PALO ALTO, Calif.--Just yesterday I received a review copy of the book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
In fairness, I've just started reading the book and am looking forward to it. But what I've gleaned so far from the cited research is that kids today are so busy texting friends, downloading content, playing video games, and socializing online that they're losing touch with reading (even online), civic engagement and a solid work ethic.
That profile--especially the last item--doesn't apply to the Silicon Valley teens here Tuesday at SD Forum's second annual Teens in Tech confab.
Take Anshal Samar, the 14-year-old inventor of chemistry card game Elementeo, who at last year's conference said he wanted to earn his first million dollars by the time he graduated middle school. Now on the verge of selling his fantasy-education game to the public, he could meet that goal out of 8th grade. (He already has 5,000 orders, but he hopes to raise as much as $1 million to distribute 50,000 sets by next fall.) Samar used the Web and photo-editing software to create his game.
Anshul Samar, the 14-year-old inventor of chemistry card game Elementeo
(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News.com)Or Sejal Hathi, a 16-year-old at Notre Dame High School in San Jose, Calif., who founded the nonprofit Girls Helping Girls to inspire young women around the world to affect social change in their communities. The Internet is central to Hathi's push to get the word out about her organization.
Or Jonathan Wilde, a 15-year-old programmer who recently won Google's Highly Open Participation Contest for work on open-source document management software called Plone. He said during the conference that he's developing his own open-source software that he hopes to launch soon.
Sure, all of these teens loosely fit the mold of a wired generation. They spend multiple hours online every day on sites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and YouTube. And they're no stranger to texting friends or creating content online. But they're behavior is more indicative of an uber-ambitious class of kids (likely raised by tech-savvy parents) that's bending technology to their will rather than staying beholden to it.
The teens were invited here Tuesday to Hewlett-Packard's campus as part of a day-long event focused on how the young generation is using technology to innovate, start new companies, or organize around causes. Marketers and investors were naturally in toe to talk about efforts to reach younger audiences online and scout for fresh ideas.
The panelists were arguably among the cream of the crop of their generation, so you could hardly consider them dumb. Their ideas and drive could turn them into the next Catherine Cook or Mark Zuckerburg. But that tech prowess and ambition could have as much to do with their genes as their geographic location.
"Being in Silicon Valley makes it impossible not to be an entrepreneur. I didn't want to wait 10 years," Samar said during an opening presentation of his company. Dressed in a power-blue shirt and blazer, you could hardly tell Samar from the executives in the crowd, except that he barely cleared the podium.
Most of the teens had behaviors unlike what you read in most research reports.
For example, during a panel at the conference (which I moderated), all of the kids said that they had abandoned MySpace in favor of Facebook. Among the reasons: Facebook lacked MySpace's gaudiness, offered superior privacy controls, and could better connect an upwardly mobile teen to professional contacts. Hathi, for example, uses Facebook "cause" groups to market her nonprofit.
Still, given the choice of another, simpler social network, most of the teens said that they would have no problem switching if their friends were there.
Most of the panelists said that they don't use instant chat, despite popularity of tools like AOL Instant Messenger among teens. Instead, most of them said that e-mail was the best way to blast out a message to friends; and then catch up with responses when they're not busy later. None of the teens seemingly had the time for the micro-blogging service Twitter.
In response to a question about whether e-mail's utility will stay relevant in the age of MySpace and Facebook, they all said that it would.
"E-mail will survive because it's far more professional than other forms of digital communication," said Hathi.
Another apparent anomaly among these teens was that they were all concerned with their privacy online. The group said that they try to avoid leaving any digital tracks and use high privacy settings in social networks.
Wilde, for example, attributed this behavior to his parents. Wilde said they made an impression on him while young to avoid sending e-mail or posting anything online that he wouldn't be comfortable with the world reading.
As for books, most of the teen panelists lamented that they didn't read as much as they would like, apart from school assignments. Yet they do get much of their news online. Hathi said she regularly reads The Economist and The New York Times online. Deanna Alexander, a 17-year-old from Mountain View, Calif., said she read about the recent earthquake in China online. Wilde, who writes his own blog on robotics, said he likes to keep up with industry sites like Engadget.
So what's missing in all this technology? Oddly enough, most of the teens said that personal connections are getting lost in the time spent with software built to connect people. When asked what they would do without MySpace and Facebook, for example, most of the panelists said with some regret that they would probably spend more face time with their friends and family.
"We might spend more time with people on a more personal level," said Alexander, who builds art-focused Web sites in her free time.
Wilde agreed. During his work on the Google contest, he said he met some of the event organizers. But ultimately he felt a lack of a real connection to them through email or a social network.
"You don't really establish a relationship until you actually talk to that person or shake their hand," he said.
Sounds smart to me.
Just as girls (presumably) write in diaries more than boys, teen girls also tend to blog more than their male counterparts, a new study finds. But boys post more video, it says.
(Credit:
Pew Internet & American Life Project)
About 35 percent of all online teen girls blog, compared with only 20 percent of boys, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's "Teens and Social Media."
"Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation," the study finds.
About 54 percent of the girls online post photos compared with 40 percent for boys, but boys are nearly twice as likely as girls to have posted video online (19 percent vs. 10 percent).
Overall, 28 percent of online teens have their own blog, up from 19 percent in 2004, while 27 percent of the teens maintain their own Web page.
But how safe are teens being in protecting their personal information and images? More safe than adults, apparently. About 66 percent of teens with a social-network profile restrict access in some way, and 77 percent of teens who upload photos restrict access some of the time, while only 58 percent of adults who post photos restrict access.
For video, a smaller percentage (54 percent) of teens restrict access, about the same as adults.
For teens who rely on a variety of communication methods, 70 percent say they talk daily on the cell phone, 60 percent send text messages every day, 54 percent instant message, 46 percent talk to friends on a landline, 35 percent see friends in person and 22 percent send e-mail daily.
Not surprisingly, cell phones are the primary form of communication for teens, with 63 percent having one.
A recent Read/WriteWeb post pointed me to a new Pew/Internet Survey that suggests that "teens" (defined in this study as 12- to 17-year-olds) may view contact by people they don't know as a "cost of doing business" in the online social network environment.
The Pew survey found that about a third of online teens had been contacted online by someone with no connection to them or their friends. Overall, studying all online teens, 7 percent of them had experienced stranger contact that made them feel scared or uncomfortable.
It is important to note that when you look at group of teens who had been contacted by a stranger, nearly of a quarter of them say they felt scared or uncomfortable. Girls were more likely to feel this way, 27 percent compared with 15 percent of boys.
What do these results mean for parents? Social networks are becoming the norm for kids and teens, and "networking" means meeting new people. The question is always how to help kids learn to safely negotiate the public contact that comes into our home through online exposure.
... Read moreOnce, again, Boston has been subjected to a bomb scare concerning an odd circuit board.
Star Simpson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student, was arrested at gunpoint Friday morning at Logan Airport when authorities suspected she had a bomb strapped to her chest.
Simpson was wearing a black sweatshirt that had a circuit board with wires, green LED lights and a 9-volt battery attached to it. When an airport employee asked about her shirt, Simpson walked away without answering so the employee called the authorities, the Boston Globe has reported.
The back of Simpson's sweatshirt said "socket to me...Course VI," a reference to MIT's electrical engineering and computer science program.Simpson is a second-year student in the electrical engineering and computer science department of MIT's School of Engineering, according to the MIT Web site.
It is unclear whether Simpson was wearing the circuit board sweatshirt to intentionally provoke an incident.
Simpson was not immediately available for comment.
Last January, Boston authorities shut down several streets after people noticed circuit boards with lights throughout various parts of the city. They turned out to be part of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerrilla marketing campaign.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are getting younger and younger. Take Arjun Mehta, a 6th grader who is 12. He started the company, called PlaySpan, last year in his garage, according to VentureBeat.
The company Web site, which features a photo of backpack-sporting, handheld game-playing Mehta, explains that it is the "game industry's first publisher-sponsored in-game commerce network." That means it enables video game publishers to sell products within the games.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has raised $6.5 million from Easton capital, Menlo Ventures, South Korea-based STIC International and Hong Kong-based Novel TMT Ventures.
But just so you don't think Mehta has exchanged the classroom for the boardroom, his father, Karl Mehta, is the chief executive officer.
This isn't the first youngster entrepreneur that VentureBeat has profiled. In May, the site wrote about 13-year-old Anshul Samar, who started Elementeo, which has created a fantasy role-playing game to teach kids chemistry.
Recent Walt Disney acquisition Club Penguin isn't the only Antarctic waterfowl in the news on the youth social-networking front this week.
Venerable publishing house Penguin Group has just made a tech-savvy move through a partnership with teen-oriented community site Piczo, in which young Piczo users are encouraged to design covers for a selection of classic books and submit them to a competition pool.
The contest, called "Piczo My Penguin," runs for the next four weeks. It offers up six book titles, each one chosen by a trendy music act such as Razorlight, Beck or Goldspot: Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, Steppenwolf, The Great Gatsby, Le Grand Meaulnes and Animal Farm. Piczo members are then invited to submit their own cover designs, and a winner for each one will be chosen by the members of the participating bands.
Piczo has crafted an image for itself as a safer, less cluttered alternative to the ubiquitous MySpace.com, so it's no surprise that it would want to boost its nicest-kids-in-town image with a contest that encourages young people to turn their heads away from their instant-messaging clients and toward classic literature.
Considering the popularity of emo bands like My Chemical Romance and AFI, with their expertly groomed pseudogothic images, Piczo should have no trouble finding plenty of teenagers willing to give Dracula a hot new makeover. But just a tip, kids: I don't think he wore eyeliner.
Teens who are most active online and influential with peers are also the kids most concerned about the environment, according to a study published Monday by research firm JupiterResearch. So-called green teens are slightly more engaged in a number of activities than the average 13-year-old to 17-year-old, according to the report. (Of the teens surveyed, 38 percent said they were worried about the environment, and 15 percent said they were highly concerned about it.)
Green teens are more apt to listen to music, post a personal page online, respond to an online poll or converse in a chat room, according to the report. Green teens are also more influential with peers; 45 percent of green teens said that people come to them for opinions versus 31 percent of average teens. David Card, senior analyst at JupiterResearch and author of the study, said green teens are also more likely to respond to online marketing by buying something in a retail store. "Only if you have a legitimate green thing to say in your marketing, because I don't think these kids can be fooled," he said.
Card added that teens' concern for the environment could be a fad. "We're going to find that grown-ups are more concerned than teens about the environment, so there's a chance it's a fad, but I can't prove it yet. Nevertheless, it's currently trendy."
Old-school book publishers are still trying to figure out how best to reach audiences on the Web and build online communities for their authors. That was the takeaway of a talk this week at Mashup 2007, a conference held in San Francisco that focused on teens and tech.
Diane Naughton, vice president of marketing at HarperCollins Children's Books, said that the challenge has shifted from the publishing industry holding the Internet at arm's length to worries about how to prove value from online marketing efforts.
One way HarperCollins plans to tackle this challenge is to team up with MySpace, according to Naughton. In the fall, the social network plans to build and launch a new "create and share" writing tool in partnership with HarperCollins, Naughton said in an interview at Mashup. Teens and college kids on the site can write prose and then share it with friends on MySpace. People can then vote on the best writing, she said.
"Offline and online have very much (merged) the last couple of years in terms of marketing," she said.
SAN FRANCISCO--Last month, Danah Boyd, a well-known researcher of teen culture online, argued that class divisions in the United States could be split between MySpace.com and Facebook.
In essence, Boyd wrote, MySpace is home to a large population of "burnouts," punks or alternative-scene teenagers whose parents likely didn't go beyond a high school education. Facebook, in contrast, is a bustling hub for jocks, school nerds and prom queens planning for their university years. You get the division.
But what happens to the teens who don't have constant access to technology, unlike those spending hours a day on MySpace or Facebook regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds?
Henry Jenkins, director of the media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said here Tuesday that the divisions are extending further to a so-called participation gap, which exists between teens who have 24/7 access to digital technologies and kids who can only get online from school or the library.
"We're moving from a (digital divide that's about) access to technology to one that's about access to social skills and cultural knowledge that emerges from access to digital technologies," Jenkins said in an interview at Mashup 2007, a two-day confab on teens and technology. (He posited this idea in a recent white paper published by the Macarthur Foundation.)
For example, Jenkins talked about how a group of kids who learned to read and write from Harry Potter books has gotten an education about corporate politics by defending their fan sites. Warner Bros. had sought to take down Harry Potter fan sites for infringing on its intellectual property, but the outcry from kids operating the sites was so great that the media giant backed down. (Apparently the kids learned from Harry what it meant to question and fight authority.)
Jenkins also cited a study from USC that showed that teens with less access to the Internet, when logged on, just grabbed information from a site like Wikipedia without thinking about it critically. In contrast, teens with more access possess a greater understanding of how a site like Wikipedia works through user-generated contributions, Jenkins said.
The Internet "is a birthplace for civic engagement," Jenkins said. "Kids who don't have access are scrambling to keep up or are left out altogether."
Parents of teens already dread getting their monthly cell phone bill, and it could get even worse. The reason comes from an unlikely source: soda pop.
In the coming weeks, Coca-Cola will bring "Sprite Yard" to the U.S. market, a social-networking site that targets cell-phone-toting teens (is that redundant?), with such features as personal profiles, photo sharing and online chat, according to the New York Times.
Jonathan Sackett, the head digital officer at Arnold Worldwide, makes this observation in the report: "Coke could see trouble if teenagers run up high data charges on their phones using Sprite Yard."
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