The Googlization of Everything

Times Online:

How the Google generation thinks differently Digital-age kids process information differently from parents. Our writer admits misjudging how her son was learning

Catherine O'Brien

My elder son Oli is almost 15 and way beyond the stage where I might usefully help with his homework. But in the run-up to his recent end-of-year exams, I felt compelled to take a hovering interest in his revision. This chiefly involved loitering on the landing and popping into his room at frequent intervals laden with the laundered contents of his sock drawer.

Every time I crossed the threshold, the scene was the same: textbooks remained firmly closed in his bag while the laptop was open on his desk.

On the screen was some history/ physics/English document, but also his Facebook and iTunes pages. In his ears were the iPod plugs, playing back a podcast. And sometimes, just to fracture his concentration even further, he might have had a half-played video running on YouTube as well.

If you are the parent of a teenager, this vignette will be familiar. We each have our breaking points and one night during that exam period I reached mine. How, I wanted to know, as I scooped up the laptop and announced that I was confiscating it until further notice, could he be absorbing the finer points of photosynthesis and his French vocab if he treated his mind like a pogo stick?

Was I being an unreasonable, autocratic, helicopter mother? My son would tell you definitely yes, while friends battling with their own teenagers assure me I'm not. It took the impartiality of my geeky acquaintance Ben, however, to unearth the truth: “He's a digital native; you're a digital immigrant. Your brains are never going to be on the same circuit system.”

Digital natives and digital immigrants are terms coined by the American futurist Marc Prensky to distinguish between those who have grown up with technology and those who have adapted to it. As an immigrant, I may be computer-proficient, but I still print out documents to read them, call people to check they received my e-mail and keep a dictionary by my desk. And I can remember (admittedly only in a vague way) that when it came to exam revision, I spent many hours sealed in my room away from the TV and other distractions, my head burrowed in books. Natives, in contrast, multi-task, thrive on instant gratification and claim to function best when networked. None of this is new. Prensky first wrote about natives and immigrants (and the startling fact that today's average student will, before graduating, spend 10,000 hours computer-game playing, but only 5,000 hours reading books) seven years ago.

What is new and perturbing is the emerging evidence of the consequences of this digital divide. According to researchers we are in the midst of a sea change in the way that we read and think. Our digitally native children have wonderfully flexible minds. They absorb information quickly, adapt to changes and are adept at culling from multiple sources. But they are also suffering from internet-induced attention deficit disorder.

Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner- Centred Design at the London Knowledge Lab and a visiting professor at the University of Sussex, is working on a study examining the internet's impact on pupils' critical and meta-cognitive skills. “The worrying view coming through is that students are lacking in reflective awareness,” she says. “Technology makes it easy for them to collate information, but not to analyse and understand it. Much of the evidence suggests that what is going on out there is quite superficial.”

The experience with which my generation grew up, of absorbing oneself in a single book and allowing its themes to meander into the mind before forming considered judgments, is in danger of being eclipsed by the new, digital world order.

This year, researchers at University College London reported the results of a five-year study into the “Google Generation”. When they examined the behaviour of those logging on to the websites of journals, e-books and other sources of written information, they found widespread evidence of “skimming activity”. Users viewed no more than three pages before “bouncing out”.

This wasn't just the norm for students. “The same has happened to professors and lecturers. Everyone exhibits a bouncing/flicking behaviour, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically. Power browsing is the norm.”

Power browsing, I have to concede, has become the norm for me. Google has been my godsend as a writer. Research that once required hours of trawling through reports and cuttings, and days of fielding calls to source experts, can be done in a few clicks of a mouse.

The difference, though, is that as a digital immigrant, my mind has baseline skills in concentration, contemplation and knowledge construction. My fear - and the reason why I wrested my son's laptop away from him - is that the acquisition of those skills is being lost in the twitch-speed of our new Web 2.0 world. ...