — it's a recapturing of the day and a way of understanding the world they're living in," Boyd said.
But amid this seemingly idle chatter lies significant information. Today's youths turn to each other for news and facts in much the way that...
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