Google Generation’ is a myth, says new research

A new report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web. The report by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to asses the information that they find on the web.

pardon the long comment, but i think i may have an explanation to why teens from lower-income families blog more often.

while income was not a focal point of my thesis on friendster (hoping you received your copy), online social networks, to me, are means of “revealing,” that it is a means for people to expose themselves (that sounded kind of funny) online when they couldn’t in real life. as such, because they are less “exposed” because they don’t have the kind of affluence that makes them stick out in “reality,” they do so online.

i can’t help but to use my own country as an example. here in the philippines, internet rental service is rather cheap (at Php20 an hour, roughly 50 cents). computer rentals become a major source of recreation, and as such, a lot of venues in the internet become exploited, like blogging and social networking. when you have an extra twenty pesos to spare, you would head off to an internet shop and “friendster.” going back on my data, the majority of them accessed their sites within 24 hours at the data-gathering period. this is, to me, enough proof of the relative inexpensive-ness of internet rental.

of course, i’m not saying that the baseline poor use computers (to invoke melanie’s comment, but extended to the filipino context of “poor”).

blogs, to me, serve the purpose of “exposure:” not because you’re completely invisible from society, but because you compensate for certain inadequacies you have in reality. there arises a sort of initiative: to express angst, to talk about one’s self, to “make one’s self known.” although as you may already know, i have reservations about “selfhood.”

besides, blogging becomes an emerging source of revenue. twitter has also emerged here as a form of communication, and social networking is experiencing a shift from friendster to multiply.

anyway, i’m not really appreciative of the whole idea of correlations. i’m skeptical: it’s a single instance. i would rather corroborate my findings with key informant interviews and the difficulties of textual analysis (as i did with my thesis): the labor is all worth it. besides, here in my part of the world, data mining is still little-known (i cringe at the thought of doing everything manually, but i did it anyway).

regards,

marck

obviously not the standard definition of chronologically ordered posts with titles and content. facebook notes also support comments and rss. i assume those are also irrelevant.

Through working with tweens (managing community websites & research convos) I’ve spoken to use their blogs when they get home from school (latchkey; most parents would still be at work). Either they blog about topical things like tv shows (teen nick storylines) or celebs, and sometimes they vent about their friends. But they STARTED their blogs because a) they were bored, b) they were alone and didn’t have anyone to talk to, c) they started their blog as a result of another website/game/virtual world: sharing cheats, codes, etc. As they learned about the blogging system, they began opening a variety of blogs on various topics, and then as that got boring and hard to manage, would start to get cautious about their information & close down to one or two blogs.

Having taught in inner city schools last year – both at risk and affluent, I can attest to some of the PEW findings. The students in the affluent schools were far more wired than those in the at risk communities simply because of access to technology – at home v. at school. Low income teens who do not have access to a computer at home – or have limited access – have even more limited access at school (in addition to snooping teachers and librarians). At most, they might be able to sneak into FB or Youtube for a few minutes to half hour depending on the presence of administrative staff. This is very, very different than being in your own room, at home (however stealth they may have to be – you can keep the windows open and minimized all evening while doing other tasks, like homework). This kind of temporal relationship is, properly, privilege.

I question PEW’s LSES blogging results – as well as their sample focus. They’ve got to get beyond MySpace, Livejournal and look at the whole picture (like Blogger and WordPress). But they cant, because the data isn’t available in quite the same way as it is from Livejournal and other services. Users of blogger, WordPress, etc are much more likely to be stealthy about their real identities, age, gender, etc.

Of the secondary schools where I had my teacher training last year, only a couple of students in the low income schools had blogs (and those students, unsurprisingly, came from the most high income families in that group). This is also true of my experience with low income college students – whose non-school hours are spent (largely) working.

In my own (limited) experience, more affluent students were far more engaged in content creation (whether blogs or wall posts) because: A) they felt entitled to do so (to have an opinion and express it) and B) the literacies, references and raw knowledge base to create expressive and confident prose. Of my students in lower income schools, very few had the *multiple* literacies required to negotiate the web in a meaningful way (if you don’t have reference points or proper terminology/jargon you’ll have a lot of trouble finding things) – this is why they find research so frustrating and why they avoid it – to write well. This is not to say that low income students won’t do so at all – but that they do with far less frequency or length (a text message is not the same as a blog post). Blogging takes time. Time is privilege.

I taught English (academic, applied and university streams) grades 9 – 12 in both socio-economic contexts. The levels of literacy, confidence and competence in both groups had *everything* to do with privilege. Privilege of prior knowledge and learnings, privilege to own your own copies of books (i.e., to have a small library of “favourite books” especially), privilege to have your own room or have acces to a *quiet* study space (and computer), privilege to return home and get support from literate, English speaking, computer and word processing savvy, university educated parents. Versus: returning home to get ready to go to another job, not having access to the one computer (or any computer), helping your parents who (especially in the case of newcomer families) with their learning, losing or misplacing school textbooks, not having appropriate supplies and resources – printers, paper, pens, dictionaries, liquid paper, etc.

The academic abilities in both groups had a direct correlation to web habits. Again, the privilege to pay for internet access, mobile devices, computers, etc as well as the privilege of multiple literacies required to use these devices (from having the language and skill to negotiate the web to having the confidence and knowledge base to express your place in it).

I disagree about Facebook’s “notes.” While providing a place to “post” information – is not the same as a blog (if you want to get into the core features associated with blogging proper).

In fact what this is suggesting is that the notion of what blogging ‘is’ may be getting so blurry at the edges that it may no longer be a useful term for many.

*goes back to look and finds it hidden away*

Not exactly the primary purpose, though.

The only friend I have using it is importing her Blogger blog. I see people linking within Facebook to blogs elsewhere, but not actually in Notes.

I’m very curious as to what happens with Facebook next year. Right now it feels like a signposting service, or maybe a pub with very bright lights.