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Growing Up Digital: The Rise Of The Net Generation. By . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998, 336 pp., $14.95.
The End Of Education: Redefining The Value Of School. By . New York: Vintage, 1995, 209 pp., $12.00.
On Killing: The Psychological Cost Of Learning To Kill In War And Society. By . Boston: Little, Brown, 1995, 366 pp., $15.95.
Good news! The Net Generation has arrived, the first generation to grow up with digital media. Everybody relax, says Tapscott, chairman of the Alliance for Converging Technologies, who is blessed enough to know that the kids are all right and that “the cynics, technophobes, and moralists are dead wrong” (p. 7). Children play, learn, communicate, and form relationships as usual, enhanced and empowered in the interactive world. While television robbed children of hours of play each day, digital media restore this precious time. Skilled, energized, fresh-thinking, newly empowered youth are ready to innovate. Their mindset demands fast results, and can change eagerly and on the fly a thousand times, which leads to a generational “digital divide.” Workwise, the writing is on the wall for the technophobic.
A generation ago television, which shaped the world and turned youth itself into an event, was done by adults to children. Now the child is in the driver's seat. To Prescott, the Net's interactivity is the antithesis of television, and on this basis he proclaims the Net generation to be the antithesis of the TV generation: at the start of a new Enlightenment it breaks free, flipping the knowledge hierarchy on its head.
Tapscott may well be right in holding that technology exists as such only for those who were born before it was invented, and that a medium is “transparent” for those born into it; but I think this belief raises at