The Association of Internet Researchers, an interdisciplinary group focused on analyzing the social and economic impacts of computer networks, held its annual meeting in Chicago last week, drawing some 350 scholars from around the world. The theme of the meeting was “generations,� and one of the keynote speakers challenged the audience not to assume that the latest generation of students is made up of techno wizards.
The speaker, Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, presented highlights from a 2004 survey of 1,500 children in Britain aged 9 to 19, which found relatively low levels of comfort with advanced computer activities, such as blogging. "Perhaps these so-called experts are not so expert," Ms. Livingstone said. "Perhaps we’ve hyped their expertise." Only 17 percent of the children surveyed said they had e-mailed a digital photograph to someone, for instance. Thirty-four percent said they had made a Web page, but most of those said they had only done so as an assignment for school, and that they were not even sure if the site was still online.
Though the children reported being more knowledgeable about technology than their parents, most of whom were also surveyed, the gap was not nearly as wide as many people would think, Ms. Livingstone argued. Thirty-two percent of children consider themselves advanced technology users, and 12 percent of their parents see themselves as advanced users. Ms. Livingstone said there is plenty of need for educational efforts to teach kids technology skills. Just 33 percent of the children who used the Internet at least once a week said they had been taught how to judge the reliability of Web sites. A report on the survey can be found online.
