Millennial era
The millennials would seem to agree. When a group of Maryland
schoolchildren were asked last week if they understood technology more
than their parents did, they answered in unison with a resounding "Yes!"
"I can fix the computer but my mum can't," said 8-year-old Jamie, who said his favourite technology is videoconferencing "because it's fun to talk to somebody hundreds of states away".
His friend Zeik added: "My parents can't even play my video games."
But what about the quality of thinking that results from these hyperactive brain synapses? After studying how teenage girls interact with technology for the last year, researcher Wendy March said her subjects were so adept at typing on the computer that they didn't have to think anymore. As a result, she said, they were often on automatic pilot.
"A few girls talked about moving away from computers to force themselves to think about their college essays in a different way so they would be concentrated on thinking instead of the process," said March who has been doing her research as an interaction designer at Intel's People and Practices research unit. "They've realised that technological fluency was not all it was about — and they have to slow themselves down."
That sentiment was illustrated on a wall at the computer lab of San Francisco's Hamlin school for girls, where a sign advises against this tendency, as least in jest: "Caution: This machine has no brain, use your own."
Teenage girls have been especially receptive to the influences of technology, researchers say, because they tend to be highly communicative and use mobile phones constantly. For privacy, they prefer text messaging or IM.
Sixth-grade girls at Hamlin write a biweekly online journal for and about the school during their e-journalism course. The girls, who are all about 11 or 12 years old, said their library cards get little or no use because much of their time is spent on MySpace or AOL Instant Messenger.
"It is a different way of growing up, if you always had it," MySpace's Brinkman said. "It's like the telephone for us. You can't imagine functioning without it. The fusion of mobile, IM and Web and it keeps getting more so. Each successive generation is going to be more like this."
If technology has generally fostered independence, it can also have the opposite effect in some forms. Phones companies have planned to insert location-detecting sensors into mobile phones, for instance, and software that can monitor text messages and Web browsing has already been developed.
That conjures a worst-case scenario for many teenagers, the possibility of parents finding out exactly where they are and what they're doing practically at all times — showing that some social dynamics never change from generation to generation.
As March noted: "Technology doesn't change what we do. It allows us to do it in slightly different ways."
