The Internet: Enhancing Digital Work Play
Lee Rainie, Pew Internet and American Life Project
9:00-9:45am
Lee Rainie, Pew Internet and American Life Project
9:00-9:45am
- Who’s blogging this?
- Show of hands
- Writings of a loud librarian
- Stephen’s Web
- Freedom to Connect conference
- Onscreen IRC while he was talking
- URLs to document he was talking about
- “He’s a lot older than I imagined”
- “Looks like a typical foundation suit”
- Younger Internet users
- Cover story of time this week: “Are Kids Too Wired for Their Own Good”
- Reality 1: Millennials are a distinct age cohort, accordin to many measures of generational behavior and attitude
- “Millennials Rising”
- Born 1982-2000
- 36% of current population
- 31% minority
- Special
- Sheltered
- Confident
- Team-oriented
- Acheiving
- Pressured
- “Hellicopter Parrents”
- Monday’s Wallstreet Journal
- Parrents accompanying their kids on their first job interview
- Conventional
- Tech-embracing
- Use but don’t necessarily understand
- They don’t need to know how it works
- The computer has always existed
- Reality 2: Millennials are immersed in a world of media and gadgets
- “Generation M” report from the Kaiser Family Foundation
- 50% broadband
- 97% TVs
- 87% video game console
- Home media ecology – 1975 vs. today
- Expect multiple devices in multiple places
- IM vs SMS is not the right question
- Love the device they’re with. They want the info on the device that they have in their hand.
- Reality 3: Their technology is mobile
- Precentage of 8 to 18 year olds that have…
- MP3 player 37%
- handheld device 13%
- laptop w/ Wifi 26%
- PDA 11%
- Cell phone 45%
- Contatnly interacting and forming smart mobs
- share info in ways that allow them to act quickly without top-down management
- Reality 4: Teh Internet plays a special role in their world
- Not more intense internet users
- case about certain things than their elders
- A lot of
- TV/movie info
- online games
- hunt for schools
- political news
- religious/spiritual info
- create Web pages
- look for info that’s hard to discuss
- 33% of online teens share their own content online
- 32% have created on web pages or blogs for others
- 22% kepe their own person web page (MySpace)
- 19% have their own blog
- 19% remix content they find online into new content
- Steve Bartman’s journey
- Caught the Cubs ball in the NL championship game causing the Cubs to loose
- All his info was posted online within the hour
- Three hours, story in 14 languages
- Fark photoshop contest examples
- Ranking and reputation systems to comment on the creations of others
- Ping their friends for information support
- Reality 5: They are multi-taskers
- Do 8.5 hours of work in 6.3 hours
- “Continuous Partial Attention”
- Not the same as muli-taking
- constantly scanning for the one best thing to pay attention to
- Reality 6: Millennials are often unaware of the consquences of their technology
- downloading music is so easy it’s unrealistic to say that people shouldn’t do it
- it’s ok to share some things for free as long as people are still buying it
- don’t care whether what they’re downloading is copyrighted or not
- digital footprints, lots of disclosure, long term privacy consequences
- soft surveilance
- Reality 7: Their (our) technology world will change readically in the next decade
- Moore’s law
- computing power x2 ever 9 mo
- spectrum power
- communications power
- storage power x2 every 12mo
- “The Long Tail”
- RFID
- more mobility
- explosion of content creativity
- search is getting better
- Reality 8: The way they approach learning and research tasks wil be shaped by their new techno-world
- More self-directred
- Less top-down instruction
- more tied to group outreach and knowledge
- more cross-diciplinary
- tagging / folksonomies
- more oriented towards people being their own nodes of creation
- Lots to study in all this
- Librarians have the privledge of shping this environment
