Comments on: Survey Finds Little Awareness of Technology in Young People

By: links for 2007-07-26 | Not the kinda cool you're looking for

links for 2007-07-26 | Not the kinda cool you're looking for — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 06:30:36 +0000

[...] Survey Finds Little Awareness of Technology in Young People on PSFK [...]

By: seni thomas

seni thomas — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:39:20 +0000

Don’t you think you will have a generation that is blind? I agree with your ideas in principal, but much more needs to be done to educate kids on the technology. We learn how combustion engines work and terminal velocity, etc, etc. Learning about technology is equally if not more important. One CANNOT innovate unless you understand the foundation. In addition, we need to inspire the youth. It’s great that they use the internet, but Myspace and AIM are such superficial uses. As graduates in the sciences and engineering continue to decline something needs to ignite the spark that inspires further pursuit in this field.

By: John Voelcker

John Voelcker — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:24:58 +0000

Agree with Margherita. These attitudes reflect the broad penetration of tech into everyday life and its use by everyday people.

The parallel here is cars. A generation or two ago, many adults were “car people”–they knew models, specs, how they worked, how to service them, etc.

Now, cars are so reliable that most people buy them just like they buy toasters: purely on the functionality. They don’t care how they work, what’s under the hood–they just want them to work.

Same principle.

By: Margherita

Margherita — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:48:38 +0000

I think it’s invisible to them because it’s already part of them at the point they don’t even notice it. They metabolize techno realted items immediately while mature users need time to get used. Isn’t it fantastic? Regarding the fact they don’t know how media tools work, the majority of people don’t know how phones, tv etc work. We are surrounded by things we don’t how they work.

By: Seni Thomas

Seni Thomas — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:50:47 +0000

Absolutely agree with this problem. I gave a short seminar to a group of inner city school teachers on “Evolving Students from Media Users to Media Thinkers” while I was attending NYU. All these kids use the media tools, but no idea how they work. One teacher did an experiment where he simply removed the iexplorer shortcut from desktop of the computers in the comp lab and all the kids asked, “Where did the internet go?”. This is a serious issue and more light needs to be shed on it. Early adopters were NEVER really kids, but 25-35 year olds that work in affected industries. How many teenagers jumped on the Twitter bandwagon? It comes down to an education issue in my opinion. Thoughts?