Emily Feld is a native of a new planet. While the 20-year-old university student may appear to live in London, she actually spends much of her time in another galaxy — out there, in the digital universe of websites, e-mails, text messages and mobile phone calls. The behaviour of Feld and her generation, say experts, is being shaped by digital technology as never before, taking her boldly where no generation has gone before. It may even be the next step in evolution, transforming brains and the way we think.
“First thing every morning I wake up, check my mobile for messages, have a cup of tea and then check my e-mails,” says Feld. “I may have a look at Facebook.com, a website connecting university students, to see if someone has written anything on my ‘wall’. I’m connected to about 80 people on that. It’s really addictive. I’ll then browse around the internet, and if a news article on Yahoo catches my eye, I’ll read it. And I may upload my iTunes page to see if any of my subscribed podcasts have come in.
“The other day, I went to meet a friend in town, and was about two minutes away when I realised I’d left my mobile phone at home. I travelled the five miles back to collect it. I felt so completely lost without it, I panicked. I need to have it on me at all times. I sound really sad, but everyone I know is the same. Everyone talks to each other through the internet or with mobiles. Technology is an essential part of my everyday social and academic life. I don’t know where I’d be without it. In fact, I’ve never really been without it.”
That’s what makes Emily a “digital native”, one who has never known a world without instant communication. Her mother, Christine, on the other hand, is a “digital immigrant”, still coming to terms with a culture ruled by the ring of a mobile and the zip of e-mails. Though 55-year-old Christine happily shops online and e-mails friends, at heart she’s still in the old world. “Children today are multitasking left, right and centre — downloading tracks, uploading photos, sending e-mails. It’s nonstop,” she says with bemusement. “They find sitting down and reading, even watching TV, too slow and boring. I can’t imagine many kids indulging in one particular hobby, such as birdwatching, like they used to.”
This generational divide has been evident for a while, but only now is its impact becoming clear. Last month, Lord Saatchi, doyen of the advertising world, virtually declared the death of traditional advertising — because digital technology is changing the way people absorb information. The digital native’s brain is physically different as a result of the digital input it has received growing up, he claims.
“It has rewired itself. It responds faster. It sifts out. It recalls less.” Recall rates for traditional television advertisements have plummeted. Instead, says Saatchi, companies must now be able to sum up their brands in a single word if they are to grab the attention of restless digital natives.
To some, a world flooded with endless info bits and constant stimuli is scary; to others, it is full of possibility and fascinating questions. Are digital natives charting a new course for human intelligence? And if so, is it better, faster, smarter? You don’t have to take Saatchi’s word for it: this phenomenon is acquiring scientific legs. And it isn’t necessarily a trend from a dystopian sci-fi scenario. Many parents still fear that children who spend hours glued to computer screens will end up nerdy zombies with the attention span of a gnat. Cyberspace is full of junk, they worry, and computer games are packed with mindless violence. But it need not be like that, say some experts, and increasingly it isn’t, as users exert more control and discrimination.
To evangelists of the digital age such as Marc Prensky, an American consultant and author, modern interactive computer games are “deep, complex experiences” that challenge the intellect far more than, say, passively watching Big Brother. Socialising through chat rooms and online forums, he argues, both requires its own etiquette and overcomes old prejudices: it doesn’t matter nearly so much what you look like. The author Steven Johnson pursues a similar argument in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You. Far from popular culture dumbing down, he says, much of it has become more challenging; he points to the intricate, multi-layered plots of modern TV series such as The Sopranos or 24, compared with the linear plots of programmes 30 years ago.
This complexity is having an effect, say academics.
“A few people have demonstrated that computer games can improve some aspects of attention, such as the ability to quickly count objects at the periphery of your vision,” says Dr Anders Sandberg, who is researching “cognitive enhancement” at Oxford University. “Is this a different way of thinking? Well, a little bit. Being instantly able to itemise objects is probably a useful skill in this world. Anecdotal evidence suggests people are becoming more visual than verbal. Some people are claiming that once computers gain good language understanding and you can speak to them, then reading and writing are going to seem cumbersome.”
The sheer mass of visual, auditory and verbal information in the modern world is forcing digital natives to make choices that those who grew up with only books and television did not. “Younger people sift more and filter more,” says Helen Petrie, a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of York. “We have more information to deal with, and we pay less attention to particular bits of information, so it may appear attention spans are shorter.” She also notes that the brevity of text messaging is spreading to e-mails and other communication, rewriting English with simpler spelling in the process. Though this may appear rude to traditionalists, it’s merely sensible to digital natives in a wired world of dizzying speed. “But I don’t think attention spans are diminishing per se,” Petrie says. “If we find something that is engaging, then our attention span is just as long as it has always been. I bet you during the England-Sweden World Cup game people’s attention span wasn’t any shorter than it might have been before.”
Studies by Pam Briggs, professor of applied cognitive psychology at Northumbria University, have shown that people surfing the web for health information often spend less than two seconds on a website before moving on. But this seems to be more a sign of incisive analysis than limited concentration. “We found that the sites people rejected within this very short timescale were generally not the kind of sites that would prove useful in the long term,” she says.
The question, then, is how do digital natives learn to discriminate, and what determines the things that interest them? Parents who hope skills and boundaries are instilled at school may be fighting a losing battle. According to Prensky, the reason why some children today do not pay attention in school is that they find traditional teaching methods dull compared with their digital experiences. Instead, parameters are increasingly set by “wiki-thinking”, peer groups exchanging ideas through digital networks. Just as the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has been built from the collective knowledge of thousands of contributors, so digital natives draw on the experience and advice of online communities to shape their interests and boundaries. A telling symptom is blogging. Where once schoolchildren and students confided only in their diaries, now they write blogs or entries on MySpace.com — where anyone can see and comment on them.
