"They are more trusting but also more willing to take risks."
Are they taking calculated risks - or is it a symptom of naivety? In our risk averse culture the kids are often not being allowed to gain the experience of how to handle risks.
Science: Broke brats glued to the web while silk-stocking scions have better things to do
A new survey of teenagers reveals that children from poorer households use the internet more than those from richer homes, upending a common assumption about our online lives. In addition, richer kids use the internet in a more productive way, spending significantly more of their time looking up educational material and things …
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Tuesday 23rd October 2018 22:23 GMT Wellyboot
Not a good portent.
>>>whether children had heard of "fake news". In richer households, 81 per cent said yes; in poorer households, just 64 per cent. <<<
The future for demagogues is bright.
The N.S.S line was that richer kids spend more time offline, doing other things that cost money perhaps?
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 07:31 GMT My-Handle
Re: Not a good portent.
I was thinking the same. My favoured hobbies usually involve making things and I have a large number of projects queued up for the workshop. Unfortunately, I regularly hit months where I just don't have enough cash to buy tools or materials and progress on my projects grinds to a halt. Thus, my spare time tends to get diverted to YouTube or video games. Money definitely helps people get out and about and spend their time productively.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 10:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
"doing other things that cost money perhaps?"
Evidently. Part probably imposed by their parents, part on their own. When you also have better places to "play" and better "toys", you have far more options. Not surprisingly they look for "how-tos", which mean they have other things to work with. Also, parents (and relatives) with more hobbies and interests will transfer some of them to their children. Greater chances to join groups or clubs also.
In the past poorer children had a bigger probability of being left in front of a TV as an electronic baby-sitter for lack of other means, now an Internet device took that place - nothing new.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 13:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "doing other things that cost money perhaps?"
"In the past poorer children had a bigger probability of being left in front of a TV as an electronic baby-sitter for lack of other means, [...]"
Was that only the poor? My experience is that since the advent of TV kids soon learn what they like to sit and watch. Parents soon have a struggle to moderate such obsessions***. What did they do before that era? Listening to the radio wasn't quite the same for kids. I always had my nose in a book - or reading the back of any food packet on the table.
In the days when South Africa didn't have television - a colleague's young children experienced it on a 3 month holiday in Europe. He said he was surprised how their education was suddenly improved by their watching kids TV programmes.
***My neighbour's 4 year old has had an obsession with some of my animated Halloween decorations for a couple of years. He sets them running - then steps back with a look of terror that quickly morphs into a wicked smile. He will repeat the performance as many times as your patience will allow. The decorations have to stay in place for several weeks. He also loves ringing doorbells - although he has learned to be selective. Hopefully a budding inquisitive engineer. Just hope I live long enough to introduce him to Arduinos. At the moment he would just take everything apart with no rationale. It's interesting watching him quickly work out how to manipulate something.
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Tuesday 23rd October 2018 23:49 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Buzzwords...
So what's the next generation going to be called after Generation Z? This "Generation <letter>" thing started seemingly with Generation X. I'm aware of "The Greatest Generation" (WWII types), "The Lost Generation" and some others but this alphabet thing just seems puzzling.
Maybe they'll get confused and start following Ubuntu released...
Generation Ardent Aardvark and...etc....
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 03:05 GMT A-nonCoward
Re: Buzzwords...
... "was a huge disappointment."
evidence: every new generation of kids, for a very long time, has placed their energy into supporting some kind of music that drew their parents, and the previous generation, totally insane with pain. Charleston, Swing, Rock, Pop (I'm jumping a few, but you get my point). What have we got, for already way too long? Rap. Techno is not it, sorry. Rap. Nothing worse has replaced it.
It's the end of times, I tell you.
(doesn't mean we all die. Well, not physically, but what's coming for us is perhaps almost worse than death. I was walking the dog the other day past a retirement home, guess what music the staff were playing? I hear that rendition operatives use Country to break down prisoners. Hmmm, those old folks there? they wish they were in an interrogation hut, I bet.)
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 17:06 GMT Tikimon
Re: Buzzwords...
"Rap is just Country music without the country, or the music."
WRONG. Country music does not glorify crime and "gangstas". It does not treat women like mindless objects for sex or label them "bitches" or "Ho's". Rap is a sometimes toxic collection of misogyny and criminal attitudes loaded with F-words.
Country music is at worst kinda boring. It tends to be about the life situations the rest of us non-criminal types care about. Life and its windings, love gained or lost, bad jobs, dogs and automobiles. Your kids can listen to it with no worries about nasty language or misogyny. It's almost the diametric opposite in content and intent from Rap.
I'm not even a fan of Country Music, but it doesn't deserve to be lumped in with Rap/HipHop.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 08:40 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Buzzwords...
I was walking the dog the other day past a retirement home, guess what music the staff were playing?
So Country is worse than death? Is death, easily confused with death?
As he got older, my Dad increasingly liked Country music (he did grow up liking Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, so maybe he wasn't far off in the first place).
It's generally got an easy to sway-to for old bones beat - I really can't see retirement places in twenty years blaring out heavy metal for the residents to headbang to...
Although the volume on Country does AC/DC so everyone can enjoy it might make you think it was.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 13:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Buzzwords...
" I really can't see retirement places in twenty years blaring out heavy metal for the residents to headbang to..."
A colleague and his pals started a teenage pop group in the 1970's. They still did local gigs in their 50s - and found that the audience were basically unchanged - just getting older. They did wonder when the Zimmer frames would appear.
People may broaden their music genre repertoire as they get older - but their pop music tends to be of their younger era.
Music is a strong part of our memories - and memories are our sense of ourselves as an identity. Apparently even with dementia - music can still be recalled with no problem. Oliver Sacks in his studies of brain injuries - wrote about the way music seems separate from speech.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 20:30 GMT A. Coatsworth
Re: Buzzwords...@A-nonCoward
>>What have we got, for already way too long? Rap. Techno is not it, sorry. Rap. Nothing worse has >>replaced it.
You clearly haven't been in contact with the absolute hellspawn that is reggaeton. This abortion of music was let loose onto the world some time after year 2000, and have been riding strong ever since
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 08:53 GMT Pseudonymous Howard
Re: Buzzwords...
It is a pattern: Windows 10 is the last Windows, Generation Z the last generation. Decade-, version- or generation-counting is dying out since the begin of the current millenium. Just listen to a radio station targetting the mainstream: At least here Germany they all have slogans like: "The best music from the 80s, 90s and today!" This "today" already exists for 18 years...
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 15:00 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Buzzwords...
The letter convention for naming generational cohorts was more or less accidental - it was a lazy popularization of Coupland's "Generation X" concept from the eponymous novel, and Coupland's own definition was narrower than what demographers typically use for generational cohorts in the industrialized West.
Some demographers tried to resist it, in some cases successfully. Howe and Strauss coined the term "Millennials" for the generational cohort of around 1980-2000, and that term stuck. Unfortunately, H&S didn't have the same luck with their "Thirteeners" alternative to Gen X, despite the cult popularity of their 1993 book 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, which I think is actually quite interesting. (I admit this is somewhat self-serving, since I fall into that cohort, a group that H&S have much sympathy for.)
I'm hoping for a return to more-interesting coinages for future demographic cohorts. I can see why Coupland used "Generation X", but every generational-cohort letter-name since then has just been a sad failure of imagination on the part of the pundits who publicize these things.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 09:15 GMT deadlockvictim
Re: D'uh
I wouldn't be too hard on him for that. `
I have some sympathy for people who have been born into generations where painful decisions are requiring to be made. Had you been a youth in Germany in the 1930s, would you have gone along with the flow (as he did) or would you have been massively courageous and stood up and out, knowing full well that it might have earned you a trip to Belsen?
And as for cults, well, the top is the place to be.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 09:41 GMT Primus Secundus Tertius
Re: D'uh
When I made an exchange trip with a German boy, his mother told me a story. One day the teacher in her class said to her and another girl that they had not yet joined the Hitler Youth. They took the hint, that day.
That is how things are done under such regimes. Lucky are the countries where people are unaware of such matters.
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Friday 16th November 2018 10:07 GMT Mooseman
Re: time travel
That's easy for you to say. I used to know a guy who had done just that. He spent 2 years in a concentration camp - and yes they existed before Belsen - in the 1930s. Some of the stories he had would make your stomach churn, and this was before they started the industrial mass murder.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 04:22 GMT FuzzyWuzzys
The Least Forgotten Generation Ever
The one thing I reminded my daughter of at the weekend is that she's the first generation of kids where no stone is left unturned and nothing about them from cradle to grave, will ever be forgotten. One of her friend's brothers, just 15, came home absolutely paralytic after a Saturday with his friends. His reasonably well to do parents went absolutely ballistic at him and it was a bit of a to-do by all accounts. On the Sunday morning I said to my daughter that although his parents might try to keep a lid on it I guarantee that by midweek it'll be all round the school and all over the kids social media. Sure enough, my daughter came home Tuesday and said it was the main topic of conversation at school due to the posts his so-called friends put on social media about him.
I did some stupid things as a kid but only about 3 or 4 people know about them, no pics, no videos, nothing recorded and more or less forgotten, in fact as I get older even I begin to forget some of the daft things I did as a kid. Our children don't have that luxury. We post pictures of them by the minute on social media just to fill Zuckerburg's coffers and seal our children's fate as the most watched and recorded generation in history to date.
My wife will only allow our daughter to have snapchat and instagram, no other social media, and with her locked down iPhone she's not allowed to install any apps either. As parents we carry the can for anything she does online, when's old enough we won't be able to stop her but by then she'll be wise enough to see what has happened to others. Hopefully she'll understand why her generation must be so infinitely careful on the internet lest they wreck their future for good with one careless post.
It's ironic that we fight against government spying to save ourselves yet we let our kids post all manner of things on social media just ripe and ready to be sold to the highest bidder and hoovered up by any government.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 06:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: came home absolutely paralytic
And as the 'Internet' never forgets, this episode could haunt that person for the rest of their lives.
They could be rewarded in the future by increased insurance premiums because of the 'possibility' of becoming an Alky, or denied jobs or financial services etc etc etc.
Back in the day (Before the Internet and all that social-media shite) an episode like this would be laughed off and you'd be told not to do it again. All part of your life experiences in growing up and quickly forgotten.
Now such episodes are broadcast to the world and will be there for posterity.
I am so glad that I don't use any Social Media shite and that I'm well past the age where having a few drunk episodes somewhere on the internet is going to bother me.
I'm sure that within a couple years we will see 10's of millions of people (sad sacks the lot of them) broadcasting their dull boring and pathetic lives 24/7 to the world just because they can.
We are doomed I tell ye, doomed!
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 06:59 GMT rskurat
Re: came home absolutely paralytic
One of the several hats I wear is that of tutor to University & High School/6th Form students. About a third have admitted to having two accounts on social media platforms, an 'official' one and another for a dozen friends, at most. The Kids Are All Right.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 16:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: came home absolutely paralytic
Can confirm
"Kids today" are well aware that everything they do is public, and their parents add them to most social media. some of their tradecraft is quite impressive,
The private whatsapp group for the lads is the premier choice round here.
Its also why I don't believe the surveys about drinking less [Although less in pubs and clubs as no one can afford it ]
Also they all go down to the park to drink cheap cider, huff Nitrous oxide and smoke weed
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 17:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: came home absolutely paralytic
The "parents are on social media" is why most of the twenty somethings are on Snapchat. They treat Facebook as their 'public' social media so Snapchat is where the "good stuff" gets posted. When people on Snapchat have kids who are old enough, a new social media star will be born...
It might already be happening, since Snapchat's popularity has sort of leveled off. I know a lot of 20 somethings, but few teens or preteens, so I'm not sure what the younger crowd is going to instead of Snapchat.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 06:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The Least Forgotten Generation Ever
The fact "no one forgets" will excuse all these things because EVERYONE will have something like that in their past. Same way that the people you were at a wild party with back in college aren't going bring up stuff you did in a wider group because you can retort with stuff they did. Except now there is no "wider group", since in 2018 pics of what you both did in that wild party were shared on Snapchat before the party was even over. And likely you and your friend are the ones who shared them. But you aren't embarrassed or ashamed, because the people who saw those photos shared photos of their escapades the previous weekend, and so on.
Its like celebrity nudes, it used to be a scandal if there were naked pics of an A list Hollywood actress - even if she posed for Playboy it was considered a bit tawdry. These days ones that don't have such pictures a two second google search away are less common than those who do, so no one even raises an eyebrow at this anymore.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 06:57 GMT onefang
Re: The Least Forgotten Generation Ever
'The fact "no one forgets" will excuse all these things because EVERYONE will have something like that in their past.'
Perhaps we will end up with a more tolerant world? Or employers will discriminate against you coz you didn't do something stupid in your youth, then uploaded it somewhere public, like everyone else did. Us oldies might have to track down old photos of past indiscretions, colourise them, photograph them with our smartphones, and stick them on Instagram with an unsuitable filter.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 09:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Perhaps we will end up with a more tolerant world?"
Not at all - you will be ranked by your "likes" or "followers"... and if you won't have something stupid to show, they'll think you're hiding it somehow... tolerance is not complicity - and well, there are things that is wrong to tolerate - even if a lot of people around you do them.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 07:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yeah, right..
"...a recent study looking at digital skills amongst all adults highlighted that 91 per cent of better-off adults claimed to have basic digital skills, compared with 62 per cent of poorer adults."
Not sure I'd trust that datum. Funnily enough, when I was in IT support, the higher up the corporate ladder you were (and thus the better off financially) the more likely you were to oversell your abilities on PCs (with a few (dis)honourable exceptions, eg; a director who felt he was so important that actually learning how to use machines was beneath him, and was something only hoi poloi do). Hence inappropriate "solutions" being foisted on unfortunate minions by upper manglement that wouldn't believe their IT staff actually knew what they were talking about.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 07:24 GMT Roj Blake
A Wise Man Once Said...
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
- Socrates (possibly)
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 07:45 GMT 3man
Re: A Wise Man Once Said...
I hear my elders' criticisms of my generation being echoed by my generation about today's generation, albeit with a slightly different straw man being used to justify the same bullshit. Given the kind of stuff some of us got up to, today's children are positively saintly in comparison. Of course this is also used as a stick to beat them with.
Western civilisation: a few years away from total moral collapse for the last 1000 years. Maybe the broken clock will be right one of these days but I'm not holding my breath.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 08:47 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Generation Z?
Is “generation Z” just the retarded hipster term for “any young people” now?
Generation Z/Millenials as commonly understood are at least in their 20s now.
Unlike the Age of civilisation (stone Age, new Stone age, iron age, atomic age), which have gotten shorter as we've advanced, the generation ages are getting longer as the rot of sophistication settles, probably undermining the very fabric of society (or something like that).
Remember Douglas Adams and the 3 stages : Survival, Enquiry, Sophistication.
Even when Enquiry is attempted these days, it trips over the rucked up carpet of sophistication.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 10:25 GMT onefang
Re: Define digital skills
"This is the bit that bursts my knitting - what is basic digital skills?"
Basic digital skills is being able to count to ten using your digits. More advanced digital skills involve signalling to another human your displeasure using your digits. I'll give an example over there in the corner, though other gestures are available.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 11:13 GMT Sir Runcible Spoon
!My Generation
My main concern around the most recent generation(s) is that they don't seem to have any unifying identities around which to rally and rebel, like most previous generations did.
Maybe this is a sign of advanced spiritual maturity, perhaps not :)
On the topic of poor vs. rich from the article, it is oft noted that the poor are poor in attitude and a shift to the positive can be reflected with a positive shift in their financial circumstances.
For example, smoking is now *very* expensive, yet I bet the largest percentage of smokers would be from poor backgrounds.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 11:32 GMT Teiwaz
Re: !My Generation
My main concern around the most recent generation(s) is that they don't seem to have any unifying identities around which to rally and rebel, like most previous generations did.
Maybe this is a sign of advanced spiritual maturity, perhaps not :)
I'm very much afraid it's a sign of a lack of imagination. Our entertainment is now very visual with little left to the imagination - the imaginations of the young may not be getting the exercise they once did.
If any society needs rebelled against, it's the one that's been shaping up the last 10 to 15 years.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 15:44 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: !My Generation
My main concern around the most recent generation(s) is that they don't seem to have any unifying identities around which to rally and rebel, like most previous generations did.
I don't see any evidence to support that, even under various friendly interpretations of "most previous generations". In particular, I don't see any evidence to believe that the array of popular identity positions is significantly diminished relative to any point in the modern era; that the popular registers of social difference (gender, race, class, etc) on which they're founded have lapsed into irrelevance; or that the broad organization of western industrialized cultures has changed significantly since the Industrial Revolution.
In particular, I'd be surprised to see a compelling argument that contemporary western cultures aren't still largely under the sway of the imaginary-identification process Benedict Anderson described in Imagined Communities. The social change I see in the news can still be adequately explained by modern social and cultural theory, such as Hall's idea of identity articulation and Giddens's structuration theory of the interplay between social forces and individual agency.
Really, I don't know how anyone could observe, say, US national politics in the 21st century and think there's been any breakdown in the mechanics of shared identity. It's all identity politics. There's barely even a sham appeal to policy or telos beyond "my team will beat your fucking team".
I'm very much afraid it's a sign of a lack of imagination. Our entertainment is now very visual with little left to the imagination - the imaginations of the young may not be getting the exercise they once did.
And that strikes me as even more dubious. Entertainment has been "very visual" for all of human history. The Millennials are the most literate generation ever to date, both in terms of literacy and of literary production; there's reason to believe the Zs will surpass them. The Internet has lowered the barriers to cultural production and exchange, and the actual methodologically-sound studies I've seen indicate younger people have, in fact, taken advantage of that.
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Friday 26th October 2018 10:47 GMT Brangdon
Re: !My Generation
Good post. I'd add that the "rallying around" has now largely been diverted to social media, posting likes on Facebook or Twitter etc, rather than activity in the real world. As such it can be overlooked by people who scorn social media.
Whether all those likes are an effective measure for actual change is another matter. Sometimes they act as pacifiers without achieving anything. Sometimes they can lead to people organising online for events in the real world. And whether the old-fashioned protest marches achieved anything is debatable too.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 14:05 GMT Roger Kynaston
This is a case of youngsters being what the world is coming to
Every group of young people are what the world is coming to. We are of course all doomed - to be grumpy old gits who go on about how it was much better "when I were young. blah blah blah'. I write this as an IT professional who doesn't get this social media stuff.
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Thursday 25th October 2018 01:25 GMT Zero Sum
Too many stood silent ..............
"Too many stood silent .............."
Yes. In the 1930s the problem was fascism, but now we have another form of totalitarianism that is not being challenged:
"They are also far more comfortable with the concept of gender fluidity i.e. not viewing everyone as a man, or a woman – hence the title of the report: Beyond Binary."
It is amazing how quickly the trans- and gender-fluid ideology has taken over contemporary media, and how scared people are to oppose it.
What is even more curious is that the strongest branch of this movement – men in dresses – is violently trying to redefine what it is to be a woman. That is – a group of men is trying to erase femaleness. Vale feminism.
Either there is going to be a massive conservative reaction to this, or the West is finished.
Thank God I'm not long for this world.
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Thursday 25th October 2018 10:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Seriously?
"In the 1930s the problem was fascism, but now we have another form of totalitarianism that is not being challenged:"
Seriously? People wanting to live their lives without the sheet-sniffers ordering them how to use their genitals is in your mind equivalent to the worst excesses of totalitarianism?
"or the West is finished" Civilizations come and go throughout history. I sincerely doubt that allowing the girly boys to choose which restroom to use will be what finishes ours off. Especially not when there are wingnuts like TrumPence in charge of the country which is setting the tone for the whole of the West.
"Thank God I'm not long for this world" No need to hang around on our account, godspeed and all that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
