This morning, Nora interviewed Don Tapscott. He’s the author of several books, most recently Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is changing your world. Last week, we asked for your questions for Don, and Nora included one from Stuart Croall.
An edited version of this interview will air on Episode 55 of Spark, but you can listen to the full interview below, or download the MP3.
Play audio:
According to Don, the net generation is growing up with a better ability to process multiple streams of information at the same time–and I agree with him. It’s evident just from looking around my university campus that most students are multitasking.
CBC News reports that the Ontario provincial government wants to impose further restrictions on the number of teenage passengers a teenage driver can have in his or her vehicle:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2008/11/18/ont-drivers.html
According to Brian Patterson, “it’s not just about alcohol but also avoiding distractions for inexperienced drivers.”
Yet if what we observations are telling us is true, aren’t teenage drivers technically the best-equipped drivers on the road when it comes to handling distractions?
I realize that the government has our safety in mind and is taking a teenager’s inexperience as a _driver_ into account. However, I wish that our politicians would occasionally stop to ponder the basic assumptions behind their logic–those assumptions may not be so sound after all.
Ben,
I would care to disagree with your post. You are taking this idea of multi-tasking from a small sample of observation. But that is only the small part. Teens are learning how to drive, they are starting understand who to control a hunk of metal that weighs over 2000lbs and travels over 100 km an hour. It really takes years to fully understand a vehicle and to develop habits which allow you to be aware of your vehicle.
Also with you multi-tasking arguement, driving is multi-tasking. You have to be aware of you speed and control it, cars around you, pedestrians, posted signage, and so on. When you are trying to learn to handle multiple actions at once any more distractions cause it to be that much more difficult.
Lastly, we have to take into account the passagers themselves. When you get a bunch of teens together they can do stupid things. I know I did. And if you have a whole bunch of them in the car one may think it could be a fun idea to do something stupid, like moon some pedestrians, and that may be a distraction enough for the young driver to run a red light. So while teens have just a learners permit I think it should focus on that and until they have proven themselves competent restricting passengers may actually save some lives.
Dear Ontario government, or the powers that be,
I am appalled yet again at how dumb Ontario can be. Let’s just throw fines and demerrit points(losing them that is) at a problem that runs through our entire society (at least I notice it here because I live here in ultra conservative Ontario). Severe lack of logic. Both on regular average peoples’ parts but more so on governments’ parts. If we expect kids to behave we have to teach them, starting day one at home and continuing until they come back home with their own kids. Yes this means a lifetime from good old fashioned knowlege and MANNERS. Wow, quite the concept I know but I do have 2 teenagers and I am tired, but that is the job that I signed up for when I decided to have them. I am far from perfect but it is a part of what is lacking (according to me).The other things that bother me about these new rules is that it does little to teach anyone, they just punish. Kids will still bug parents for rides now because they can’t have 2 or more friends in their cars if they’re driving. Thanks ,I just love being a taxi. The bus system here in London Ontario is BAD and that makes bussing a non-existant choice quite often, cabs in London are SUPER EXPENSIVE and it is a stupidly set up city so walking is annoying too. Yes I know I’m quite negative but non-the-less realistic. Zero tolernce for drinking makes sense but parking all these ex-tra cars on the roads and lots is a problem, as is gas cosumption without “car-pooling” for young drivers. let’s also think about the insurance industry as we get our new rates after one ticket because we all know insurance is “cheap” to begin with anyway. I’m just saying that if we want our kids to grow up they need responsibility not more pampering from us (as a society). We’ll need them to change our diapers as we get older, how can they if they can’t even take care of themselves without making a few mistakes along the way without losing their car or so much money with insurance fees that they can’t move out or go to school(post secondary that is.) We are creating such a negative environment for young people as well as police due to the fear of being caught doing something wrong and having to pay for it for years ( money of course being that issue).The sreet racing issue is also beyond belief, yes of course that is a BAD thing to do, but if you’re speeding on the highway and not “drag racing” someone beside you, how is this street racing? Speeding is not necessary but a fine would suffice. I guess complete and utter control is something that is wanted by the police and government.It reminds one of Nazi Germany doesn’t it?
Hehehe … didn’t mean to spark a debate, but seems I did.
@Lee,
I understand your points and agree with them. As an avid watcher of Canada’s Worst Driver, I’m all too aware of the bad habits that drivers (new and old) have acquired during their years behind the wheel, and the resulting messes this can cause.
You point out that teenagers, regardless of multi-tasking ability, have less experience handling a vehicle (which is true) and are thus more prone to making mistakes while being distracted (also true).
Then you argue that teenagers tend to do stupid things which make distractions worse, e.g., mooning a passerby. But that’s the thing. Are teenage drivers are distracted by the number of people in the car, or by what they are doing? Is it the input //itself// that distracts, or the nature of the input (which, for the example you used in your post, would be mooning a passerby)?
I more interested in asking questions than posing my own solutions, partly because, as you pointed out, my observations are anecdotal rather than based on statistics. I just want the government to re-evaluate its assumptions before it tries to act on them. The way I read the article, I got this impression that those proposing and supporting this legislation have held these views for quite some time now, and that this is just an attempt to make it look like the government is being effective at reducing accidents by inexperienced drivers. My question is, is this really the most effective way to go about, especially with the role that technology plays in shaping the information-processing abilitites of our youth? It may very well be the best way to handle it, but I want the government to think about it twice before signing it into law.
wow, great interview! I saw him ages ago at a CIPS conference and he’s a terrific speaker and quite thought provoking.
as I listened so I wouldn’t forget key points.
I had to jot notes (using Tomboy
so, some thoughts:
He talks about not reading books being kind of a scary concept. Books are information. the Internet (when used properly) is information. The format has changed but it’s still information. I haven’t looked anything up in an encyclopedia for ages because of wikipedia (which isn’t as wildly inaccurate as some people think).
Don mentions their new forms of collaboration, etc. One thing I’ve noticed is they (NetGenners) will get into discussions via an IM tool while working, and get really irate and flame each other, and they’re sitting in the same room.
He mentions that when they enter the workforce, “children are the authority on something really important.” That sounded a bit strong. When they’re the age to enter the workforce, they’re not children. They are inexperienced, but not children.
And yes, the concept of privacy is different to them. I think this leaves them open to things like phishing. It’s almost like the precursor to the “wholly dependent on machines” generation. They don’t care how it works as long as it works, so they don’t think about things like phishing or privacy.
Hand in hand with that goes a different concept of courtesy. They don’t think twice about answering their phone no matter where they are. Granted, older people do that,too. I think it’s a different perspective, though. With the netgen, it’s being totally unaware of any other code of conduct, whereas with older people it still seems to be a bit of “look how important I am on my cell phone” (or maybe that’s just my interpretation of it
One final thought, about the lack of concentration thing. I had thought that too, but as I was listening I realized it might be something else. I think it’s the TV addicts that have lost the ability to concentrate (a lot of which are from the baby boom and GenX group). The abundance of reality TV shows appear to be testament to that, as not even the creators of the show have to concentrate for any length of time to make the show happen. It’s encouraging to see that fad disappearing, and to see people turning to other sources of information. As long as we can keep the Net neutrality there, everything will be great!
anyway, thanks for posting that. It was very interesting.
GTFO NAO
I’m GenX, and I don’t think we’re necessarily that different from the net generation; there is a continuum going on here, not a dichotomy.
Also, this is not the first generation to be born into something that their parents don’t truly understand: those growing up in the ’60s grew up with a different worldview that ushered in new ways of seeing society. Those who grew up just after the printing press also likely displayed a new worldview as well.
I agree with Don.
As I was listening to this podcast on my Eee PC, I also used the link to go to the web page for the book, and read the first chapter, read an article about how NB has banned Facebook, read about the Endeavour space walk, and checked my emails on GMail. I have witnessed and been a part of every thing Don has said. Cubicles are a detriment to work because they interfere with the necessary networking that leads to idea diffusion. I haven’t read an actual book in over two years. If I want to know something, there is always Google and Wikipedia. I watch YouTube, not television. I read cbc.ca/news, not newspapers. The only magazines I read are science magazines which have articles I already know will interest me. I listen to my MP3 player, not the radio or walkman. Most of my life is stored on SD modules or USB drives. I am the kind of person the Gen-Xers, and especially the boomers, decry, that Don is talking about.
The only problem is that I’m not a teenager. I’m a 43 year old married woman who also happens to be an embedded systems software developer, and the network administrator for a small ISP.
With every technology, there are early adopters. Before there was WoW and Second Life, there was MUD, and D&D email lists. Before there were video games, there was ADVENTURE and Larn. Before there was Facebook and MySpace, there were BBSes, Fidonet, and news groups. Before there was Windows, there was UNIX, QNX, and DR’s Multi-DOS.
The heart of every “multi-tasking” operating system is something called “rapid task switching”. A single processor can only do one thing at a time, and so it rapidly switches between all of its tasks and so appears to slower moving humans to be “multi-tasking”. This is how Windows and all of the UNIX derivatives work. Boomers and many Gen-Xers work like DOS. They can only do one thing at a time, and they do it using a kludgy command line interface. The Net-Geners are “Rapid task switchers”. They are the Mac OSXes with their fancy customizable GUIs.
But some of us were Xerox’s STARs running on big, slow, VAXes running UNIX. Our processors are not as fast as these youngsters and our memory management units are just no where near as sophisticated. And none of us oldies even come with a graphical processing units. Heck, a lot of us don’t even have anything like a real floating-point co-processor.
The largest super computers in the world today are called Beowulf clusters. These systems consist of numerous individual computers connected to each other by very high speed networks. In order to work, Beowulf clusters need complex algorithms to allow all the different computers which make them up to co-operate with each other effectively. When your teenager is playing WoW, they are learning those complex algorithms. Instead of being a waste of time, they are being better prepared for the future, a very different future than what previous generations dealt with.
Today, information transfer is both global and near instantaneous. Collaboration occurs over the net between people who are in far-flung parts of the globe and who will never meet each other face to face. How would a boomer feel working with someone who they have never seen or heard, and will never see or hear? If one is in Australia and one in Canada, how do they “do coffee to discuss the project”? Second Life, WoW, Facebook, and all of the other social network sites and on-line multi-user games are training for doing business in such a world.
Are there pitfalls and problems with this near global change in lifestyle? Certainly. Us old 8/16-biters have already experienced it. But as I look at my niece and nephew, I see that they have already learned from our mistakes. They are doing better as teenagers than we ever did. I’m not worried about the next generation. They are not net-addicted. They are not lazy. They do not lack concentration. They are going to be just fine.
To the boomers and the geb-Xers who complain about the Net_Geners, I say “Go watch television to take your mind off of it”. To the Gen-Xers, “You’re welcome”.
Why is this any different from what any and all generations have experienced?
Compared to, say, the intro of the typewriter into offices and effects that had on things like the gendered division of labour and such, this is nothing.
If you liked this interview, check out the interview that Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte did with Mr. Tapscott http://twit.tv/natn79
I happen to agree with Mr. Tapscott that we have seen some major changes in the way that young people adopt newer technology, as well as changes in how they learn and organize themselves.
This isn’t the same thing as the historical adoption of communications or transportation technology typewriters or automobiles, although if you lump all of that together with the industrial revolution and the creation of the corporation to organize labour, then we’re talking the right scale.
I feel optimistic about what the next generation would be capable of doing making use of new technologies, learning methods and organizational structures. I’m equally pessimistic about how the current generations in power will fight to stop this potential to our collective peril.
The current economic failure isn’t just about over-selling housing or under-regulating deliberate attempts to hide bad debt. It’s about a major economic transformation that has been under-way for a while now, and which will see the fall of legacy manufacturing (bailouts or not, with an auto bailout simply being visible bad debt) as well as old ways of organizing labour/etc.
Note: I’m in my 40′s and not part of the Net generation.
Hello You did a great job with this blog. I loved terview: Don Tapscott on the Net Generation | Spark | CBC Radio