The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future

In 2006, S. Craig Watkins participated in the MacArthur Foundation’s well-funded digital media initiative alongside a select team of scholars and tech experts. The goal was simple: to understand young people’s emphatic embrace of social and mobile media. Watkins went on to build a small research team that skillfully collected over 500 surveys and conducted 350 in-depth interviews with young adults, parents, and educators while visiting the online spaces where young people gather. It was a full-scale immersion into what Watkins calls the “digital trenches,” and when he emerged, his understanding of the ways young people learn, play, bond, and communicate had become more detailed and dynamic.
 
It may come as no surprise that more teens are online than ever before—in fact 87 percent are. Consequentially, television is no longer the dominant medium it once was because young people are now spending an average of six to eight hours a day online. Watkins contends that most teens and twenty-somethings migrate online to share their lives with friends, something television simply cannot offer. As Melinda, a twenty-one-year-old student, proclaimed, “What do people do without Facebook?” In other words, for young people today, if you’re not online, then you’re not really living—and the ubiquitous presence of their mobile phones, laptops, and iPods positions them at the center of our evolving digital landscape.
 
Timely and deeply relevant, The Young and the Digital covers a host of provocative issues—the influence of social sites like MySpace and Facebook; the growing appetite for “anytime, anywhere” media and “fast entertainment”; how online “digital gates” reinforce race and class divisions; how technology is transforming America’s classrooms—and takes a fresh look at the pivotal role technology played in the historic 2008 election. Watkins also debunks popular myths surrounding cyberpredators, Internet addiction, and social isolation. The result is a fascinating portrait, both optimistic and cautious, about the coming of age of the first fully wired generation.