Rise Of The 15-Year Olds, Part II 391
Small wonder the kids believe that older people have little or nothing to teach or tell them. It's often seemed true. The Net fosters a "Hey, I can do this, too" value system.
Sometimes, the outsiders, younger than most successful business executives, score big -- with successes like Netscape, Gnutella, Linux, IM, WinAmp. Even though they're more than 15, Lewis would argue that such pioneers help drive the status revolution. But they're exceptions, too.
Look at the allegedly-overturned powerful institutions and their upstart rivals. The music industry is in less trouble than Napster. Microsoft still makes far more money than Open Source systems. The broadcast network's audience steadily erodes, but their evening news shows still have greater reach and clout than Matt Drudge.
The strengths of 15-year-olds are also their weaknesses. Certain traits of the Net-connected 15-year old form recognizable patterns. They tend to confuse hostility with communication; they shoot (or type) before they think. They can be arrogant and posturing as well as creative and energetic. They are sometimes narcissistic: they fixate on "me" media, blocking and filtering people and ideas they don't like or agree with. Too often, they see reality only as what they (or the people on their mailing lists, blogs or p2p forums) think.
Although they consider themselves ferocious defenders of free speech, in theory, in practice many find differing opinions infuriating. Online, they have not grown up in a civil culture. Often, their hostility is a posture, a veneer.
They have profound, impressive grounding in technology, gaming and software, but big blank spots in many other areas of knowledge, including history, politics, mainstream culture -- fields not necessary to navigating online but definitely helpful in running the world.
No question they're among the leaders of the technological revolution spawned in cyberspace. But they are also kids, unprepared for the political, civic, ethical and headaches of leadership, or the responsibility that comes with running institutions. The first generation of computer kids is now running the tech world, and they've been universally sobered by the realities of economics and politics.
Does childhood end when computers come into their lives, as Jonathan Lebed's father laments in "Next"? I suspect there's some truth to the idea that things can get lost and values skewed when any single value system or interest -- computing, sports, music -- overwhelms a person's days and nights and crowds out everything else. The computer geeks and nerds I know seem healthiest to me when other powerful things in their lives help keep them grounded: close relationships with friends and parents, religion, a passion for chess, dogs, hiking ... whatever.
Despite the widening cultural gap, I still think older people have some things to teach them. One of the surreal things about being a kid, of course, is that you have no idea what you don't know or might need. Life's lessons and experiences, along with history, ethics and context, can be invaluable, and they're hard for 15-year-olds to come by on their own. The reality isn't so much that kids are taking over the world, but that the world has sometimes made them technological orphans, abandoned them to sophisticated machinery that few adults bother to comprehend.
Margaret Mead wrote years ago that the pace of cultural change in the West was accelerating so rapidly that the young were coming to believe they had nothing to learn from their elders. And that was before the Net. Her prediction has been fulfilled, more than even she imagined.
(Next -- Your feedback.)
They've learned a language (Score:2, Interesting)
The worst thing is that even though they understand the ways of computers better than most adults their skills are in reality scaringly limited to the relativly few youngsters that can comprehend the lower languages of computers. Todays 15-years-olds only know the top of it; how to surf the web and efficiently locate information, how to connect to IRC and communicate with their friends and how to interpret simple error messages and act on them. As children and young people they have an easy time learning languages, they've learned the GUI-language. How the computer GUI talks to its users and how they can talk to them, but they can't get deep down in the computer.
The worst thing about this is that the ones who do understand often is more educated than the rest but will become computer-engineers, -scientists or something else within those fields. The rest - who know the GUI-language - will make out the rest of the society. As Katz say they won't listen to older people and take the knowledge wich they have to offer because they belive they are intelectually superior. They're not, they just know a language older people hasn't had a chance to learn. These people are going to get the jobs like accountanting, nurses, teachers and if it gets really bad doctors and engineers. The knowledge average is falling and if todays 15 yearolds don't get a grip on themselfs it will be a free fall and a lot of F's will be given in school.
disappointed, really. (Score:4, Insightful)
And I can't tell you how infuriating it is every time I hear someone declare themselves l33t simply because they found more Jenna Jameson porn on the SMB network, or kick ass at Half-Life, or anything that doesn't require any significant self-education at all. It's sad; if more people wanted to learn this sort of thing, it's easier than ever, but a lot of folks just don't want to dig deeper into the mystery.
The scary part isn't how many kids become hackers, it's how many don't.
-grendel drago
the only difference (Score:1)
What 15 year olds are we talking about? (Score:2, Interesting)
This leads me to say that I find it somewhat unenlightening to read attempts such as these to sum up a generation in just a few paragraphs (spread among a few articles). This has been happening forever, I know, (just look at all that has been written about the baby boomers) but I think that these writings tend to focus on shallow issues.
There are some interesting observations to be made about a generation where the middle-class and wealthy are raised via the Internet, but I think this sort of thing needs to be approached carefully and with much thought and research, which doesn't seem to be apparent here.
they're just kids! (Score:2)
But even that doesn't matter nowadays. Public libraries provide free net access (which absolutely **rules**. And some fools thought that they were going to become irrelevant...) and most schools have labs in them.
Of course, the most cynical among us would say that poor kids can only make a difference the way they always, have, through senseless acts of violence that would make Beat Takeshi cringe.
The *real* problem can be seen if you log on to, say, Bolt.com's message boards. Bleah. Makes Slashdot look like some kind of academic colloquium. They act like... kids! Something Katz would never suspect.
-grendel drago
End of childhood... (Score:1)
katz again (Score:1, Flamebait)
"Despite the widening cultural gap, I still think older people have some things to teach [the 15 year olds]..."
Why does this get published on slashdot - anybody can sling together a bunch of obvious sentences and string them together to creat one of Jon Katz's essays. Jon Katz continues to be ignorant and oblivious to any real issues, and seems to write on whatever he pleases.
Don't get me wrong - I have found a gem or two of truth and good points throughout the the last year or two of JOn Katz's writing... but, just out of curiousity, would any other slashdot readers like a different author? I think it's safe to say that the majority of slashdot could care less about Jon Katz and his writing, and would rather push for someone more interesting and more in tune to the audience. Just because you have written a book or two doesn't make you better than the average slashdot reader who might have something more interesting to say, and can really feel what the audience wants.
This is not new (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it; when you were 15, what did you do? I'm willing to bet you snuck out of your house to go make some hell on the town, just like today's kids sneak down to their daddy's computer to do some packet sniffing. I'm willing to bet that you told your parents that you were going to a friend's house but instead went out joyriding with friends, just like today kids say they're using the 'net to "just look around" when they're downloading the latest 0-day exploits.
Come on, let's keep things in perspective here. Just like Brittney Spears, it's the same song, just with a different group of backup singers.
Re:This is not new (Score:2, Insightful)
now 15 year old kids are taking down corporate web servers, writing virii, writing software that negates copyrighting etc...
so, what i'm saying is that yes, we were all rebellious but the extend of our then-rebellion was nowhere near as far reaching and dangerous as "digital rebellion".
Re:This is not new (Score:2)
Big whoop. 15 year olds have been doing dumb things since the dawn of time. I personally would much rather see kids writing viruses and taking out web servers than see them chucking hunks of concrete off the overpass onto the highway. That's what the 15 year olds in my old hometown do for kicks. I had some friends when I was a kid that got caught doing this, and just recently another set of kids put an old lady in intensive care with this stunt. The kids involved weren't underprivileged, they weren't disturbed (well more than any 15 year old boy), they just were bored and stupid.
It scares the heck out of me every time I drive under that overpass, especially at night.
My father is a lawyer, and he worked quite a bit as a public juvenile defendent while I was growing up. I have heard plenty of stories about the dumb things that teenagers do. Believe me, writing a virus doesn't even make the top ten list.
Adding technology to the mix doesn't make for a revolutionary new breed of 15 year old. The "Digital Revolution" is hardly a revolution at all, and it certainly isn't more dangerous than the things that stupid 15 year olds did in 1950. Much more troubling in my mind is the growing number of 15 year olds who are in gangs and walking around armed with automatic weapons. Compared to that defacing a web server is hardly any cause for alarm at all.
Re:This is not new (Score:5, Insightful)
Listen, 15 years ago, I was a 15 year old script kiddie wannabe before script kiddies were even known as script kiddies who used to spend all my weekends in the back of a Radio Shack store messing around with a TRS-80 Model I Level II and an acoustically coupled 300 baud modem.
I used to hang out with a slightly older dude named Eberle (pronounced eh-ber-lee). Me, my buddy Mark, and Eberle did all kinds of weird and rebellious shit over that modem. The grunts working the cash register up front had no idea this stuff was going on in the back of their store. I remember there were a couple of really old (and really slow) BBS's that we used to connect to with the modem. We taught ourselves Z80 assembly, played a lot of Zork I (remember when Radio Shack used to sell Zork I and II in those plastic zip-lock bags), and messed around occasionally with the TRS-80 Model II -- the one with the big-ass 8 inch floppy drives.
We played Dungeons and Dragons, Avalon Hill's Squad Leader, and rode our motocross bikes with the yellow mag wheels up and down the streets like we owned the town. We slapped quarters on the front of Donkey Kong arcade games ("Hey, pal, I'm taking the next game.") and used to wonder if a perfect score on Pac Man was possible. We knew all the patterns, BTW. The arcade managers at the Aladdin's Castle in the mall where me and Mark and Eberle used to hang out wore these red vests and carried around rolls of tokens. They used to hang out in the backroom and would silently come over to us whenever Tron or Pole Position ate our quarters.
We used to hang out at the local high school in the computer labs where they had old, grizzed ex-IBM guys working and teaching there who let us use the Osbourne MicroAce's and Commodore PET's (remember those plastic keyboards?) and the TRS-80's. Forget Apple and all the color shit that became popular -- the computer of choice in our small, midwestern town with a single mall and lots of D&D players was the Radio Shack TRS-80. (We carried around our copies of Super Utility Plus so we could copy any copy protected disk that came our way.)
Eventually we got kicked out of the Radio Shack. We scared off a lot of customers, I guess. Plus, Eberle started growing facial hair, so he looked a little strange.
I started taking computer classes at the local college -- Fortran, Pascal, some Cobol -- and eventually won a TRS-80 Model III by guessing the combination of a lockbox full of twenty dollar bills at the local mall.
My friend Mark moved out of town, and Eberle
Radio Shack stopped selling TRS-80's not long after that. Everybody started talking about Commodore 64's and Apple II's and Timex Sinclar's and Atari 400 and 800's.
Aladdin's Castle tweaked the Pac Man game so we couldn't run patterns anymore, introduced Ms. Pac Man (which let us all down), and got rid of their Tron game (which rocked).
And that was that.
Not exactly rebels, but we had our moments. That TRS-80 and its 300 baud modem was a helluva cool little machine.
Re:This is not new (Score:3, Insightful)
See, I think that back 15 years ago, you had to be smart to use a computer. You had to read through books and manuals thicker and heavier than your computer before you could even figure out how to start it.
I don't think that the kiddies are getting smarter... If anything, I think they are getting dumber (I don't mean stupid). Kids now live in a world where anything they want to know is at their fingertips. This all started with the Sesame Street attention span.
These kids may be called smart. But they couldn't tell you what they learned in school today. It's not that they don't know, but they can't remember. The "Script" Kiddies may be taking down corporate web servers, but they don't know how they're doing it, they don't understand what they are doing.
To them, Code is taken to be just that, a series of commands put together to form a code to take down www.bigbucks.com or whatever. They don't see it as self expression, nor do they understand what it means. They just know that if they hit the carriage return, the server will go down.
Look, the fact of the matter is that when I was 15 (only five years ago), I hung out with my friends around the city. Wandering the streets causing whatever trouble we could find. It wasn't that I was a bad kid. It's just that, someone tells you not to smash a window, and it makes you all the more curious.
I remember my first window, the sound was beautiful. All that glass splintering and falling to the concrete... it was very satisfying, mainly because I knew that I would get in the shite if I was caught.
I haven't heard anyone tell the kids not to break windows anymore, and I am not seeing too many broken windows. I do see people telling kids not to trade or pirate software, music, videos, and just about anything else that 15 year-old boys trade, and I see that the kids now have a burnt copy of Eminem, have the Matrix on VCD, and just about every software application and exploit ever uploaded... But I don't think this makes them smart....
No, the internet kiddies are hoarders, and they're doing it, because people are trying to tell them that they can't.
Re:This is not new (Score:1)
My family was a "Nielsen family" in the late 70's. (I always left for school with my TV on PBS, just to help them out.) They connected the tuner via some encoder to a proprietary modem, and hooked up our house with a second phone line. Well, my brother and I got a Commodore VIC-20 with a modem for Christmas soon after. Just for fun, I unplugged the Nielsen equipment and plugged in the VIC, and VOILA! We were online!
We found BBS's, which led to passwords into corporate computers, etc. We didn't hack anything, we were just seeing where we could go. An account on a GM computer was a lot of fun. We had visions of redesigning next year's model, but it never came to fruition.
The funny part of this is that years later, we recalled all of this to our parents. They got a big laugh out of it. They said that the local Nielsen rep said that there were a number of strange phone calls on that second line, and they suspected computer hackers! Of course, they knew nothing at the time, so we got away with it.
I can't remember anything as thrilling as seeing "Welcome to General Motors" popping up on the screen back then. Well, wait a minute...yes, I can...but that's off topic. ;)
Re:This is not new (Score:2)
Had Compuserve for free at home because the store let me use their "free" account there (and I of course memorized the account info
I loved the Model III, it was in my eyes the first real computer they had going there.... but alas, they came out with he IBM crap and killed a nice line. So you must have screwed around at the apple store.... Cool! and too bad alladin's had to close.. only decent arcade in the town.
Re:This is not new (Score:2)
When I was fifteen, some school friends and I took over #France on Effnet using UNIX ping and the old Winbomb proggy.
Its amazing what a couple of years can do to maturity levels. All that stupid shit is behind me, and I'm using my time for somewhat productive things, like trying to teach myself Physics and watching Charlie Rose.
Still, the other guys involved in the takeover are getting busted for alcohol possesion and racking up driving tickets, all of which I have avoided, so the distribution of common sense/maturity isn't uniform. Heh.
Then-and-Now (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's my point: Before this "digital revolution", do you think that 15-year-olds were just happy people who only pulled girl's hair? Of course not. They broke windows (like taking down web servers). They spraypainted walls (like defacing websites). They shoplifted (like negating copyright). The fact that they're doing it online now and in a virtual world does not negate the fact that they've been doing this for YEARS.
What, do you think that those kids weren't prosecuted back then? Of course they were. And don't tell me that real-world crime has lighter ramifications; I think it's the other way around. Get caught cracking somebody's computer, get your computer use restricted for a couple of years and put on probation. Get caught breaking a window, and you pay for the window. Which would you rather have?
Re:Then-and-Now (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe if people didn't run such horribly insecure websites, then they would get taken over by 15 script kiddies. Here's a hint admins: try those bugtraq scripts, etc out for yourself on your own servers. See what you can do and learn. And then secure the damn things. I know your time is precious, and the web server currently "works as is". But seriously, take a few days a month to try hacking stuff, that's your job.
Hey man, Give use a break! (Score:2)
Re:Hey man, that's illegal (Score:2)
Weird but true.
Once... (Score:5, Insightful)
Once, I was at the Tower of London with a friend. We were looking at the crown jewels, and both of us were convinced they had to be fake. As we were discussing this, a woman in front of us overheard our conversation.
She turned around and looked at us very gravely and said, "Oh no, those are real."
To further cement her authority, she followed her assertion with a whispered explanation -
"I've been here before."
Re:Once... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Once... (Score:2, Funny)
Some reality, please... (Score:5, Informative)
At a heavy industrial engineering firm where I once worked, we had a **7 year** development program. That is, we took new hires, age 21-24, who had already completed degrees from top engineering schools and had at least two summers of intern experience, and put them through intensive real-world OJT. At the end of that time, _some of them_ (some!) understood enough about customer requirements, interpersonnel relations, project management, and engineering to make significant contributions to the company.
Along the same lines, I have seldom met a successful project or program manager under the age of 40. No matter how smart you are, or how much you "know", there is just too much that only experience can teach you.
Example: unless you have been through the hope/pitch/buy/implement/disappointment/CLEANUP/r
Nothing against kids (I was one once), but let's get back to reality.
sPh
What book learning really is... (Score:2)
In light of that, I think we've done a poor job of preparing our children for what to expect. I'm not talking about controlling teenage egos. History has shown that's an impossible feat. Even God couldn't prevent Adam + Eve from taking a bite. What I mean is that kids have a tough time adapting to the idea that the entire world isn't centered on them. I'm still young though, perhaps that's the way it's always seemed.
Experience with 15 y.o.s? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't really consider writing a book, some articles, and exchanging e-mails as experience with 15 y.o.s. Raising children and spending a lot of time with them (i.e. 24/7/365 of dealing with the good and bad) will make you more of an authority on that one, but that's just MHO. It's a real distant view that you're talking from, Jon.
I think it should be known that 15 y.o.s who:
Think they know everything.
Can be arrogant
Are unprepared for leadership
Surprise everyone with their creativity
Need to learn from adults
Re:Experience with 15 y.o.s? (Score:2)
Can be arrogant
Are unprepared for leadership "
Um, yes. Its called HORMONES. Seriously, has anyone considered the physiological aspect of this? Its not just psychology and peer pressure, you know.
Net finds EXCEPTIONAL 15 year olds (Score:2)
So are most 30 year olds and 60 year olds.
However the powerful of the Net is that it increases
the connectivity of human society in a way such
to draw out exceptional individuals.
The history of human progress is in finding
better ways of organizing groups of people.
For example, take the maligned "corporation".
It is only about 150 years old, but now is the
dominant method of generating wealth.
Previously people organized production in small
family businesses or huge state organizations.
The corporation had to wait progressive ideas
about property law and monetary credit.
The internet is another organizing force.
When it is understood it may have great potential.
the problem is ... (Score:5, Interesting)
But back to reality, and to the article. I don't see the widening gap. At least not with the 15 and 16 year olds I deal with on a bi-weekly basis.
One of my favorite stories is when on a youth retreat I was giving a short talk on "life'd dirty little secrets" ... which includes one of my favorites ... sometime, between the age of 25 and 30, you wake up one day .... and much to your horror, you realize ... mom & dad were RIGHT!
No lie, when I said that, one young lady put her hands on her ears and screemed "NNOOOOOOOOOO!".
Now I'm no expert. Heck, I'm a coder. But I'm at least cogent enough to recognize the following three things.
I'll say things, and/or give advice that their parents give ... but because it came from lips, and not that of their parents ... they are more likely not to roll their eyes and moan. Not because I'm some great sage, but because I'm convinced teens that age are wired that way so they don't wind up living in the basement when they're 45.
Second, 15 and 16 year olds get bored real fast. I've done some computer projects with them, for Boy Scouts, church groups, you name it. Alot of energy at first, but when it comes down to the maintenence phase of a project ... hello ? is anyone out there ... ? Nope, they're all at the Taco Bell snarfing down things that now keep this old fart up all night.
Third ... they do listen ... they just pretend they're not so they look cool in front of their friends.
The point is, teenagers are great, fun and a pain all at once. What I enjoy, and what I get out of them is their energy and their enthusiasm and hope for the future. While I would never want to be that age again, I do enjoy being around them as it keeps me a bit younger at heart.
The problem is, in many respects we ask teenagers to grow up too fast, especially when it comes to marketing and merchandising.
Irresponsible things to tell impressionable youth (Score:2)
Which, of course, is going to be true for some people and absolutely untrue for many others. As someone who is 37 and has travelled around the world twice, lived on three different continents, and has been around a fair amount I can honestly tell you that my parents, both of them, were wrong about just about everything. I won't go into excruciating detail except to say that religion and rational thought do not mix well and to add that every human being, adult or not, parent or not, is certain to be wrong about something.
No lie, when I said that, one young lady put her hands on her ears and screemed "NNOOOOOOOOOO!".
Which, since you have no idea what her parents might have said, much less whether it was "true" in any sense of the word, her reaction to your comment might have been a natural, even rational. For all you know she was being raped by her father and her mother was telling her it "get used to it baby, cause it aint never gonna stop" which would be both untrue and appalling, and coupled with your assertion would make suicide by even the most painful means appealing.
Parents are no more "right" or wrong than anyone else
As to the three points you make, I couldn't agree more.
Geeky 15 year olds (Score:2, Funny)
Lets admit here that jonkatz' articles are really about 15 year old BOYS. He's ignoring geeky 15 year old girls. Girls don't want porn, and usually aren't as devoted gamers as guys. Why is that? What do girls go online for? How are young women changing the web? I know from experience that we are less encouraged to become hardcore programmers. But are encouraged to become journalists or graphics people.
As the internet grows, everyone can start playing on an even playing field. regardless of age,race,and social standing. Thats the real story. You guys are all talking about 15 year olds? NO, just geeky 15 year old boys. We all know why guys go on the net; games and PORN. Yes, thats right, free porn that you don't have to hide under your matress. Genious. Then, after porn and games, they go wandering and
Re:Geeky 15 year olds (Score:2)
This is all Katz needed to write. Right here.
Not just the 15 yr olds... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, they are not the ones that will help to extend the reach of computing know how, or probably ever isnstall software on their own. But they are eager to learn and willing to ask for help when they get into trouble. Something that I would like to see happen to all children is to have their grandparents get online. This would allow the children to teach the grandparents what they know, and the grandparents to impart some of life's wisdom on the children.
I think that in order to truly understand how computers are affecting the children, adults need to do little more than to sit down with their own kids and listen to them. Having just gone through those teenage years, I can tell you it is nice when an adult will listen to you and learn from you.
If you truly want to understand the way that a child views the internet, do not spy on their browsing or watch over their shoulder, get involved. You will find that most children are very receptive to learning from someone willing to learn from them.
Re:Not just the 15 yr olds... (Score:2)
Steven
Weakness of American Culture - not geeks. (Score:2)
Once again, Mr Katz brings up an interesting issue. But once again addresses it without rigor. Mr Katz, being an alternative to big media sound-bites is not merely a matter of bringing up issues that they ignore, it is a matter of METHODOLOGY.
I submit to you some suggestions to experiment with:
1)Go through your writing and do a simple old propositional analysis (p or not p).
2)When you are comfortable with step 1, try using Hegalian dialectic.
3)When you are all ready to go, come back with a post-structuralist chainsaw and some deconstructionist C4 and give us the articles we have been waiting for.
-Peace and love are for rich people only.
Is Weakness Cultural or Geek? (Score:2)
Um, Rwanda, isn't that the place near Florida that isn't quite a state yet? I think J.Lo came from there.
Born too early? (Score:2, Interesting)
I fiddled with them, learned the basics of programming, did some repairs. It was a hell of a lot of fun, but there really wasn't that much I could do, since I only got a few hours a day with them when I was lucky, and I had almost zero information on how they worked. I persevered, managed to find a couple of books and magazines, and stole time from classes to the point where I would have failed 8th grade if I hadn't moved to another city first and my records got "lost" (did I mention that these same Apple ]['s were used to store school records?). Anyway, the next year I was in a school with no computers and wound up on the football team, grew up to work in construction and then joined the Air Force as an electronics tech.
It's hard to describe what discovering the Internet while I was in the Air Force was like. Imagine you have this overpowering thirst, and all you have to drink through is a little cocktail straw. That was what my entire life had been like for me and learning, there was so much capacity for information in my head, and I couldn't even come close to satisfying it. The things I wanted to know weren't in the library, or if they were they were in this incredibly cryptic academic language I couldn't follow.
In 93, that changed completely. Here was an incredible amount of information at my fingertips, and people who understood it and were willing to explain it to me. It was like going from that cocktail straw to a 4 inch firehose: For the first time in my life, the only limit on how much I could learn was how fast I could read and how long I could stay awake.
I was still young enough to make the switch back to my geek roots, but I have to wonder, if I had been a few years older when the Internet came around to something the public could reach, what would have happened? How many bright kids, without the money to go to college or the discipline to work their way through, lapsed into discontented mundanity like I almost did?
Now, kids like I was don't have to deal with the conformity-hammering pressures that turned me into a jock and a construction worker. While still young enough to have flexibility of mind, and the physical support of their parents, they get access to this *incredible* resource, in which they can find out literally *anything*. So you get kids like Lebed and company, who can reach their full potential, and that potential turns out to be phenomenal.
Do they lack maturity? Yeah, they do. Only time and mistakes can confer maturity. That's not the important question. the important question, is maturity neccessarily the enemy of flexibility and capacity to absorb information? When these kids *do* grow up, will they be supplanted by a new batch and become the old guard? Or are we at a transition point of history, from one where most of our best and brightest are stunted by their upbringing to one where we can expect a *lot* of people who are extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgable, comfortable with change, *and* have the advantages that experience gives?
I officially became old the other day. I walked into a shoe store and looked at these shoes that could have been props from a sci-fi movie, and realized that I would feel completely ridiculous wearing them. It has to make me wonder: Right now, I'm working on the cutting edge, but in five years am I going to be looking at a 20-something who knows things about what the world has become I can't understand? Will that 15 year-old now, 20-something then, find himself equally supplanted in 10 more years?
It's been said that experience is nothing more than the opportunity to practice your mistakes. Is that joke going to become a truism?
--Dave Rickey
well, while Katz worships 15-year-olds .. (Score:2, Redundant)
-not hiring
-wants an MCSE or a CNE or any other BS certification
-wants a college degree for tech suppr0t
I've sent my resume out to five different companies and haven't heard back from one. I've had my friends check their connections to different people. No one is hiring. Drives me nuts.
Really, only Katz thinks that 15-year-olds are the leaders of the Net. I think that everyone is working against me.
Re:well, while Katz worships 15-year-olds .. (Score:1)
Anyway, good luck with your job hunt.
Employment in IT Today (Score:2)
- Enthusiasm - this means you want to work in IT and are willing to do the hours - note please this does not mean that if you are an uber leet linux hacker you are enthusiastic - Corporate IT deals with clients so you have to be enthusastic at dealing with their problems
- Experience - sorry guys if you dont have it then you will find getting work hard - MCSE's do NOT count as experience - if a 14 year old kid can get one if he pays the money then they are no balance of skill - the answers to the exams and information is readily available thus they are not worth the paper they are printed on without relevant experience to back it up - this means minimum 12 months in my case - and it must be relevant - if you have an MCSE (you finished it last week) but 5 years experience as a helpdesk operator or a programmer then im afraid you wont get a job with most companies as a network admin. (NOte i dont exclude graduates here - my experience of managing and hiring graudates is they come out of Uni with great skills in some areas but lousy skills in many others - most of them have no practical experience in IT) and finally a comment on relevance - working in Radios Shack or Frys etc in the service dept even is a good job but it doesnt qualify you to start as a network admin for me - i wont hire staff for technical support without helpdesk experience - its where i started and where all my staff start (even my senior guys have too do 2 weeks helpdesk to get the feel of the company when they start)
- Humility - the number one fault i see in young applicants is arrogance. They think they know it all and have no time for anyone who does not agree - they often have very strong opinions but lack the tact to control themselves. Remeber that when you go for a job the employer is hiring you for what he wants - if the job is as a Desktop Support engineer in an MS house running Dell machines then you MUST be willing to do this job without complaining (and evangalising about Linux every day is the same as complianing) - you dont make the decsions on Os's etc at lower levels and at higher levels you do what the company asks - this is the price of taking the dollar BUT
- Intelligence - I personally look for staff who will think outside of the box and suggest things that may improve our systems - maybe cost saving network ideas, patches for servers, new ways to work, and thus you should always be willing to offer reasoned and intelligent comment (if your company wants it) But be carefull this becomes arrogance all too often - learn humility.
-Appearance - You would not believe the number of times i have had applicants turn up unshaven, dressed in rumpled clothes or T Shirts and jeans ! im only young so i try to see past it but this organsiation is a Suit and Tie workplace - i expect an interviewee to at the very least wear a clean pressed shirt , a tie, work shoes and be clean and presentable (brushed teeth, hair etc) if you can't turn up and interview with me looking like you want the job then you are not gonna get it - and my advice to all of you is buy a suit - spend what you can afford - and good shoes and look after them - i am always impressed with a youn guy who hs taken the time and effort to prepare
- Preparation - learn about the company (at least know how big they are and what they do) you all have web access so there is NO excuse for not knowing a bit about a prospective employer
- network - find older people in IT and get to know them, ask questions, LISTEN TO THE ANSWERS - most of us try to help out the younger guys and get them in the industry but you have to show some interest in our knowledge and not try and appear uber leet to us - we dont care a bit about a web page you and your crew hacked, or the virus you wrote or your frag count, we like people who want to learn about corporate IT and how to deal with it. (ps if you dont like dealing with people and taking phone calls then forget IT and find another industry - no matter how good you are your first roles will be lower level - helpdesk or desktop support and these are customer contact areas)
- Stick at it - turn up to work on time, do your job, work what hours are needed and learn what you can.
- Resume - clean, clear, consice and up to date - no fluff, simple descriptions and a list of skills and realistic ratings on those skills (ie: excellent knowledge, good knowledge, working knowledge, exposure to) no fluff and a few good references will get you in the interview room - from that point its up to you.
How to find work is hard for anyone - the industry is in a slump and people arent hiring as much - what i and most people i know look for are people with broad skill ranges - they know both Linux and Windows and a range of applications, they have some hardware knowledge and basic networking skills and are willing to learn.
My best advice is look in the papers and on the web and think about the contracting companies and headhunters very carefully before you use them (in Aus these companies cannot charge the appicant for their services - not sure how it is in the US) these guys will lie to you, steal from you and can make or break your reputation.
Hope this helps some people (forgive my spelling OK)
Re:well, while Katz worships 15-year-olds .. (Score:2)
Offer to work for sub-par pay - meaning on an hourly basis. It sucks, but it's a foot in the door. Show them what you can do. There WILL be someone who will want to hire you. You just have to find them. Getting a job at a tech firm isn't that easy, particularly entry-level, so you have to be willing to work for less. But once you do, it's on your resume, and other companies will be a lot more open if they see you have experience in the corporate field.
Good Luck!
Pizza Hut, Wendy's, and McDonald's (Score:2, Insightful)
Are hiring. Youre not going to get much else as a 16-year old unless a parent or someone else you know hooks you up. Companies do not hire summer workers and after-school part-timers into career-type positions.
The fact is, your first job is not going to help you down the road. Its very rare that it will be on your resume. You learn about the job market and workplace in general. You develop a work ethic and learn to appreciate the value of the money you do earn. Its supposed to be a type of real-world extension of your education.
Re:well, while Katz worships 15-year-olds .. (Score:2)
The trick isn't to find a small company (we're 41,000+) - it's to have something to offer the company. Even better, be able to offer them something they can't get anywhere else.
Most kids today, even at 16, aren't mature enough to handle a real job. I'm 20, and I have a career job. I couldn't have done it at 16. 18, maybe. 19, I did. You need to be human. Not cocky. You need to understand that you probably don't have all that much to offer that they can't get from someone that's probably more reliable than you are. Why hire a 16 year old to do shell scripting when you can get a 25 year old that has reliable transportation and a few years of work experience?
Younger kids have too much working against them: issues that employers don't want to deal with, lack of experience, lack of a degree (which tells an employer "Hi, I'm tough enough to stick out 4 long years to get this piece of paper" - lucky, I got by without this one), etc.
My advice to the kids: get a job at Pizza Hut or the local grocery store or Wal Mart and start saving your cash. Get your own computer to practice stuff on. Get good with UNIX (a *lot* of companies need people with UNIX experience). Start programming. Send your resume not to 5 companies, but to 500. Develop your own style. Make a good impression in an interview. Ask your dad how to do this. Life's not easy. There aren't career jobs for 16 year olds. Maybe if you're lucky, you'll be ready for one by the time you're 19. Start now.
Re:well, while Katz worships 15-year-olds .. (Score:2)
Woot, isn't that great?! Instead of doing a low-end dirty boring computer job that will not look good on a resume and will not lead to any advancement or additional job skills, you can enter the rewarding and high-paced field of fast-food service that usually gives one a few dollars more then minimum wage so you can support an extravegant lifestyle.
Wish I had thought of that.
Seriously though, apply, apply, apply. Someone will screw up and hire you. Worse comes to worse, go for the low-paying tech job, learn skills, and then ditch your present employer for one that will pay more, based on your work experience. Or else consult, do simple PC repair. Invest a few hundred into looking official, and just have a second phone line. Charge something like $30/hour to do the work, it'll be lower then the competition, but more then you can make at Kmart.
Who needs politics (Score:2, Insightful)
Absolutely... (Score:5, Insightful)
For somebody who likes to bash mass media - you sure love to cater to their stereotypes of the internet today dont you? I mean most 15 year olds on the net are either sitting on AOL (some on
The Net does not cause this. Children have always been this way to a certain extent (as our society gets more liberal - the children become more uncontrollable it seems). For you to simply point the finger at the internet and say "thats why" all while assuming that this is the product of some deviant open source, copyright infringing lifestyle - is fickle to say the least. And yes that if anything would be the deviant lifestyle. You seem live under this wonderful assumption that all children today have access to computers and all of the kids are up and coming computer scientists willing to work for free. Bullshit.
Jon - come back to earth. The Net is not life. Life is not the Net. Perhaps you should begin writing fictional stories (some might argue that you do already) instead of editorializing. I believe you might find more acceptance on that platform. The fact is most kids online just sit around and IM their buddies on AOL or yahoo all day long. Some look for MP3s. Some check email. Most of them are not future Fortune 500 CEOs.
Get back in touch man.
Gam
"Flame at Will"
Re:Absolutely... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thought that was relevant here.
-grendel drago
Patting one's self on the back... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I'm glad to see you only need to know "a bit" about a subject to write a book about it.
what computers CAN teach teenagers (Score:2)
And as the article from which this list is derived, this training should begin at home. Perhaps one of the problems is, we just toss the kid in front of the computer to learn, the same as we toss them in front of the TV to babysit ?
One other thing, and it is the one thing a computer cannot teach (though it can be a source of) ... how to deal with life's hard knocks, including failure, guilt, sickness, disappointment and death.
And it is in that above category, I have no problems getting the attention of the teenagers I work with.
Re:what computers CAN teach teenagers (Score:2)
You forgot anatomy.
This is profound .... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is profound ... how? When I was 15 I didn't have Internet access. I was still many of the good and bad things listed above and I can bet that 15 year olds for many decades if not centuries could be akin to this description. For once Jon is right. 15 year olds are arrogant. The reason that they are arrogant on the Internet is because they grew up with it. Oh well simple minds, simple concepts. At least Jon is dead on with this article, he's just stating the obvious :)
Stupid People are of all ages (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Stupid People are of all ages (Score:2)
No more so than in any other age group; kids today are the same as the previous few generations, they just are lucky enough to get so many opportunities.
Re:Stupid People are of all ages (Score:2)
Not enough credit (Score:2, Insightful)
If you reread the Katz post you will notice that he actually refrained from lumping all 15 year olds into the same boat. He did state that while some of them are into the hostility and posturing that gives them a sense of superiority, he also mentioned that some refrain from such acts.
I work in computer sales and I see many diferent people from all walks of life. I can agree with you about how that statement can refer to some older people.
For instance there are these two punks that are near my age that come in every once in a while. They believe that they know everything and everyone else is just not worth their time. They are abrasive, rude and generally dificult to talk with.
A very wise man told me recently that a truly inteligent man knows what he doesn't know. Basically, all that means is that you can learn something new every day, there will always be someone that knows more about something than you do.
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Re:Same deal. (Score:1)
You spend half a dozen hours a day, or a dozen a day in summer, in front of the screen, you learn a thing or two.
Re:Same deal. (Score:2)
Not true. My brother has been doing this for the past two years, and he still has to ask me to how to do even the most elementary things - like, change his homepage. He's a smart kid - he just has no urge to do anything on his computer but play games. As a result, he has learned almost nil about his system.
Re:Same deal. (Score:2, Interesting)
And they're not getting a tan, either.
Computer use *can* lead to great things, but that's a far cry from saying it *will*.
-grendel drago
I have a geeky 15 year old (Score:2, Interesting)
I bought him his fist machine when he was about 8 years old. When he was 9 he got himself into a little bit of "trouble" online. the appropriate authority figures threw a good scare into him and he's stayed out of trouble (so far as we know) ever since. I've probably spent between 8,000 and 10,000 dollars on his hardware and software. there have been times when I was worried that the computer would be his ruin, but in the end, I know I did the right thing. he's way ahead of the game when it comes time to earn his own living. My evening job is freelance technical writer. My son is doing technical edits for me before I submit the manuscripts to the publisher for further editing.
I'm damn proud of him. His social skills are improving, occasionally I can even drag him away from the computer for a day of fly fishing, or driving lessons (he swears he'll never buy a car with a clutch!). Overall he's turning out to be a positive contributing member of society. In the end, that's really what matters.
Not just the net...I was a 15yr. old geek. (Score:2, Insightful)
> value system.
Computers in general give kids a feeling of power and ability they might not feel elsewhere. I was that 15yr. old geek reading "Byte" (the one good computer tech magazine) in study hall. But since my dad worked at an engineering firm and nobody there knew how to code, I was hired.
Somebody else said they haven't met a project manager under 40 that's any good...well, I'm tired of "I've been doing this for twenty years, so I know what I'm doing." Give me a REAL, rational reason for what you're doing, instead of claiming experience. I've been doing this for almost twenty years, too.
Elders (Score:2, Insightful)
Most adults today have the perception that it's ok to just be a member of society, work, save, have a family, and die, and that's it! They don't think about the fact that they have a chance to really gain some profound knowledge during their lifetime, and pass it on to others... They don't have a concept of the "Elder", because most of them didn't have anyone like that to guide them.
Does anyone realize that this is precisely the problem with our schools today? Why don't kids respect teachers or other adults? It's not really because they don't understand technology or the latest game. It's because they don't have any profound knowledge to pass on. They're not wise. They don't have the self-confidence of a proud grandfather, so kids don't feel any reason to respect them.
Some of this has become clear to me through my practice of martial arts -- my teacher is truly wise, and his son respects him, not because he's his father, but because he knows so much, and knows he knows it ;) He is a shining example of the wise old man, and he can beat the crap out of any frat-boy football player in his prime...
People must command respect. They can't just expect people (even kids) to respect them simply because they're older. Many seem to have forgotten this basic truth of our instinctive culture.
Eldoration (Score:2)
> a member of society, work, save, have a family, and die, and that's it!
I understand completely the point you're trying to make with this, which is that there are those who feel that going through life while avoiding any unnecessary effort to truly grasp the wisdom that falls to them is acceptable, and that they deserve respect even though they've learned nothing worthy of it, and I agree that it's a crying shame. You need to consider, however, that there are those who do the things you describe, and little more, and still manage to amass great wisdom in the doing of them. My grandfather is one such person, and I'll warrant your sensei is another. The things you listed are not things that prevent one from learning, and in fact most of them can be sources of profound insight. The point is that you should be more clear in stating to whom your message applies. To imply a lack of wisdom based only on a simple life is disrespectful, often of people who deserve that respect highly.
Virg
Re:Elders (Score:3, Insightful)
I've got to disagree totally with this; first of all, the idea that elders are superior hasn't developed in "recent years"--it's an idea that's been around for thousands of years. And it hasn't really started to change until recently, when the mass media started inundating TV and movies with the idea that adults are clueless and kids can be totally independent, which is of course wrong.
People must command respect. They can't just expect people (even kids) to respect them simply because they're older. Many seem to have forgotten this basic truth of our instinctive culture.
Again, I don't think this is an instinctive part of our culture. And just about everybody deserves respect; it's polite to show it even if you don't feel it. Plus, kids are too inexperienced to even tell in many cases whether an adult has something to pass on or not; and in any case, EVERYONE has something to pass on, even if they're not some wise guru sitting on a mountaintop divulging the mysteries of the universe.
Re:Elders (Score:2)
In tribal (I guess that's a better term than primitive) societies there's usually an institutionalized age/status system, and while a younger man might actually lead, the older members are usually given respect simply because of their age.
In some cases I'm sure this is true, but I believe that the vast majority of kids, even from a very very young age, can tell who is really wise and who isn't. There's an aura about them. A knowing smile, but never condescending...
Still have to disagree with you here; I don't think wisdom is so cut-and-dry. You can have a vicious, curmudgeonly, condescending, sarcastic old teacher who might be incredibly brilliant in his or her field. You may have someone who is totally ignorant of anything remotely approaching an academic discipline, but they may be a master of something mundane. I think you can learn from anyone.
Our problem is that our present culture tells us we must assume that the older people are wiser, even though many of them are not.
Again, I have to disagree; our present culture is, compared to the rest of human history, amazingly lacking in respect for older members of society.
Senseis (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, age can cause one to give the benefit of the doubt. But I know several adults who are, frankly, useless, irresponsible infants who just happen to be over forty.
Yes, experience is the greatest teacher. But that doesn't mean that everyone older than me has it. And, of course, age says absolutely nothing about raw talent.
-grendel drago
Wow. (Score:1)
Eh, I'm not too crazy about most Eastern culture. Too little individuality, which sort of goes along with tradition and respect and so on.
People think of `Sensei' as meaning `teacher', but it literally means `born before'. Luckily, `born' is interpreted to mean `started doing X'.
And I have really no idea how to feel about my elders, my father especially. He spent ten years in college, and is relatively esteemed in his profession, but frequently seems incapable of expending the mental effort to avoid asking brain-numbingly stupid questions sometimes.
Eh, I just don't know.
-grendel drago
Re:Elders (Score:2)
None of the faculty from my old high school could get this through their heads no matter now many times I explained it. They would ask me why I didn't 'respect' my teachers, and when I replied that they hadn't done anything to earn my respect the shocked look I got back said a lot about what was going through my principals head at the time. Apparently young people are expected to respect the old simply for being old, that's just ludicrous. I respect my grandparents and my parents because they have seen and done things I haven't and can give me insight into how the world works that I haven't yet obtained for myself. My teachers were for the most part bitter, ignorant, and unwilling to accept anything that wasn't in their teachers guide. There were a few shining exceptions to this rule, as there always are.
But really, I can completely understand why teenagers have no respect for teachers and a lot of other older people, especially of the 25-35 range, a lot of that age group hasn't really done anything with their lives except work... And no one wants to hear someone bitch about how all they ever do is work...
Kintanon
Katz, please find something new to write about. (Score:3, Insightful)
Here are some realities that Katz needs to grasp:
-The grand majority of "geeks" he is placing on a pedestal are merely antisocial teens who play too much Quake and spend most their time in UNIX changing their window managers. I know this because I was a wise-cracking teenaged "UNIX geek" only a few years ago.
-The most knowledgeable (sp?), clever, annd innovative computer people out there are the same people who are married with children; the normal men and women who don't get a great deal of attention in the media. This is mainly because "computer smarts" comes mainly from knowledge built from years of experience, not any kind of magical teenaged link to the wonders of bits and bytes. Anyone with both an academic and production backgroun in software will confirm this.
Please, Katz, realize the above points and move on. A couple articles a couple years ago was OK, but you've been milking this for far too long. Just move on and find some other subculture you can leech on; at the very least teen geeks arent even worth it.
Nonsense... (Score:3, Informative)
When I was 15 I was also a wannabe, programing away in pascal and basic, sometimes in ASM, and thinking I really understood a lot about computers.
Of course 10 years latter, now working in the core network of an ISP, I realize how stupid I was, and how ignorant I was...
Re:Nonsense... (Score:2, Interesting)
Howevere it leads to an interesting discussion. I think most of the people on
These's a debate in the UK at the moment over the value of gap years - a year spent doing charity work / travelling overseas between finishing high school and starting at college. Originally it was an interesting way of gaining experience, maturity and learning to grow up. Now its a case of middle class kids being expected to do this and all following a set formula for where they go and what they do while away.
So are these script kiddies actually breaking the mould or doing exactly what the previous generation did but for the wrong reasons? I've always wondered whether the net community follows the three generation rule* or whether, because we get people from so many different backgrounds we mitigate the effects and avoid revolution. Any comments?
*Three generation rule - First generation do things because of a flaw in the system and to fulfil a need. The second generation are indoctrinated but usually dont question. Third generation question second and fail to get reasonable responses. Thus revolution and the next cycle.
Gap years (Score:1)
Just as an aside, the real reason so many students in the UK now take a gap year between sixth form and university is the funding situation. Most who take a year out don't travel, they work, to provide some basic finance to support them as they start their university career.
This is an obvious consequence of the government pushing a system where the educatee pays for him/herself (loans instead of grants, tuition fees, etc.) but the business world is not yet really appreciating this and paying much afterwards. (That is changing, but has yet to reach the situation in places like the US.)
Sadly, this means that the opportunity to take a year out and actually develop yourself is getting less and less common in the UK, however much carefully massaged statistics might suggest otherwise.
Gaping Hole (Score:5, Insightful)
Katz is right about one thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
Speaking of social skills ... (Score:2)
You mean knowing all the names of all the Pokemon isn't useful? My son knows them in English, French, and Japanese
Seriously, I think a common thread to most of the posts today, all from
Look, we're not gonna uncheck it in our settings, because we know that just encourages more hapless victims to read it. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away.
So, to sum up - Jon, get a life. Teens have way more important things to do than you describe, and geekdom is usually a symptom, not a goal. My son was describing the social scene amongst the teens and preteens yesterday and the groups they were in. Some of us spend a bunch of time with kids, some tech, some not. And we all think Jon is really pushing it with this series.
Drop the series. Stop "having" to write in magazine article length and chopping it into snippets. That is so last century, so pulp paper magazine concept. I've sold many stories to zines and magazines and published in a number of countries for bucks and we all know the drill.
Read your users. We want short, sharp, insightful snippets with links to the boring crap. Stop insulting our intelligence with these recastings of longer "theorizing" or "mythologizing" articles that you broke up because we got angry when you went on for 3 screens. Adapt to the media or get out.
Go out and find some real stories - maybe about rave paraphenalia becoming illegal and how blinky electric things are a new fad sweeping the world. Maybe something about how cell phones are now so popular that they're becoming passe. Do some real work, get a fresh insight. But don't feed us this old old line, ok?
Same assumptions... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a long held stigma that teenagers have no respect for their elders, teenagers think they're invincible, teenagers know everything...the list goes on. Not that it doesn't have some truth, but the fact is, this idea has been around long before everyone flooded the net.
The net isn't making kids any more disrespectful of their elders, or any more invincible, or any more knowledgable. It is, however, making them more of a presence. 30 years ago the geek in the corner was the geek in the corner. Now the geek in the corner has met up with hundreds of others.
It's quite possible that this isn't such a negative thing -- for every obnoxious, annoying kid on the net there's another one who is getting a lot of support from it.
It's just easier to focus on the troublemakers -- they're the ones that want to be noticed anyway. But to say that the net made them that way isn't really correct. It just made them more obvious.
Re:Same assumptions... (Score:2)
Re:Same assumptions... (Score:3, Interesting)
As humans are hunter/gatherers in order to get smaller (teen sized) folk out into the world they need a heavy dose of I Am Invincible or they'd never leave their mother's side.
Re:Same assumptions... (Score:2)
Indeed... Socrates made similar comments regarding teenagers in 400BC or so.
Simon
Yes and No (Score:2, Insightful)
The same can be said for any interest a teen has, and the peer group that surrounds that interest. This is part of being a teenager. They haven't been orphaned to technology (or sophisticated machinery), so much as orphaned (or abandoned as you say) to puberty. Teens are angry because they're awkward, misunderstood, touchy, and frustrated by their lack of control or freedom. Music can be just as much of an escape as technology, and fewer adults attempt to comprehend The Sonic Death Monkeys, than try to understand computers.
Andrew
There goes my karma (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm generally no fan of Jon Katz, but I have to applaud the following:
Except that I'd draw the line closer to 25 than 15, I couldn't have said it better myself. It's an almost perfect description of the majority here on slashdot or in the other forums Katz mentions. Web-connected young techies seem very acutely aware of how much they know, and insistent on that knowledge's importance, but startlingly (disgustingly) unaware and dismissive of all that they don't know. It's like the urge to learn is short-lived, taking them only so far before that curiosity disappears and their opinions harden into stone after only a few years. Few and far between, seemingly, are those who continue to admit the limits of their knowledge and set about making new discoveries after those first couple of years. I'm sorry, but as long as I can meet dozens of people a year who have performed and innovated at a high level for a decade or more[1], I will remain unimpressed by people with only a couple of years of less-than-stellar achievement under their belts. Enfants terribles are a dime a dozen, and their inflated sense of their own worth and importance is what brought us the dot-bomb crash.
[1] Yes, such people are also a small minority. Far more ten-year guys[2] have "one year ten times" and not ten years of continuous learning/innovation. That's kind of the point. Just about everyone has a few good years in them. The two-year guy hasn't proven he has anything more than that and, statistically, he's far more likely to fall into the "one year ten times" category, so why does he think he's so exceptional?
[2] It is pretty much just guys I'm talking about. I've known some female developers in my time, including my wife, but the patterns of performance and stagnation among them seem quite different than what we're talking about[3].
[3]Any Pratchett fans out there?
Re:There goes my karma (Score:2)
This is pretty amusing. In the first 15yo thread, I said that's the way adolescents have always behaved, and I got flamed for it. Now I'm getting flamed for limiting my comments to a particular subset of adolescents. There is, apparently, nothing one could say on the matter that won't draw fire from someone who's 15 years old at heart and feels threatened. What better evidence could one ask for that some people just come here to harass others instead of discussing things like adults?
On a more topical note, I still do think there's something distinct about net-connected 15yo techies compared to others their age. There's a level of social reinforcement for their arrogance that didn't exist before. It used to be that little pockets of interest would form by town or neighborhood. God help the kid who was interested in model rocketry while the other kids in the immediate area were all into model trains, or vice versa. The "odd man out" would gain no status or respect through their knowledge. Now, though, it's different. Anybody can hop on the web and find some sort of community based around their interests. They can obtain resources and advice, or respect and status, from their globally dispersed peers. They can spend a great deal of their time in such one-dimensional communities in what amounts to one big circle jerk, instead of being brought down by constant contact with people who consider their preoccupation silly or worthless. Often, they can parlay their narrow interests into highly paid jobs, stroking their egos even furthers. This is very different from the way things used to be, or the way they still are among less-connected people, where potential community members might never meet even when they live very close to one another. Try to find a good marbles player in your area without using the net, then compare that experience to what happens when you ask a similarly obscure computer-related question on the net.
The *tendency* toward this sort of behavior has indeed always been there, but the environment turns tendencies into a much more common reality. The factors that used to mitigate such arrogance have disappeared, and new factors that accentuate it have come into play.
That's not the same thing as confusing hostility with communication. While a certain level of intergenerational suspicion is natural (as I pointed out last time around), extension of that suspicion even to one's peers - even those who offer only well-meaning questions or advice - is the mark of a sociopath. Unfortunately, such indiscriminate anti-social behavior is only reinforced by ubergeeks who go out of their way to create a false association between creativity and irritability. The received lesson from these "negative role models" is often that you can't be a true ubergeek yourself unless you snap at people constantly, so the impressionable kids emulate that behavior. This is not the same relationship that has traditionally existed between 15-year-olds and their mentors or role models.
Thank you for your demonstration of arrogant posturing. The point here is that 'net culture encourages such posturing, as described above.
Again, you're demonstrating the exact same behavior that Katz attributes to 15-year-olds. How old are you, anyway?
Kids have always tried to filter out messages they didn't want to hear. However, the information deluge of the last twenty years has made quite a difference. Every cause, no matter how ridiculous or narrowly defined, has its champions on the net. With so many "channels" to choose from, an impressionable kid can be far more selective about which messages they hear than they could ever be before. If you read the daily newspaper, you'll get more-or-less decent information on a whole range of topics, written from a more-or-less objective POV. If you read Slashdot instead, you'll get information that's not only more limited in scope but also more consistently slanted towards a particular set of philosophical and political views. The kids Katz talks about are the ones who read Slashdot, and that does make them different from other kids who read the paper.
The inevitible will happen (Score:2, Insightful)
Give the "15 year olds" time, and they will have experience. What was I doing at 15? That was over half my life ago, it is hard to remember. Worrying about getting a driver's licence, if I would ever get laid, why I couldn't get all the points on the bonus levels of Galaga, how to throw a curve ball, etc.
I didn't really have a life, and now kids have one online, even though it isn't real. They'll figure it out, or they won't make it. Eventually they will have to interact with real people, and will be in for a shock. But they are willing to jump in with both feet, and by doing so make mistakes. They can learn from them, and get better, or crawl into their own little world and become outcasts.
We had the same thing, technology is just an added pressure. Does anyone care that I sucked at Defender? (not now, but I felt like a dumbass then)
Bottom line is that people still have to learn how to interact with other people, that is what our society is based on. They'll grow up, they don't have much of a choice.
--
visit http://www.poundingsand.com [poundingsand.com] for cool Tshirts - check out Micropoly!
A massive amount of stereotyping (Score:3, Interesting)
Wonderful. In one fell swoop he manages to both generalize and be shallow.
The part that galls me the most is that agression in teen online culture (which is there, but its in many online cultures) did NOT happen in a vaccum. Guess what? It came from their parents, culture, religion, media, etc. The violence and violent attitudes we see don't just appear, the kids didn't invent them.
It almost sounds like Katz blames the net by default.
Kids are young people. Teach them. Raise them. Be responsible and understand them. Nuff said.
I was 15 or so once (Score:3, Insightful)
But not so much anymore.
Childhood is becoming an outdated concept... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you, ANY of you, are interested in the subject, you owe it to yourselves to read Neil Postman's very thoughtful analysis of the sad subject, "The Disappearance of Childhood". [amazon.com]
Postman posits that the phase of human development we commonly refer to as "childhood" is a social construct, one that came about primarily as a result of the public educational system created in America only a couple hundred years ago.
Childhood was a period in which the institutions of society (from schools, to government, to families, to churches) actually "protected" children from information. (I can hear you squints groaning already, but please, let me finish). This was easily managed because there was a rather universal morality that the various institutions that made up our society subscribed to- and- terror-of-terrors, it was pretty much the Judeo-Christian one that most of the founding fathers (Deists, Puritans, Christians, Agnostics all) believed in. Children, brought into the public education system, were not only taught math, science, etc.- they were taught the ten commandments, the pledge of allegiance, etc. (They were taught patriotism and morality- by the schools! ARGH!!!)
Childhood, then, was a period in which children were taught a standard of right-and-wrong, and were also kept innocent from much of the harsh realities that their minds were deemed not yet ready to contextualize.
Information was tightly controlled and regulated. There was no ratings-driven-and-and-advertising-subsidized-mas
I know, it seems terrifying. There are a million bad things to say about such a society, and I've no doubt that hundreds of you will re-appropriate all the bile and vitriol you've stored for diatribes about the evil menace that is Microsoft in eviscerating the evil menace that was "America" until recently. We know too well that such a system is capable of legislated racism and sexism (truly and inarguably terrible legacies of America 1.0). We know it is capable of gross violations of civil liberties, with impunity (government-sponsored biological experiments on its own citizenry, wiretapping, etc...).
But there are benefits and advantages to having universal standards in a societal system- and I don't just mean for those institutions determining the standards. I'm talking about the people. One of the greatest benefits of such a societal system was a public education system that was, in its time, unparalleled in the entire world for providing a quality of education to any willing citizen. Another benefit was that shame was a powerful psychological force for discouraging behavior that was not in the society's best interests. Seem puritanical? It was! But many of today's societal ills- especially those that affect children- were all but unimaginable then. Teenage pregnancy? School shootings? Drug-addiction in teenagers? They weren't a problem. Why? Because it was "WRONG" to have sex before marriage, "thou shall not kill", and "what are drugs", respectively?
The human mind is, in a very real sense, akin to the computer it ultimately conceived of in its image. The best and most productive minds are like the best and most productive computing systems- the have a tested, feature-rich operating system controlling the activities and information storage/retrieval of information itself. When humans don't get taught a worldview (a comprehensive perspective on right, wrong, truth, value, etc.), they are less effective when it comes to contextualizing information. You can have the biggest hard-drive in the world, and if you're running DOS 1.0 on an IBM-PC, you're pretty much going to be limited to a dull-ass computing life.
In answer to the original question, "does childhood end when computers come into (kids') lives?". No. Childhood ends when children are given unrestricted access to uncontextualized information. So often, when the subject of school shootings comes up on Slashdot, it descends into arguments about gun-control, videogame violence, first-amendment issues, etc. But every so often, someone nails it by saying, "Parents should teach their children right from wrong". Parents now are the sole institution with the authority to teach their children a worldview. And sadly, more and more parents are abdicating this profound responsibility by turning their kids over to be taught by television sets and now, the Internet. (Divorce happens in half of all households, showing children that even the parental institution isn't reliable or trustworthy). Childhood, as we've known it, is going to become an outdated concept. And it is more fitting to ask, "can childhood ever begin?".
I've hardly done justice to Postman's wonderful book- go and buy it now if you've any interest in a thoughtful, NON-CHRISTIAN examination of the issue of the eradication of childhood.
Mod this UUUUUUP. (Score:1)
Re:Childhood is becoming an outdated concept... (Score:2)
I can't mod today, so I'll reply. Excellent post. I disagree with some of what you say, and far more simply goes unaddressed, but overall your points - particularly about the importance of being able to put information in context - are very valid and significant.
Thanks, guys (and more about Postman...) (Score:3, Insightful)
The ironic difficulty here is that many partipants in the Slashdot community are themselves unknowingly victims of the sickness of an inability to contextualize information and/or an ignorance about the indispensability of values in the life of an individual and a society. Hence, the tendency of threads about the symptoms (school shootings, etc.) to deteriorate quickly into futile but sometimes compelling arguments about first-amendment-versus-second-amendment freedoms, etc.
I hope a lot of you will give Postman's work a read. He is a brilliant, lucid social theorist- and he touches on many profound subjects in his works. It is, in my opinion, his most intriguing work.
If you find the premise of childhood's eradication to be engaging, do also help yourself to his other works.
"Technopoly" [amazon.com] discusses the eradication of culture by technology itself. It was written in a pre-Internet age (by this I mean before the Internet had reached outside of the academic/institutional/research worlds and into all of our daily lives). Postman had no foreknowledge of the Internet's upcoming capacity to accelerate the trends he describes, so the work is feeling less like prophecy and more like history every day.
Also consider "Amusing Ourselves to Death" [amazon.com], which discusses the corrosive effects of our modern media structure on everything from attention span, to literacy, to capacity to reason, and so forth.
All of his books will leave you with new lenses by which to view some of the more vexing of what are (currently) American societal ills. (If "Technopoly" is currect, we are currently exporting the problem to other highly developed nations and we can expect to see them experience similar societal problems within a generation or two...) You may find (as I did) that you do not agree with particular theories or concusions, but that you agree with and are edified by the broader observations and disturbed by the potential longterm societal consequences of the trends in media, education, and culture. They are ultimately, and I don't use the term loosely, "apocalyptic" in nature (in a secular sense of the word).
If you have a religious worldview (as I do), you may also find these trends to be apocalyptic in the religious sense, as well. I know I may be checking my intellectual credentials at the door with many of you by stating I am a Christian- and so be it. I say this because my own religious worldview, a filter which lenses "meaning", "purpose", "morality", "judgment", etc., is one of the means by which I contextualize the information we're discussing. And it suggests (to me) that the outcome is pre-determined and the course of mankind unchangeable- even as it is our duty (as Christians) to call others to awareness of the outcome (as well as the purpose of man, the holiness of God, the nature of sin, etc.). When you read the works of Postman in the context of the apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel (Old Testament) and Revelation (New Testament), the overlap is perfectly congruous- which is simultaneously terrifying and comforting. (I know I just lost the majority of you on this point, but what can I say? These are my beliefs.)
I know I could be 100% incorrect in my interpretation of these separate information sources (secular social theory and biblical prophecy). Nevertheless, I am grateful to have had a real childhood, to have learned how to reason, to believe in God and Christ, and to have a brain that can process information and contextualize it well enough to have confidence in my beliefs, and a hope that life may have meaning, despite the pain we experience and the senseless acts of evil we witness. And I hope for everyone who reads it, the same peace-of-mind and sense of purpose in your own lives.
Majority not so tech savvy (Score:2, Insightful)
Even worse is our recruitment of student workers for ITS. Out of an incoming class of 600 students or so, at most 10 will have the problem solving mindset that makes them any use to us. That's the big factor; aproaching a problem with an open, inquisitive mind. We all know users who freak out as soon as they get a print error or a 404 on a web page. To the majority of computer "users" out there, the computer is still a vague box full of piss and voodoo, just waiting to rain all over them.
After having a problem solving attitude, the next thing a 'hot' computer geek needs is a desire to see the big picture when dealing with the various systems that make up 'tech'. Too many techs seem content to master their small domain without looking beyond. Again, we get some students who are ''Win95/98 wizards" but balk when they are put to work on DOS, Mac or Linux machines. Finding ones that enjoy the challenge of learning a new system and aren't afraid of appearing clueless about something they've never touched before is also a hassle.
Oh well, as more young people have access to computers, more hot geeks will be showing up. Think of all the computer genuses who lived and died before computers came along or are in the other 2/3's of the world and might never have a chance to shine.
First was on target... this seems unnecessary (Score:2, Interesting)
15 year olds have power, but they are still kids, and this dilutes their "power."
that sums up the first article.
this one is, "15 year olds on the net, but they are still 15 year olds."
really, I don't see the point.
skye
Katz is right and wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, anonymity allows for expression of many thoughts that might not come out in the 'real world' - hence, flaming. Personally, I've found that a majority of flames that I've received have been from the younger side of the population. I do agree with Katz on that point - you can see in the postings the difference between the type first, think later, and those who think their comments through. There are many stupid adults who shoot off their mouths (I've met plenty) and smart teenagers who think things through too, though.
Lastly, the theme for early comments seems to be that experience is vital. It is. Being a young engineer, I find I know very little, and find out constantly that paper is not the real world. There is no substitute for experience, and though at times certifications and degrees may seem like BS, it's not only the knowledge companies are looking for, it's the experience that comes with attaining that knowledge.
American naivety (Score:3, Insightful)
Teenagers in other parts of the world aren't necessiarily anything like the negative stero-type painted by you and others. I've seen levels of dedication, intelligence & humility among teenagers & children in some ethnic groups that would make Americans' jaws drop in shock.
People think humans are a certain way, from the behaviour they observe in their own society, & from what they know of other societies. In a highly insular society like in the USA, other behaviour-sets are unfamilia, & thus people believe certain behaviours are inherant to humans, when they are infact 90% cultural.
Puleeeease (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, most teenagers know their way around a computer enough to operate a web browser, listen to MP3's, and play a first person shooter. I also know the overwhelming majority could not write a program or simple script. No, that would involve a bit of time, motivation, and curiosity. Most teenagers are too busy fighting hormones and following popular culture to do anything intellectual. Okay, a generalization, but a largely accurate one.
There are very bright 15-year-olds. There are many more dullards who come across malicious scripts and fancy themselves Hollywood-style hackers. This crowd, especially Katz, out to know this. Stop perpetuating the insane myth.
I would love to corner one of these self-professed 15-year-old wizards and ask them about various data structures, logic, or compiler theory. I can picture the blank stare I would receive. I'll bet, however, he could tell me the URL for a good warez site.
Still, he has the edge at the next job interview. You see he is under 25 and sports a goatee(sp?). The human resource manager conducting the interview has seen the movies and documentaries. He knows the magic today's youth possesses.....
23 yr old agrees (Score:2)
Despite the obvious generalizations we have to make when discussing demographics, I am a firm believer than now, more than ever, are the next generation of adults are filtering their consumption to suit their agnst, social politics, and what have you. Cliques on the net have never been more clearly defined. One needs only read over various blog circles to recognize that each community typically involving young ones has a strict code of conduct, stipulating words, ideas, and what to rebel against. I AM NOT JUDGING whether the ideas and ideals being rebels against are valid. I'm NOT saying 'kids these days
Yes, I will probably get flamed for this. I'm sure it will be pointed out that this has always been happening, etc etc
Re:23 yr old agrees (Score:3, Insightful)
You're 23. You do know more than teens do, but you've still got a lot to learn. Wait. When you're 33, 43, 53... etc.
Re:23 yr old agrees (Score:2)
I hate to be the harbringer of bad news, but the older you get, the more out of touch you would be with the behavior of teens, much less the understanding of why that behaviour is occuring in the first place. (Unless you work in marketing or some other function where your primary job is understanding.)
Please explain how being 23 is 'the problem for me', and what I would learn from being older as it relates to this issue. Hell, being 23, I still participate in these cultures, many of which are dominated by 15 yr olds (the gfx scene, the coding scene, the quake scene, the blog scene)
Never once was I claiming I knew more or less than the 15 yr olds Katz was describing
Speaking as an (actual) 15 year old (Score:2)
This isn't different from anybody else (any other age group) in the world. Whoops.
They are smart, creative, and know the inner workings of the the Net and the Web better than any other sub-set of the species.
What's his point? Smart kids are capable of understanding stuff?
They do, in fact, have access to unprecedented amounts of information. Few parents, teachers, pols or reporters have any clear idea what these kids are doing online, or just how significant cultures like gaming and coding have become.
Now he's saying that kids can use Google, and adults can't figure it out. I bet he's also talking about pr0n, but who cares? These are just hobbies, and you can find them from 15 to 50.
The rest of the article just re-states the mindset of any teenager in an on-line context. It's kind of ridiculuous passing off this stuff as original. You can get the same stuff from any study of teenagers, and I'm kind of shocked he didn't include how teenagers misinterpret people's emotions and relate them to teenagers taking out their rage and frustration out on poor unsuspecting 40 year-olds in Quake.
Katz should leave this psychobabble to professionals.
don't think so. (Score:1)
Adults can be at least, if not more, petty, arrogant and greedy as any kid. Not to mention that they are almost invariably in a position to do much, much more damage.
Kids may not be as wise as the most wizened sensei, but that doesn't give every adult the right to place themselves on a highty pedestal, point and shout ``Damn whippersnappers!''.
-grendel drago
Excuse me, a lot of us get this much email (Score:1)
It's not that much. Maybe half is spam, but I narc those to the feds and ISPs.
sad sad world (Score:2, Insightful)
These are the same kids who asked if they could learn next year's stuff if the curriculum ran out early in math class, instead of playing Jeopardy or Tri-Bond for the last month. Ah, nostalgia...
-grendel drago
ego problem?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Never occured to me that the dozen Mr Steroid contenders didn't mind constantly crowing that they were the greatest. Somehow it must have been less threatening to people.
It's taken me until now to be able to say ``I'm clever, I'm capable, and I don't have to be ashamed of it.'' I feel like some sort of Ayn Rand hero saying that, but it's true. It was always ``Shut up, Drago, no one cares what you have to say.''
I have this odd feeling that some crackhead moderator will mark this as a troll, but it's the unvarnished truth---I had the opposite of an ego problem.
-grendel drago