Tapscott says that the Net Generation will create its own layer of new media on the old society (248). Even though the new technology has some capabilities improved with more memory, processing speed etc, much of the information available is still in the traditional written form. For the new revolution to take place, this generation basically has to recreate every piece of information in a new media. We may be in a transition period similar to the Printing Revolution and depending how fast the generation is working on this project, we may or may not see the collapse of the written media. The result of the Printing Revolution was that knowledge, stories and news were all appearing in a printed form. And now everything is going to appear in an animated or realistic 3-d environment.
I had noticed the fascination with movies in Americans from the first time I had contact with them. Coming across the ocean in the 80’s was like crossing into a different time dimension, and coming over from Eastern Europe was like crossing two time dimensions. In my circle of friends, we often talked about books. When companies in Hungary build their benefit packages, they often include gift certificates to bookstores. A book is still a very accepted birthday or Christmas present in my country. When I look under the Christmas tree in NH, I rarely see the flat package of a book. I can say that I probably transformed myself into an American by now since we only have two bookshelves at home. Americans tend to bond over what movies they have in common with their friends. When they are in the period of getting to know someone new, there is a period when they are exchanging names of movies. In Hungary, they would be exchanging names of books and authors. Tapscott has described the progression towards visual media in his description of generations in the second part of the 20th century. The Baby Boomers growing up on TV set the scene for the Net Generation’s involvement with more sophisticated and individualized visual media. With every generation, the written word gets less and less dominant. Does the fact that I feel that it has not lost dominance mean that I am clutching to the traditional way, or does it mean that the progress is very slow? Teaching a language, I am having a hard time breaking away from the black and white representation of text. Even though in language teaching there is a lot of innovation in presenting materials and creating authentic practice, most of the assignments still boil down to creating texts.
Multitasking would be an area I would like to explore more. Tapscott seemed to not give a clear picture of multitasking, switching and blocking. He quotes the study of the Oxford Future of the Mind Institute saying that Net Geners are not outperforming older people when dealing with interruptions, and goes on to bring the example of his daughter capable of brilliant multitasking feats (2123).
When students are learning something very new, they are supposed to focus more of their resources on it. Once the task becomes automatic, it becomes acceptable to put it on the backburner. When students first study spelling, it takes a lot of concentration to call up the correct spelling. Once students had practice, they can afford not to focus on it. Just recently I had an adult student who is a professor at a university, improving his English skills in our school. He did not want to take notes while I was presenting – he was hanging onto every word uttered in the classroom, and then at the end, he tried to write down everything. I would ask the question: what percentage of the Net Generation is good at multitasking and is everyone capable of multitasking?
Tapscott, D. (2009). Grown up digital: how the net generation is changing your world [Kindle]. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
