In a cover story on urban youth in India called Aliens! (ref Stowe Boyd and Dina Mehta), Business World begins the article with “If men are from Mars and women from Venus, is the species known as ‘youth’ from the moon orbiting the distant Pluto?” This kind of framing inevitably worries me because it signifies that the writer is going to speak about youth as a fascinating ‘other’ where adults exotify youth. Throughout the article, they refer to different age groups as different species while trying to classify different groups of youth using models that would make sense to adults. ::cringe::
Deeper inside the magazine is an article entitled IMHO*, IM Rulz. I begin the article concerned. For the most part, the article discusses practices, but there are embedded assumptions that really get my goat. Here’s the one that upset me the most:
IM is a kind of metaphor for the mindset of the new millennium youth. It fulfils a deep-seated need for constant stimulation. And keeps pace with their shorter attention spans.
In July, i spoke about how designers are building technology off of the assumption that everyone has ADD. We often joke about the fact that the MTV generation has no attention span, but i have never seen anything that empirically validates this. Without concrete data, i’m absolutely convinced that this is just an adult projection onto youth. There is no doubt that the prescription of ritalin and adderall are way up but there are tons of reports on misdiagnosis of ADD. Interestingly, more kids are diagnosed in the wealthier districts of the States. Why? Well, frankly, almost everyone i know sees an improvement in their attention span when they’re on these meds and pressure parents who are determined that their kids get into the best schools and calm down and otherwise act proper are bound to see this as a perfect remedy. That does not mean that these kids have less attention than any previous generation.
What we do know is that there is far more media available to consume today. With thousands of TV stations and the Internet, there’s almost infinite choice. Guess what? With more choice, people are needlessly asking themselves “is there something better?” Channel surfing is not a new phenomenon. Given choice, people are worried that they might be missing something.
And what is this deep-seated need for constant stimulation that they are referring to? And why is this particular to youth?
Aside from my irritation at their projection of ADD onto youth, i think that their causal relationships are all screwy. Youth exist in an always-on culture. With mobile phones and computers at their finger tips, they are able to maintain relationships constantly, unbarred by physical geographical constraints. Always-on culture is not the product of a deep-seeded need for constant stimulation. Alternatively, the perception of this need for stimulation probably results from the opportunity of having an always-on culture.
Identity formation amongst youth is deeply rooted in being able to connect and relate to others of the same age. Remember the paper cup phones that kids would string between neighboring houses to talk late at night? Remember teenagers and land lines? IM is no different. It’s just a new opportunity to keep in contact with one’s friend group, not the production of some mental deformity.
My gut reaction says hysteria around IM culture has to do with hysteria over what adults don’t understand about youth because of generational differences with regard to access to media. Thus, i groan.
I follow you, and agree with you on most points – but this…
“What we do know is that there is far more media available to consume today. With thousands of TV stations and the Internet, there’s almost infinite choice. Guess what? With more choice, people are needlessly asking themselves “is there something better?” Channel surfing is not a new phenomenon. Given choice, people are worried that they might be missing something.”
This feels like a total assumption to me. I’m not so sure they are needlessly asking themselves is there something better, and if they are… Given the vast number of voices out there in various medias – and given their general lack of trustworthiness (in terms of reliability and accuracy)- i’m not so sure it is “needless”.
It would be interesting to see if youth are using things like im and electronic based media more often because they trust these information sources as reliable and up-to-the-minute because they are “known”.
I also don’t necessarily buy the assumption that given choice people are worried that they might be missing something, or that that is the most important reason why they are choosing. Things like fickleness, ‘coolness’, apathy/boredom also play a big part in choice.
I do agree with you that this statement…
” IM is a kind of metaphor for the mindset of the new millennium youth. It fulfils a deep-seated need for constant stimulation. And keeps pace with their shorter attention spans.”
…is mostly bunk. do they really have shorter attention spans – where’s the scientific proof? i guess the author has never heard of “Crackberry”, i.e. I don’t think this issue lies solely in the purview of youth. I mean if they had written. IM(Cellphones, Crackberrys, etc.) are a kind of metaphor for the mindset of the new millenium. It fulfills a deep seated need for constant information. And keeps pace with their shorter free time. I might said hell…yeah.
Kiri – you’re totally right – there are lots of other reasons why folks surf, not just that there’s something better. I was more trying to point out that this is a complete contradiction to the twitchy need that the article signified as opposed to express that this is the only reason. Sorry for not being clear.
There is this idea that the old days were somehow better than today and at the same time much more difficult. While, there is some evidence supporting that things were indeed tougher on previous generations, there is evidence to refute the good ol days ever existed. All the troubles kids are faced with today, have exisited since they did, the only difference is the level of sophistication. And it is this level of sophistication that really makes a difference in perception. There was a time when a train on a movie screen racing toward the camera scared the hell out of audiences, because they honestly believed they were about to get run over.
Today it is almost unimaginable that anyone would be so gulliable to believe that images on a screen would have the ability to harm you, yet it is not at all dificult for some people to belive that music, television, and video games contribute to the decline of civilization.
I guess that I would be a member of the choir to your sermon.
In addition to the availability of new media and innovation, do you feel the expansion of language is a contributing factor– terms like ADD, post-traumatic stress-disorder did not exist.
Or could it be that adults are simply looking for excuses for there inability to accept the responsibility for future generations. Afterall, everyone of us learned from a role model before we ever new what one was. Were those formative years spent learning from someone that actually considered the consequence?
I get worried when I read articles like ones you describe, because it is covered in the stench of not even attempting to understand.
hmmm… I seem to remember a few years back I heard there was a study done by one of the airlines (United or American or something like that) when they introduced more choices for one of their services (may have been dinner service, but may have been something else) under the assumption that more choice would make for happier customers. They were completely surprised to see that their customer satisfaction ratings actually dropped almost immediately after. Turns out there is empirical evidence that people do worse with more choices. Having a choice (one thing or the other) is better than having no choice, but having too much choice is almost as bad as having no choice because of the agony of “what if”. So I suspect the assertion about more TV channels and compulsive surfing may be right.
I am curious though, about the “youth framing”. Isn’t that a normal reaction to the “younger generation” type of thing? Our parents were concerned with us in a similar fashion i bet (and probably still are to some extent). Although I believe ADD is the fashion of the achievement generation (that is the young adults and kids of today)
“almost everyone i know sees an improvement in their attention span when they’re on these meds”
Well, sure. I’m a veteran of the ’60’s, and I vividly remember watching my friend Andy work over a small sheet of paper with a Rapidograf pen, inking a cross-hatched nightmare that made a crisp new twenty look like a kindergardener’s crayon sketch. Talk about your attention span! He was at it all night, and never made eye contact with anyone else at the party.
Speed works. I wonder what these kids will be like in ten years? Twenty? Andy burned out long before that.
Richard
Danah:
what opinion do you have on Paul Bloom’s ideas on dualism; how is the technology changing the ideas about the self, and how we relate to the material. Are we seeing a change in how we develop, or are we seeing a social disruption and transition of how we think; or are our extensions reenforcing a underlining human phenomologic experience that relates with space and self that creates new metaphors embedded in the language.
Howard did touch on these questions; questions about self and where the soul is?
Choice becomes part of our thinking with an increasing influence on the external world; like Blooms child asks; “you can make me go to bed, but not sleep.”
Just today I heard something on NPR during an interview with Anita Roddick, the woman who founded The Body Shop, arguably related to evolutions in attention span. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4168727
She has written a book of random facts and numbers (many with a social twist that I dig).
One fact she cited was that the average magazine article length X years ago was 1000 words and today it is 300. This would certainly seem to support the notion of projection.
On the other hand, she cited a study that cited that 1987, in Z art museum, the average visitor spent 10 or so second viewing each painting. By 1997, visitors spent fewer than three seconds. This would seem to be a demand side indicator of shorter attention spans, no?
Hi, I did a very interesting social experiment in Craigslist about San Francisco dating scene.
Here is the result:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ksenija/
(it’s summarized in my last post)
The Myth of the Short Attention Span
Danah Boyd has an interesting blog post that begins with how youth are often exotified in business articles. Her case in point is an article published in Business World about youth in India titled called Aliens! What I found intriguing…
Official Website of Shri Srinivasa Ragavaswamy charitable Trust in South India working towards constructing a temple for Sri Srinivasa Perumal (balaji) with Raja Gopuram which is named as Kovai Thiruppathy.