As with all things, balance is good, but it’s too evident that when it comes to Internet, the balance has shifted towards the unwholesome trends and it needs to be corrected.

Go out for a walk, enjoy the full moon and stars and the planets, grow some tomatoes. You’ll find all these activities much more rewarding than clicking on a button to join a “cause” on Facebook. Make a snow-angel in the field, not on the Internet.

I almost hit the girl the other day while driving because she was listening to her I-pod while on her bike. She ran the red light and was completly unaware of what was happening in traffic.

I all for technology, I’m online as much as the next person, however I think people spend to much time ‘networking’ online with total strangers.

Facebook is another thing that a lot of high school and college kids should try to control better.
More employers are looking for the facebook pages and any documented bad behavior can and will cost you a job.

Why do people spend all this time talking on cell phones while driving?

Please stop using your cellphones while driving!

I think illiteracy isn’t just not knowing how to read, it’s also not reading relevant information or being able to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

I’m 57 and I’ve been using all of this stuff since its birth (Apple II, fidonet, etc.) and my house has been wired longer than most. I spend a considerable amount of each day online doing many of the things talked about here, however, I still read long and deep articles daily, not just headlines, and I read periodicals and books, online and off.

There’s a difference between skimming headlines on the New York Times web site and reading articles from start to finish. I’m pretty sure that folks who are putting a lot of time and energy into sharing exactly what they’re doing at every moment are probably not putting as much time into reading and thinking deeply about the important stuff. That’s a form of illiteracy caused by techno ADD.

Maybe these kids are being “well trained.”

(They do need to work on composition, grammar and spelling, though.)

- Digital divide issues are discussed in the Media Ecologies Chapter.
- Bullying is discussed in the Friendship Chapter

Also, as far as physical mobility, there are studies in the U.K. that suggest that young people have less physical mobility than ever before. In our fieldwork, we found that many of the young people we interviewed were unable to leave the house or, if they were, their friends weren’t. For many, online encounters with friends were more accessible than face-to-face ones even though F2F was much preferred. This is referenced briefly in the Friendship chapter.

In Learning from Cyber-Savvy Students: How Internet-Age Kids Impact Classroom Learning (Stylus, 2000), I explored the question of how classroom teaching and learning is affected by students’ experience using the Internet for their own purposes. I am fascinated that, although the Internet media are now much more sophisticated, the comments made by teens in both the Frontline special and the Digital Youth Project report echo closely the voices of teens in my research done ten years earlier.

The consistency of results across the past ten years of research leads me to believe that the changes highlighted by the Digital Youth Project report are far more than passing trends. The impact on formal education is profound and must be acknowledged, if schools are to remain at all relevant to teens.

My current job search experience has given me an opportunity to realize how much things have changed, while I was not paying attention, busy with task at hand rather than keeping skills and knowledge up to date.

After 20 years of continuous employment which included the introduction of Personal Computers to the workplace I find it difficult to identify a starting point to “catch up.”

One job posting described the trend very well – the job title was “New Media Visionary”. In this new world of web sites and databases I have found little intuitive knowledge regarding employment needs when speaking to employers – even at job fairs and personal networking contacts – no one knows of opportunities but they say “check the web site”.

Each employer’s site requires a separate profile, username, password and the same information posted on dozens if not hundreds of your other profiles generated just to make an initial inquiry or apply for specific openings. While access to information is plentiful the pure volume makes it very difficult to be productive. I am very interested to see how business process continues to evolve with this next generation of new media users.

Of course there are. As Fareed Zakaria points out in his book “The Post American World,” our country is a manufacturer of ideas, so a lot of this movement shouldn’t be surprising. But it doesn’t mean we’re not still pursuing “old fashioned” ways to have fun. I go running in South Boston every day and I see kids playing baseball during the seasons, kids at the beach, etc. Young bands still preform, my nephews and nieces all studied some sort of instrument, and many of my friends are quite artistic. As a staff-member at a youth leadership summit in Maine, I don’t necessarily see a difference in activities among kids – just a different generational attitude (and one for the positive, to be honest).