The Ever-Accelerating Pace of Technology

Link to January 10 New York Times Ideas & Trends column by Brad Stone, "The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20's".

Excerpt: My daughter’s worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s impending tablet among them. She’ll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.

But these are also technology tools that children even 10 years older did not grow up with, and I’ve begun to think that my daughter’s generation will also be utterly unlike those that preceded it.

Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

The article mentions.....(for your further research).....

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project.

Larry Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hill.

Rosen's book, Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn.

Club Penguin

Moshi Monsters

Mizuko Ito, cultural anthropologist and associate researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Center.

Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.