PBS Frontline has a new episode called Growing Up Online, about how the internet and connectedness is changing our experience in a radical way. Unfortunately I can’t embed the video here for you to watch, but you can watch the full program online, and it’s well worth the time.
If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.
This documentary really hit home for me. The show opens with teens bringing their computers to a friend’s house to have video gaming LAN parties on a Friday night. That was me only few years ago. My best friends in high school were part of one of the top ranked clans in the world for the popular tactical first person shooter game Counter-Strike. One time crammed a few dozen kids and their computers into every nook and cranny of my parents’ house for a whole weekend of gaming and caffeine. We even created a website where we blogged about our mischievous teen exploits, which we thought was secure, until one day I walked into the computer room at lunch and everyone had it up on their screens. We learned our lessons at the very beginning of the adoption curve, before the stakes got too high.
I spend a lot of time working with Gen X folks, I’m almost always the youngest person in any team. At 25, I often feel closer in culture to the teenagers in this documentary than my colleagues who are 30 plus. It’s become clear to me that current education and work structures are not well prepared for us Gen Y folks and our quirks. I’m hoping that will lead us to become a generation of entrepreneurs, of game changers.
Internet society researcher extraordinaire Danah Boyd does an excellent job in the documentary at cutting through the smoke about teens online. Her research papers are a great way to dig deeper into that subject, if you want more information.
