"I can't remember the last time I picked up a newspaper," university student Thomas said.
Iconoculture's Steuer said the evolving ways of consuming news is tied directly to interactivity. "That's why blogs and MySpace are such a huge deal, because they're not weaned on just mass media but also interactive media," he said.
MySpace generation
In just two years since MySpace was created as an indie music
community, it has grown into a cultural phenomenon where teenagers
grapple with such formative issues as body image, peer pressure, drugs
and relationships. Social networks like MySpace allow them to play with
their identities or try out new ones.
"Last year it was all about AIM, and this year it's all about MySpace and chatting with boys," said Sarah, a sixth-grader. "But you have to be careful who you're talking to."
Educators, too, are seeing the role of such social networks grow in children's lives — and they don't always appreciate their influence. Many English teachers openly deride the Internet in general as a detriment to developing minds. The Web and its billions of pages have no universal standards for writing or communication, they say, and children can easily develop bad habits at a time when they don't know the definition of a homonym or when a sentence needs a capital, comma or semicolon.
"It's a bastardisation of the language," said one teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area who asked to remain anonymous for the sake of parents and students at her school. "And it normalises for them that they can ignore conventions."
Others argue that such criticism is futile because technology is here to stay. Instead, these scholars worry that schools should be taking more initiative with the Internet's potential to help students learn.
Andrew Davis, who teaches social studies to seventh and eighth graders, said he's working informally to integrate technology into many classroom environments. In one case, Davis wants to incorporate "study wikis" into social studies to let students collaborate on a subject more easily.
A wiki could be created as a glossary to study Islam, for example, and the children could be given 60 terms to define and discuss. Because wikis maintain histories of posts and edits, teachers can verify which students worked on particular parts of projects and grade them accordingly.
One technology that's becoming fairly popular in PC-equipped classrooms is an email system called First Class. With it, teachers can send an email with a study question to a group of children and when one student replies, it starts an email thread that is consolidated into a file accessible to all, rather than a series of messages in an in-box. This teaches children to read information in threads.
"Independently they're learning new ways of expressing themselves that will cause the definition of writing to change. There is a new form of literacy developing that is informal," Davis said. "You have this immense sea of possibilities with the Internet and good teachers don't have the time to navigate that sea. I fear that, mishandled, the Internet will become like the TV 20 years later."
Some cultural observers don't think that would be the worst thing that could happen. Steven Johnson, author of "Everything Bad Is Good for You," posits in his book that video games, reality TV and other presumed villains of popular culture are actually making us smarter. One reason is that digital interactivity forces constant decision-making.
"For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path towards lowest common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the opposite is happening: The culture is getting more intellectually...
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