The 'Net Generation' Isn't

Kanel introduces this lengthy review in Spiegel Online this way: "Kids that grew up with the Internet are not 'digital natives' as consultants have led us to believe. They're OK with the Net but they don't care much about Web 2.0 and find plenty of other things more important than the Internet. Consultants and authors, mostly old guys, have called for the education system to be reworked to suit this new generation, but they never conducted surveys to see if the members of 'generation @' were anything like what they had envisioned. Turns out, children who have known the Net their whole lives are not particularly skilled at it, nor do they live their lives online." "Young people have now reached this turning point. The Internet is no longer something they are willing to waste time thinking about. It seems that the excitement about cyberspace was a phenomenon peculiar to their predecessors, the technology-obsessed first generation of Web users. ...they certainly no longer understand it when older generations speak of 'going online.' ... Tom and his friends just describe themselves as being 'on' or 'off,' using the English terms. What they mean is: contactable or not."

Re:evidence?

[slimjim8094]

You make an awful lot of assertions. In fact, the summary even talks about people like you who just make assertions about how 'young people' are.

Can you support any of them? Because the article supports the opposite.

Re:evidence?

[Capt. Skinny]

I've noticed that as I get older I can relate more and more to people who just want things to work. It was one thing to dick around with a shell script for 20 hours in desktop support to automate something that would have taken me only 2 hours to do manually (fully admitting that the bulk of the value was in the learning experience), but now that my time is valuable (to both me and the people paying me) I like to get on with what I'm supposed to be doing. When shit breaks and it isn't my job to fix it, I'm now very likely to hand the problem off to whomever does have the job of fixing it. There's only so much time available, and if I dig into everything that looks cool I'll forever be jack of all trades, master of none. OTOH, maybe I've just become jaded.

Certainly don't mean to criticize the hacker spirit, only to give some perspective for "wanting it to work." I'll bet there are several things these teens care about the elegance (or cruft) of -- but none of them happen to be the net.

Re:The 'Net Generation' from Ground Zero

[SheeEttin]

I even remember after reading this one guy's paper on the inner workings of Metroid's engine and spending more time in hex editors altering the the levels slightly.

May or may not be the same guy you're thinking of, but the source to Metroid is available here [metroid-database.com]. Somewhat commented. (I don't speak Assembly, so I can't opine on the code.)
(Also: Metroid doesn't have levels, it has areas. ;))

Re:Tech is still Tech, yucko!

[operagost]

Actually, the 286 had protected mode so it could have been done there. Regardless, DOS was already entrenched by the time the PC/AT came out and it was WAY more expensive than an XT.