UTS Digital Generation – Danny Mavromatis

I have just finished watching the two ABC commentaries “Growing up in the digital age” and “Concern over teen Internet habits“. Previously I had read “Want to be my friend? What you need to know about social technologies“, so I thought maybe I should just have a look at how much social networking was occurring between adolescents in my area.

I first went to www.ratemyteacher.com and searched for the high school that my son is attending (year 7). There were only about a dozen entries (one per teacher) in all. Each teacher only had one or two comments and, in general, they were quite short and mostly positive. I then tried the high school at which I did my first practicum and it was a similar story. In summary, there did not seem to be much use of the Internet in this area.

I then logged in to www.facebook.com and searched for my son’s high school under groups. There were a couple of entries with about 50 members each, mostly ex-students or “the class of year xxxx”. Again, there didn’t appear to be much social networking occurring amongst current students.

From my own experience, my son’s main use of the Internet is for online research for assignments, and for playing games such as Runescape with his school friends. Mainly the latter! He has a small circle of boys in his class that he phones, or they phone, so that they can coordinate being online at the same time. They are also starting to explore using IM to avoid making the phone calls.

“Teens and Technology” is a talk given by the author relating to what he terms the Millennials, the generation born between 1982 and 2000. I found the information presented interesting, but as the father of a teenage boy born in 1995, there was very little that came as a huge surprise to me.

The speech was delivered in the US and the statistics he quotes are based on American research. Nevertheless most of what he says very much has relevance to Australian society as well.

I did note a couple of contradictions in his arguments though. At one point he states:

“Millennials are on track to become the best-educated and best-behaved adults in the nation’s history. They live with rules and believe in them.”

At another point he is discussing their indifference to copyright issues:

“55% say they do not care much wither[sic] what they download is copyrighted or not”

He also mentions that the Millennials are sheltered (eg. metal detectors in schools). Why would they need such measures if their generation was so-well behaved? I think the author has made a few too many such sweeping generalisations without presenting evidence. It is true that we are living in a fairly conservative period of the western world. However, personally I don’t believe the current generation is significantly different to any other (except maybe the hippie culture of the 60’s) in terms of rebel behaviour by a minority.