Emos and Digital Natives - lack of information methods

On last Thursdays lecture (I know I did not post for a while… but I did a sea cruise ;-)) Katarina Gaffman talked about social trends. Her most recent study was about 15 to 20 years old people. In order to understand them and the trends in their group she spends as much time as possible with them. She talked about the so called Digital Natives and Emos. The Emos are “emotional rockers” to be recognized by their way to dress.

Just recently the 4 German boys out of a small town in eastern Germany got elected to the Best Newcomers at MTV Video Music Awards exclusivly by an American audience. That is an incredible success and certainly connected with the trend of Emo fashion with in the 15 to 20 years old. In Germany Tokio Hotel empowered the culture and made boys use more make up than any girl since about four years. Somehow this reminds me of the good old Beatles causing half of the world’s male population to get a stupid haircut. And it seems like Tokio Hotels worldwide success has just begun. It is really impressing how musicians and other celebrities can have such an intense influence on trends in the society.

But a way bigger influence has technology on the human society and especially on the group of 15 to 20 years old, as they adapt easily to new technologies. As mentioned above they are called digital natives. Katarina is not the only one who concentrated on digital natives. In fact the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland have a research project about digital natives and their own blog.

Two of the project members even wrote a book called “Born Digital”, talking about this specific group of people which was born in a society where information is digital and always available. “Our economy, our politics, our culture and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed.” – This book introduces the Digital Natives and talks about future impacts. I want to ask you to read this short excerpt of the book.

There is one thing you know for sure: These kids are different. They study, work, write, and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways that you did growing up. They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. They probably don’t even know what a library card looks like, much less have one; and if they do, they’ve probably never used it. They get their music online—often for free, illegally—rather than buying it in record stores. They’re more likely to send an instant message (IM) than to pick up the telephone to arrange a date later in the afternoon. They adopt and pal around with virtual Neopets online instead of pound puppies. And they’re connected to one another by a common culture. Major aspects of their lives—social interactions, friendships, civic activities—are mediated by digital technologies. And they’ve never known any other way of life.

What was really interesting to me is that the authors and Katarina agree that the Digital Natives do nether know neither the traditional way of information accessing nor the modern ones. Katarina said that it was shocking to her how less experience they had in reading and using information websites or get along on enterprise websites to do for instance a web application. The Digital Natives know how to use messengers and blogs, but they do not know how to gather information.

I have mentioned several times that information will be available anywhere and at anytime in future. But all this offer of information will have to be filtered by the users. And this can only be done by experience. But the studies of the Digital Natives project and Katarina’s impression made clear that the new generation is not yet gathering this information. In my opinion the duty of future education should be to show this group how to gather information in a modern way, how to evaluate it on trustfulness and how to filter out the relevant things. And all of this needs to be done in an exciting and interesting way, as Katarina said they seemed to be always bored, the “Bored Generation”.

A future core competence will be to know the methods how to use the omnipresent accessible information in a proper way.

Schinne