Stop the Presses

"Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing" !!!

According to the New York Times, based on a $50 million study done by the MacArthur Foundation:

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

My favorite part of Catcher in the Rye is when he stops thinking everyone's a phony and learns to create a homepage.

The study describes two early Facebook messages, or “wall posts,” by teenagers who eventually started dating. First, the girl posted a message saying, “hey ... hm. wut to say? iono lol/well I left you a comment ... u sud feel SPECIAL haha.” (Translation: Hmm ... what to say? I don’t know. Laugh out loud. Well I left you a comment ... You should feel special.)

Okay, these old person questions have been on my mind for a long time, so I'm just going to ask them:

1) Do all teens use this "chatspeak" now, or just, like, the trashy ones (i.e. the majority of teens)? The teens in Nick and Norah wouldn't do that, right?

1a) We wouldn't have done this if we were teens in 2008, right?

2) When you get texts/wall comments from people our own age who do this, what are you supposed to think? Why do people our own age do that? Is it a class thing?

“New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting,” the study said. “Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults.”

So what this study found is that humanity doesn't automatically get worse every time there's a new technology.




I'm going to posit that as a general principle.

Now give me five Genius Grants, please.