Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
THE “digital divide”. What exactly is it? The answer, it seems, is not the gap between rich and poor, but the difference in the way young people and adults view the Internet.
At a recent seminar, the grown-ups were wheeled out. One government minister talked about how kids use computers to engage in social networking and to create comprehensive personal music collections, (they are) also a valuable tool for their studies. She also, like most adults, fretted more about the risks than the opportunities.
Far more enlightening, though, was a young speaker, the impressive James Downey, aged 12.
James epitomises how kids use computers. A year ago, he mostly used his for homework.
This year, though, he is heavily into iTunes, Bebo and YouTube. And he used the web to research getting a dog. “Fed up that my parents wouldn’t get their act together, I searched the Internet for the right breed at the right price.”
For him, the computer has become the best place to find information of any sort.
Is James typical? I asked Josh, aged 13, whether he used Bebo or MySpace. “Oh, you mean social networking,” he said. How about YouTube, I asked? “That’s not social networking, that’s user-generated content,” he snapped back.
Clearly he had no trouble understanding the phenomenon that has swept the world in the past two years.
He could also explain why his generation’s use of technology – such as iPods, games players and mobile phones with built-in cameras and video – is fundamentally different from those over 30 or 40.
To get a girl’s view, I also talked to Anna, who has just turned 16 and goes to an all-girls school. Both seemed to mirror James’s attitude to technology: it’s a tool to help them do what they want to do.
And sometimes that goes into places where adults would struggle at the first step. A friend has two children aged 11 and 16. He explains: “The latest thing is downloading high-pitched tones that only children can hear on to their mobiles, Bluetoothing them around, and then starting up a cacophony in lessons – they can hear it and double up in agony, but their teacher can’t.”
It’s a metaphor for the adult/child gap: the children can recognise what the grown-ups can’t.
The teenagers reject adult complaints that they spend hours a day staring at screens or plugged into their iPods. Josh says he only listens to music for three-quarters of an hour on the school bus, and takes in a podcast in bed.
Games are, admittedly, a problem. Josh’s parents have had to ban the PlayStation in the evenings in favour of homework, but have accepted that he runs computer games around the edge of their 24in screen while he does his homework in the middle.
Josh has about 30 ‘friends’ on Bebo, 25 of whom are active. Just under half are girls, who he reckons use the site more than the boys.
Anna and her friends use MySpace as enthusiastically. Social sites such as this might even be the beginning of the end of the boy/girl divide in computer-use.
To them, computers and the Internet are just tools to help them communicate with their mates. They are also helping them to solve problems, collaborate with each other and create their own knowledge.
Did old-time education do all of this? Adults should stop worrying and join in.
That could plug the child/adult divide – at least until the next generation.
By Richard Sarson
