Are young people really "digital natives"?

This article is interesting in that it provides an alternate narrative about today's young people. The prevailing narrative is that these are "digital natives" who are as (or more) comfortable in the virtual world than in the real.

There is little evidence to back such theories up, however. Rather than conducting surveys, these would-be visionaries base their arguments on impressive individual cases of young Internet virtuosos. As other, more serious researchers have since discovered, such exceptions say very little about the generation as a whole, and they are now avidly trying to correct the mistakes of the past.

Numerous studies have since revealed how young people actually use the Internet. The findings show that the image of the "net generation" is almost completely false -- as is the belief in the all-changing power of technology.

A study by the Hans Bredow Institute entitled "Growing Up With the Social Web" was particularly thorough in its approach. In addition to conducting a representative survey, the researchers conducted extensive individual interviews with 28 young people. Once again it became clear that young people primarily use the Internet to interact with friends. They go on social networks like Facebook and the popular German social networking site SchülerVZ, which is aimed at school students, to chat, mess around and show off -- just like they do in real life.

This article suggests that this may not be true in general, and it also points out the need for education in information literacy.

A major study conducted by the British Library came to the sobering conclusion that the "net generation" hardly knows what to look for, quickly scans over results, and has a hard time assessing relevance. "The information literacy of young people has not improved with the widening access to technology," the authors wrote.

A few schools have now realized that the time has come to act. One of them is Kaiserin Augusta School in Cologne, the high school that Jetlir, Tom, Pia, and Anna attend. "We want our pupils to learn how to use the Internet productively," says music teacher André Spang, "Not just for clicking around in."

The Internet as an information operating system

I found this item over at O'Reilly to be a very interesting read. O'Reilly begins by talking about what happens during an Internet search, then dives in a little more deeply into what a computer operating system did for application developers before abstracting back to Internet search. At that point, he builds the idea of an "information operating system":

Among many other functions, a traditional operating system coordinates access by applications to the underlying resources of the machine - things like the CPU, memory, disk storage, keyboard and screen. The operating system kernel schedules processes, allocates memory, manages interrupts from devices, handles exceptions, and generally makes it possible for multiple applications to share the same hardware.

As a result, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that "cloud computing" platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, or Microsoft Azure, which provide developers with access to storage and computation, are the heart of the emerging Internet Operating System.
Cloud infrastructure services are indeed important, but to focus on them is to make the same mistake as Lotus did when it bet on DOS remaining the operating system standard rather than the new GUI-based interfaces. After all, Graphical User Interfaces weren't part of the "real" operating system, but just another application-level construct. But even though for years, Windows was just a thin shell over DOS, Microsoft understood that moving developers to higher levels of abstraction was the key to making applications easier to use.

But what are these higher levels of abstraction? Are they just features that hide the details of virtual machines in the cloud, insulating the developer from managing scaling or hiding details of 1990s-era operating system instances in cloud virtual machines?

The underlying services accessed by applications today are not just device components and operating system features, but data subsystems: locations, social networks, indexes of web sites, speech recognition, image recognition, automated translation. It's easy to think that it's the sensors in your device - the touch screen, the microphone, the GPS, the magnetometer, the accelerometer - that are enabling their cool new functionality. But really, these sensors are just inputs to massive data subsystems living in the cloud.

Broadband to libraries

This item over at Ars Technica reports on the recent ALA report on Internet access.  Much of the article discusses the difficulties faced by rural libraries in getting access at adequate data rates as well as the funding going with it.  According to the article, the ALA report recommends raising the spending caps on the e-rate program.  It seems that this might be a difficult recommendation to follow given the problems with the e-rate program found by the GAO.

Internet statistics

If you like facts and figures (however useless), you might like the Google Internet Stats pages. On this page, Google has assembled data from a variety of sources about many aspects of the Internet. Perhaps because it is google.co.uk, many of the items are oriented toward the UK. For example:

• Nearly three in five (57%) of youth consumers logged on to YouTube to watch a music video in the last 12 months, compared to 56% who watched a music TV channel.
  
• 97% of UK female Internet users research products online and 92% of UK female Internet users buy products online.
  
• Over 30% of respondents in a recent eMarket study for Japan, UK, Spain and US, agreed that the mobile phone is an extension of their PCs/Laptops. 4% felt it was a computer, while 22% felt their mobile device was both a phone and a computer.
  

State of the Internet

Akamai is using data gathered by its global server network along with publicly available information to deliver a quarterly "State of the Internet" report. The first such report (January-March 2008) is available here.

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