Mark Bauerline, an English professor at Emory University, has written a book and in his book, he stated that the generation of people under 30 is the dumbest generation that has lived. He criticized the internet and all the new technologies. In his book, he called the digital generation slackers, that we don't read enough. We spend too much time on the internet talking and 'facebooking'. His conclusion is that the internet has jeopardised the digital generation – us.
There is a study led by Mizuko Ito, a research scientist at the University of California, which contradicted Mark Bauerline's book. Based on her 3 years study, she said that the teenagers actually benifit a lot through the internet. Bauerline said that kids have lost their social skill but Mizuko Ito believes the opposite. Kids develop a brand new network culture, where they are all connected with each other. By chatting and texting, they actually pick up new social skills that they don't have when talking face to face. Everyday, the number of SMS sent and received is even larger than the total world population. Communication is extremely important to us. We have to communicate to know what is going on around us. A week worth of information in the New York Times contains more news than a person was likely to experience in their lifetime. There are just too much things to get a hold of. A person that is left out of the information flow would feel like a fish out of water. The amount of technical information is doubling every year. So we must keep our knowledge up to date or else at some point, we will find that we know nothing.
Come back to Mizuko Ito’s point about kids building a deep social network. Facebook and Myspace homepage can be used to represent a person. By reading their web page, another person can read information about this person and then become friends even though they have never met. That is one way that the network grows bigger and bigger. Some people go online and join chat rooms or forums of others who share the same interest. It is amazing what one can learn from talking to people on their forums. They can discuss whatever they want, ask whatever they want. Friendship will also develop from this kind of interaction. With the previous generations, when they were young, spending time with a computer may be seen as a geeky activity. Computers were related to social isolation. When Mark Bauerline said that we don’t socialise enough because we spend too much time on the computer, I think he was talking about his own time. Because we see clearly, kids even keep in touch with their friends even if they are half a globe away from each other. Spending time online doesn’t mean that we are cut off from the real world. Me, I spend most of my time online but I also spend a lot of time hanging out with my friends, catching a movie or go shopping together.
The language has also developed. It has always been developing. For instance, there are about 540 000 words in the English language. 5 times more than there were during Shakespeare’s time. There is currently a new language using by the teens. The shorthand speech is also known as ‘IM slang’, ‘Internet speaks’, ‘SMSL (SMS language)’ … Texting and chatting are more convenient with these new words. There are different versions of it, modified by teens around the globe (or the internet world). The simple ones are ‘U’, ‘R’, ‘2’, ‘L8’ … To the phrases like ‘ttyl’, ‘imu’, ‘ily’, ‘cya’ or ‘cutmr’ … Lots and lots. They are just convenient and now they are widely know so why not use them? They are definitely not formal but we only use them to text and communicate amongst us so what’s wrong with it? It’s not like we forget how to spell ‘you’, ‘are’ and ‘late’.
The parents also play an important role. Some kids turn out to be badly developed because the parents didn’t do their job – parenting. Parents should help them with the growing up process. They should tell them right from wrong. Parents are not always wrong or always right. Most parents nowadays give the kids more space, which is good. But because of the space between them, parents don’t really know what their kids are doing. It then leads to them leaving their children doing what ever they want. The point is they have to keep their kids in line, don’t leave them wandering to the wrong path. Sometimes, it is good to tell their kids not to stay up at 1 am in the morning chatting. They should keep track of the kids’ education. Most importantly, telling them that it is not cool to be dumb.
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