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Talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-
Late last month Alfred Hermida summarized the views of Dianne Lynch, the dean of journalism at Ithaca College, regarding the future of the news audience which she presented to the Knight Science Fellowship Symposium. Hermida reports:
This is the new audience for news. They grew up in a world where the Internet has always existed and this has changed their social and cultural attitudes.
“The generation coming into adulthood has had a very different experience than we have had”, [Lynch] argued. “Our audiences are changing and we are not as aware of this as much as we should be.”
Lynch pointed out they have grown up with no private spaces, no private lives and no expectation of privacy.
Partly this is because they have grown up in a world without solitude. The mobile phone, IM, Twitter means they never need be alone, at least virtually.
Let me just stop everyone right there for a moment. I see a lot of ‘this audience,’ ‘the generation,’ ‘they,’ ‘they,’ ‘they,’ ‘their attitude,’ ‘ their experience.’
Who exactly are we talking about?
As a university student charged with taking a critical look at the media industries that surround us, one of the notions most frequently pressed is that we’re not to refer to the actions of ‘the media’ as though it were one body. Big sweeping classifications of that vein do no good for anyone because certainly there are usually exceptions to most any rule.
Is it not reasonable to expect the same to be true in reverse? I understand the intentions, but question the outcome of looking at ‘this generation’ with such narrow parameters. They are right to identify changes in their audience, but I worry that grouping people with these broad stroke labels creates detrimental and inaccurate perceptions. In particular that the experience of ‘this generation’ all occurred in the past few years. I shall use my own experiences as a counter point illustration.
I first recall the Internet showing up late in elementary school, and more heavily around sixth and seventh grade. It made sense to me from the onset. I’d played Nintendo and the idea of interacting with on-screen objects to ‘take you somewhere else’ was one I was comfortable with. In that regard, perhaps my peers and I were more prepared to handle and understand the web. The ‘book and pages’ analogies weren’t necessary. I would consider it more accurate though to say we ‘grew up on technology’ than ‘grew up online.’
Remember that this was a different Internet back then. The first computer I accessed the net with was running DOS. Afterbirth was everywhere. Things were very user un-friendly and no one was sure what to do with it yet. It was slow and had very few of the practical utilities it has now. I spent small periods of time online, but as doing so tied up the house phone it didn’t allow for the marathon sessions possible today. ‘Alone time’ is definitely something I and many of my friends had plenty of. We were on the same ride as everyone else, but often were simply better equipped and motivated to invest in it.
By high school separate phone lines became more commonly used and I found myself online considerably more. Remember though that the web wasn’t nearly the pervasive force it’s come to be. Of my friends who did have computer and net access, the vast majority of them had no more presence online than an ICQ or AIM screen name. My having taught myself enough HTML to put together simple web pages put me leaps ahead of most my peers in web-guru-ity. We used things like mIRC. Yahoo and AOL chat rooms. Maybe a message board or two.
Lynch pointed out they have grown up with no private spaces, no private lives and no expectation of privacy.
I find this decidedly untrue for myself. We were online, yes, but much more invisibly so. Only the nerdiest of poetry writers and gamers had heard of some thing called Myspace. The depths of something like Facebook were still long off. You didn’t put photos of yourself online — what would you have done with them? At most you had, again, your ICQ or AIM profile in which you revealed maybe your age, sex, and penchant for trashy novels, but the immersion went little further than that. It’s amazing how fast we lose perspective along the path of change. Recall that The Sims was all the buzz at this time, and the idea of people existing, communicating and doing normal day-to-day type activities through an on screen avatar was stirring up all sorts of conversation about the future of technology! mind rot! hooplah! Only the most forward looking basement EverQuest jockeys really had first hand understanding of where this all was going and what it may mean for websites, and only if their Mountain Dew trip was intense enough to trigger some major extrapolation.
I got my first cell-phone my junior year and text messaging was then a too-expensive novelty. Napster hit the scene and many downloaded songs for the first time — one at a time. Blog-as-diary was starting to be the explosive phenomenon it would grow into. It wasn’t until I graduated in 2003 that anywhere near half my friends had Myspace accounts.
Lynch’s explanations, focusing on what’s available right now, are most accurate in describing the current batch of 10-15 year olds, many of whom will have grown up with these technologies as a constant reality. Yet many of them still live in households without Internet access. They’re not all rolling out of bed and checking their Facebook and Twitter accounts on personal laptops. Many of them still watch their parents read the newspaper over coffee each morning — planning on the day when they’ll do the same.
My point is that generalizations and assumptions about our proposed lifelong Internet experiences do a disservice to everyone. It’s foolish to use a snapshot of now to explain desires and attitudes shaped over a much longer time frame. My peers and I may be more comfortable online than many older folks but to assume we weren’t there for the ride in any capacity, or that we don’t understand and hold important the value of classic print journalism is to miss much of the picture.
Switching gears from nitpicking and nostalgia I turn to the latter portion of Hermida’s coverage of Lynch’s presentation, in which I find much more to agree with.
…what really matters for journalists is understanding [this generation’s] attitude to who is an expert. Lynch explained how the research showed children create online personas and develop reputation on the web, regardless of their age.
This is important for journalists, who tend to assume they know more than their readers. However, said Lynch, the young do not share this perception.
Instead, she argued, online no one knows you are 12 and this generation is part of a world where knowledge equals practice, regardless of age.
This was one of the quotes she highlighted from her research: “I might be 13 but I know more than anyone else in the community about fan fiction.”
Provocative talk for a room, largely full of print journalists who are uneasy and a little frightened by the changes taking place in the media.
Here they’re hitting the nail right on its big fat head. The times I most frequently lied about my age online were always when doing so made my contributions or statements hold more weight. As a fourteen year old film and music critic I felt my opinions were well-considered and valid, and so did others so long as they were in the dark about my age.
If there’s one thing we all need to be learning from the online experience it’s that information either is or isn’t valuable in and of itself, and who it comes from is changing and matters less. The Internet says more voices are better, and is the purest example of democracy we have. Speaking of which — Net Neutrality — but we’ll save that for another time.
Hermida and Lynch are on the right track in their emphasis on accepting changes in the audience, and attempting to illuminate what those may be. They’re accurate in their perception that much of the youth hold their opinions and abilities as being worthy of competing on whatever level they warrant, regardless of the creators age. I do hope, however, that they can approach these changes without shrinking their view of the audience to oversimplified stereotypes.
Alfred Hermida’s overview of Lynch’s presentation: Link
This is the new audience for news. They grew up in a world where the Internet has always existed and this has changed their social and cultural attitudes.
“The generation coming into adulthood has had a very different experience than we have had”, [Lynch] argued. “Our audiences are changing and we are not as aware of this as much as we should be.”
Lynch pointed out they have grown up with no private spaces, no private lives and no expectation of privacy.
Partly this is because they have grown up in a world without solitude. The mobile phone, IM, Twitter means they never need be alone, at least virtually.
Let me just stop everyone right there for a moment. I see a lot of ‘this audience,’ ‘the generation,’ ‘they,’ ‘they,’ ‘they,’ ‘their attitude,’ ‘ their experience.’
Who exactly are we talking about?
As a university student charged with taking a critical look at the media industries that surround us, one of the notions most frequently pressed is that we’re not to refer to the actions of ‘the media’ as though it were one body. Big sweeping classifications of that vein do no good for anyone because certainly there are usually exceptions to most any rule.
Is it not reasonable to expect the same to be true in reverse? I understand the intentions, but question the outcome of looking at ‘this generation’ with such narrow parameters. They are right to identify changes in their audience, but I worry that grouping people with these broad stroke labels creates detrimental and inaccurate perceptions. In particular that the experience of ‘this generation’ all occurred in the past few years. I shall use my own experiences as a counter point illustration.
I first recall the Internet showing up late in elementary school, and more heavily around sixth and seventh grade. It made sense to me from the onset. I’d played Nintendo and the idea of interacting with on-screen objects to ‘take you somewhere else’ was one I was comfortable with. In that regard, perhaps my peers and I were more prepared to handle and understand the web. The ‘book and pages’ analogies weren’t necessary. I would consider it more accurate though to say we ‘grew up on technology’ than ‘grew up online.’
Remember that this was a different Internet back then. The first computer I accessed the net with was running DOS. Afterbirth was everywhere. Things were very user un-friendly and no one was sure what to do with it yet. It was slow and had very few of the practical utilities it has now. I spent small periods of time online, but as doing so tied up the house phone it didn’t allow for the marathon sessions possible today. ‘Alone time’ is definitely something I and many of my friends had plenty of. We were on the same ride as everyone else, but often were simply better equipped and motivated to invest in it.
By high school separate phone lines became more commonly used and I found myself online considerably more. Remember though that the web wasn’t nearly the pervasive force it’s come to be. Of my friends who did have computer and net access, the vast majority of them had no more presence online than an ICQ or AIM screen name. My having taught myself enough HTML to put together simple web pages put me leaps ahead of most my peers in web-guru-ity. We used things like mIRC. Yahoo and AOL chat rooms. Maybe a message board or two.
Lynch pointed out they have grown up with no private spaces, no private lives and no expectation of privacy.
I find this decidedly untrue for myself. We were online, yes, but much more invisibly so. Only the nerdiest of poetry writers and gamers had heard of some thing called Myspace. The depths of something like Facebook were still long off. You didn’t put photos of yourself online — what would you have done with them? At most you had, again, your ICQ or AIM profile in which you revealed maybe your age, sex, and penchant for trashy novels, but the immersion went little further than that. It’s amazing how fast we lose perspective along the path of change. Recall that The Sims was all the buzz at this time, and the idea of people existing, communicating and doing normal day-to-day type activities through an on screen avatar was stirring up all sorts of conversation about the future of technology! mind rot! hooplah! Only the most forward looking basement EverQuest jockeys really had first hand understanding of where this all was going and what it may mean for websites, and only if their Mountain Dew trip was intense enough to trigger some major extrapolation.
I got my first cell-phone my junior year and text messaging was then a too-expensive novelty. Napster hit the scene and many downloaded songs for the first time — one at a time. Blog-as-diary was starting to be the explosive phenomenon it would grow into. It wasn’t until I graduated in 2003 that anywhere near half my friends had Myspace accounts.
Lynch’s explanations, focusing on what’s available right now, are most accurate in describing the current batch of 10-15 year olds, many of whom will have grown up with these technologies as a constant reality. Yet many of them still live in households without Internet access. They’re not all rolling out of bed and checking their Facebook and Twitter accounts on personal laptops. Many of them still watch their parents read the newspaper over coffee each morning — planning on the day when they’ll do the same.
My point is that generalizations and assumptions about our proposed lifelong Internet experiences do a disservice to everyone. It’s foolish to use a snapshot of now to explain desires and attitudes shaped over a much longer time frame. My peers and I may be more comfortable online than many older folks but to assume we weren’t there for the ride in any capacity, or that we don’t understand and hold important the value of classic print journalism is to miss much of the picture.
Switching gears from nitpicking and nostalgia I turn to the latter portion of Hermida’s coverage of Lynch’s presentation, in which I find much more to agree with.
…what really matters for journalists is understanding [this generation’s] attitude to who is an expert. Lynch explained how the research showed children create online personas and develop reputation on the web, regardless of their age.
This is important for journalists, who tend to assume they know more than their readers. However, said Lynch, the young do not share this perception.
Instead, she argued, online no one knows you are 12 and this generation is part of a world where knowledge equals practice, regardless of age.
This was one of the quotes she highlighted from her research: “I might be 13 but I know more than anyone else in the community about fan fiction.”
Provocative talk for a room, largely full of print journalists who are uneasy and a little frightened by the changes taking place in the media.
Here they’re hitting the nail right on its big fat head. The times I most frequently lied about my age online were always when doing so made my contributions or statements hold more weight. As a fourteen year old film and music critic I felt my opinions were well-considered and valid, and so did others so long as they were in the dark about my age.
If there’s one thing we all need to be learning from the online experience it’s that information either is or isn’t valuable in and of itself, and who it comes from is changing and matters less. The Internet says more voices are better, and is the purest example of democracy we have. Speaking of which — Net Neutrality — but we’ll save that for another time.
Hermida and Lynch are on the right track in their emphasis on accepting changes in the audience, and attempting to illuminate what those may be. They’re accurate in their perception that much of the youth hold their opinions and abilities as being worthy of competing on whatever level they warrant, regardless of the creators age. I do hope, however, that they can approach these changes without shrinking their view of the audience to oversimplified stereotypes.
Alfred Hermida’s overview of Lynch’s presentation: Link
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