Copyright: 1998
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
ISBN: 0-07-063361-4
Don Tapscott tackled an interesting topic in the late 90's, "how are children being affected by growing up in a digital world?" Unfortunately when you write on a topic that borders on pop-culture, your writing tends to have a pretty short shelf-life. Most of the material in this 1998 book would have been outdated by 2001 when I began work on my degree in Computer Information Systems. Even so, there is some interesting material in the book.
Shortcomings
I will start off with the negative. Tapscott did something that always annoys me in an author. He overstepped his influence and tried to change the term "Generation Y" into "N-Gen". Throughout the book, you have to constantly remind yourself that this "N-Gen" that you never heard of is actually what most people call Gen-Y. He puts forth a good argument on why he likes the term better, but unfortunately for him the term never took off. Most likely because it was embedded in a book that had such a short shelf life. The copy I borrowed from the local University had last been checked out in 2000.
This wasn't the only term that was out of place. He used "the Net" rather than "the internet" as we are now accustomed to doing. He used terms such as "C-girlfriend" and "C-life" to refer to "cyber-girlfriend" and "cyber-life". The term "cyber" has all but disappeared with reference to the internet and I had never even seen the shortened "C-*" versions before.
I put forth these criticisms because I have been using the internet since 1992 and have children in their teens now who have grown up using the internet. Hopefully authors who write about current trends in computers will learn not to try so hard to be hip and cool and will instead stick to the more mainstream terminology.
In addition to the terminology oddities, Tapscott comes across as an old fuddy-duddy trying too hard to be cool. He blatantly leads cheers for "the kids" and builds them up as extraordinary because of their computer skills. Throughout the book are quotes from teens and children regarding various issues from their usage of the internet to world peace. These seem to be cherry-picked to make it seem as though these "N-Gen" kids are more advanced than their disconnected peers. I have 2 teens who are straight-A students who write well and they would still need coaching to use some of the sentence structures that supposedly came from an 8, 9 or 11 year old.
Gems
There were a few things that I gathered from reading this book. One observation was that human communication has gone from text to graphics and back to text. Tapscott points out that the printing press made text a means of mass communication. The television turned us towards graphic or video displays of information. With the advent of the internet, we now have email, blogs and plenty of text based web sites that are part of our communication medium.
Another interesting observation was what Tapscott called the "transparency" of technology to children. He described this as being like air... it is necessary to life but mostly we don't pay attention to the air itself. Kids (and indeed now many adults) have a tendency to view technology the same way. Most of us (gadget geeks aside) don't care about the technical specification of the screen we are reading our email on or the programming behind the email client. Instead what we care about is that "Jay needs to meet with me at noon today to go over the upcoming soccer schedule." The computer, the email client and even the email itself are transparent... it is the message that we care about.
This notion of transparency means that computer programmers must be careful not to impart too many of our values into our programs. People using our software will unlikely pay enough attention to the software itself to differentiate values that we insert from reality. An example of this is the game Sim City. One young person learned from Sim City that "raising taxes can cause riots." Well... certainly in extreme cases that can happen, however it is questionable whether we want that to be the only lesson that a child learns about higher taxes!
The notion of community on the internet was pretty big back in the late 90's but it hasn't come of age until more recently with the surge in popularity of MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn and other "social networking" sites. Tapscott observed some interesting things with regard to how boys vs. girls used language in building communities.
Boys tended to use language to assert their position in the community hierarchy. They also used language that was designed to draw and hold an audience. In addition they used language to compete with others. Girls on the other hand had a tendency to use language for building the community rather than themselves.
Conclusion
I have a vested interest in understanding the impact of computer and the internet on children, particular in the context of education. That said, this book was interesting for me to read as Tapscott did a large amount of empirical research into the topic. He directly interviewed and observed a large number of young people and their usage of the internet and computers. His book is a great reference book for numbers and trends, albeit all of them from the late 90's and largely out of date today. I would only recommend this book if you have an interest in the historical perspective of the period or if you are looking for some anecdotal data for some specific research you are doing.