2007 Tlt Symposium Keynote - Lee rainie

{ music } Welcome to the 2007 Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium. My names Angela Linse. I am the Executive Director and Associate Dean for the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence. And I've been asked to introduce our speaker today and I'm honored today. First I want to give you a little blurb about the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence. Our mission is to work with faculty, departments, colleges, campuses, anybody who teaches at Penn State to improve what, student learning. We do that by working with instructors. And an increasing part of our work has been in collaboration with various units in Information Technology Services. Including the TLT and ETS. Many of whom, many of those staff from those units are here today. And we are looking for ways to integrate technology into teaching to improve student learning. So it's my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker today. Our keynote speaker. Lee Rainie has been the Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Doesn't quite flow off your tongue, but he's been the director of that project since 1999 when it was founded. This organization explores the impact of the internet on work, home, education, and other aspects of daily life. But not just the internet. All kinds of new technologies have been the subject of their recent reports. Recent and not so recent reports. And I would encourage you to go to their website and look at some of these reports. It's really easy to get sucked into the details of the reports and you'll learn a lot in a very short period of time. Let me give you an example of some of the reports that they've conducted or what, created over the last few years. For example, the use of the internet by different demographics groups, including latinos and seniors. Evolution of the internet and the emergence of this participatory Web 2.0. I went to the website and now I know a little bit more about what that means exactly. And maybe you'll learn about that today as well. They've explored the rates of podcasting, blogging, and tagging. And if you don't know what those are, you're in the right place. Social networking, we've heard a lot about that recently for our undergraduates and also for our future under graduates. I'd encourage you to go look at that report. Give you a little insight on the culture of young people today. They've even explored the extent to which cell phones and other things like online banking have become essential technologies in our world. These reports do a really important thing for most of us in academia. They provide data on which to make decisions Rather than anecdotal stories about somebody you know who did something with technology. They give us a solid foundation for policy making decisions. For decisions about how we might integrate new technologies into our courses. And they also provide a very important national perspective on cultural changes that have been significantly impacted by technology. So, we couldn't ask for a better keynote speaker to serve as the foundation for the launching of this Symposium. Please join me in welcoming Lee Rainie. { applause } Thanks! Oh, there I am. Thank you, that was a lovely introduction. I am very grateful And the Pew folks are especially glad that I am here. When I, Pew by the way is a family name. It's the Pew charitable trust gives us our main funding. It's not connected to church work, although we have studied how churches and spiritual folks use the internet. But it's the family name of Pew. And one of the interesting dimensions of the assignment that I was given by Pew when they first approached me to run this project was, that they didn't want any advocacy coming out of the project. There was a ten point fix it plan for the internet. There wasn't a set of technologies or companies or individuals that Pew wanted to promote. They wanted us to do analytical work that was based around primary research. In part because at that time in 1999, there were a lot of arguments about the impact of the internet. Was it good? Was it bad? Was it helping people? Was it making people more isolated and depressed and stuff like that? And there were lots of interesting sort of theories about that, but there wasn't a common set of facts about what was going on online. And Pew thought that that was a contribution they could make. So what I will present to you here is the results of a whole bunch of surveys that we've done. We've been in the field about eighty times now since late 1999 looking at how people use the internet and what impact it has. And a lot of it is phone survey work. Although some of it is online and ethnographic work. And I feel like we're sort of map makers of the internet. We help, as Angela was saying, set the boundaries of what's happening online. And what people are doing. So that those of you who are doing much more detailed ethnographic or theory work, at least can figure what kind of population you're talking about. The other thing they are though is anthropologists. And trying to talk to a lot of people about their internet use. So you'll get both flavors of that today. I'm from Washington D.C. and one of the things that happens when you move into Washington, which did in the late 1970's, is they immediately send you to re-education camp. Where in it you have to learn how to filibuster and you have to learn how to have a stump speech. They won't let you out of the camps unless you can do both. And so I passed those courses. And I can filibuster. And I love our data. I love our work. I could go on and on and on forever. They call me rain man in the office. But I'd much rather, I know you've got a lot of practical questions on your mind about how students are using these technologies. How they might be applied in the classroom? So I'd much rather be in conversation and I will pause every once in awhile in what I call filibuster moments just to make sure you're still with me. But I would encourage you if I say something that's confusing to you or if I say something that you would like elaborated a bit more. If I say something that's really stupid, please just raise your hand, I'll call on you and I hope we can cover a lot of the ground that matters more to you than probably I'm aware of. So I'd like to do that. I always start my talks by asking who is live blogging or in this room who is doing any other kind of live posting on this work right now? Ok, we got about twenty people. Who plans to write on their blog about me if I say something remotely interesting or controversial? Ok, and other folks. That's very cool. And so for you guys it's not the case that you have to learn about this new environment where essentially people like me have to consider themselves literally on stage all the time and being criticized or being critiqued or being analyzed all the time. But it's some times pretty disorienting from somebody who came from media world. And so I like to go through what it's like to be in this new environment. And professors and stuff consider themselves also in this environment. So I ask who's blogging and here's some of my experience with people blogging me. Some times in real. Some times later. I do a lot of library events and I have a lot of lovely library postings on me. One of one is from postings of a loud librarian who said, "Rainie was funny, at ease, informative and we found ourselves doing a lot of 'huh. I didn't know that during his speech. Very, very cool." I sent that baby right off to the mother ship. They loved me. They really, really loved me. I do a lot education events like this. Stephen Downes is a wonderful education blogger and after a presentation I did at Educause, he wrote, "Good crisp presentation backed with some actual research and drawing out the implications for educators, a list of which should be posted on the wall of every school." That went right off to the home office too. They loved me for that one too. Every once in awhile though I don't use powerpoint. It's some times not appropriate for the kind of talk. But behind me on the screen it was a wonderful old movie theatre in in Silver Spring Maryland. They were running a live internet relay chat. The participants in the room were allowed to use. And so behind me were scrolling comments about my work, which had some cool dimensions to it because every once in awhile I would make a reference to our research or someone else's research, someone would use a wireless connection, go out and find the url for that research and post the url for the group. But here's some of the comments that I got when I was giving that talk. And they had the same reaction you did. "He's a lot older than I imagined." "He looks like a typical foundation suit." So you know peals of laughter are coming out in the room as I'm trying to be really smart about the internet. It's a little bit vertiginous to have that kind of commentary done about you. So I went through these slides though. This is just to prove that information markets are self correcting. I went through this same material and lovely, another library blogger had this to say, "While he may look older than some expected, and appears to be just another foundation suit, he's a very intelligent man, and worth paying a lot of attention to." So that's where I would like to start my day just to all of you bloggers can take note of that please and say nice things about what we're doing. I thought I would focus my conversation today on the tribe of people that I call digital natives. Essentially it's people twenty-five years and younger. The people for whom all of this stuff we're gonna be talking about is not a miracle. And they are different from those of us who are of a certain age who I would call digital immigrants who have had to some times unlearn things in order to relearn new things and master new technologies. Yet one definition of technology of course is stuff that was invented after you were born. If it was invented before you were born, it's just part of the atmosphere of your life. You don't think about it as something special to be used or tools to take advantage of. It's stuff that you just know. And so digital natives are the people who have grown up in an environment where the internet was the norm. They entered first grade when Tim Berners-Lee wrote a program called the World Wide Web. And they exited elementary school knowing that the internet was a major factor in life. They grew up, the day they were born, personal computers were already ten years old. And they've seen through their high school experience the rise of PDA's and iPods and Wikipedia and tagging and Flickr and World of Warcraft and stuff like that. So they've grown up in an environment where all this is just part of the atmosphere much the way the lights in this room are part of the atmosphere. It's just accepted background that they know how to use in many cases. They teach each other how to use. They are eager to dive into it and learn new applications in a way that digital immigrants are not. So these are the people that are very often sort of in the classrooms that you care about. And they're a different tribe from those who are older. I just should point out though, that I'm talking about the bell curve part of generational cohort. There are people who are intensive users in ways that I won't even comprehend. But there are also people who are casual users or even not part of this technology environment at all. And I just caution you that I'm talking in generalizations here. There are people at both ends of the bell curve that we should worry about. Particularly those who don't have the access. Don't have the means to have the access to some of these things. So just keep them in mind. Particularly as you're thinking about what to do on your campus and what to do in your classrooms. I thought I would talk about six realities of life for digital natives that I bet you guys could recite in your sleep. But I will at least codify them for you. Reality number one is that media and gadgets are ubiquitous parts of everyday life for them. One simple way to look at what that means is to measure the change in technology in typical households from the time of digital immigrants growing up to the time of digital natives growing up. This is what the media ecology of a household in 1975 looked like. There were a couple of ways media products, there were a couple of media products that got into their homes. There were a couple ways they got there. There were couple of ways they were displayed once they got there. And there were a couple of ways that they were stored if we ever wanted to view them again. This is what that map looks like now. On the red lines in this map are things and applications and gadgets that have come into existence since Thanksgiving. The environment is changing so rapidly. And I've even snuck in here some of the dimensions of iPhones, which aren't even yet a glimmer. Well they're a glimmer in Steve Jobs eye, but they aren't a glimmer in our eyes yet. But iPhones will add more functionality to this list. But you can see that the kinds of products have tripled. The routes that they used to get to the home have quadrupled. The displays on which we render them have quadrupled and the storage capacity has just exploded. This changes the way that people, especially young people use media. And the way they access information and their control that they have over it. They access media and information in different places, in different ways, and in different times than before. So for instance, they're having different media experiences from their elders. They listen to radio on devices some times other than the radio console in their car. Or the radio console at their home. A lot of them are listening to radio through their computers, through their iPods, and stuff like that. A lot of them are watching TV on their devices. This screen graph here is from November trip that I took into research land where I'm a big baseball fan. And the season was over. I was in mourning. I was accessing the major league baseball site to see if there was any activity in the trade market. And low and behold at the end of November, there was a game being broadcast from Osaka, Japan where some triple A players from Osaka were playing some triple A American players from Waikiki. So I did research the rest of the afternoon by watching this fabulous baseball game and felt like spring was just around the corner. It was great. But I was watching TV on my computer in my office. And at one point I needed to go get a cup of coffee so I carried my laptop wirelessly to the coffee machine to make sure that didn't miss any critical pitches. They're also using the internet to place phone calls. There are lots of young people who do videoconferencing and use the internet to make phone calls and don't think of it as anything other than a phone call. Even though they're using very different devices, very different channels from the ones that you and I might say we were using as we were placing a phone call. The other thing that happens as this device and the ecology universe expands and grows is that the young allocate their differently from the way that I did when I was their age. This is wonderful data from Kaiser Family Foundation, which in 2004 looked at the generation that they called generation M for media and at age eight to age eighteen. And they added up all the minutes on a typical day both through a diary mechanism and through survey work. That children in this cohort used media and they came up with, they found that about four hours were spent with video media. About an hour and forty-four minutes were spent listening to music in one form or another. Just over an hour was used with a computer including internet time and just computer time. Bunch of video game time. They were even reading print material and stuff like that. If you add up all of the minutes in those buckets, it's eight and a half hours a day. On a typical day that someone in that cohort is in contact with and using media. It's more time than they sleep. It's more time than they spend in school. It's more time than they spend on extracurricular activities. It's the single most dominant portion of their time use in a given day. So that's reality number one. I'm gonna pause, filibuster pause moment number one here. Just to make sure. { inaudible question } I have a slide on multi-tasking that's gonna get to that. But a lot of them. The answer is a tremendous amount and that is a very distinguishing part of this cohort. Great question. The rest of you with you me? Ok, good! Reality number two is that new gadgets allow people to enjoy media, gather information, and carry on communication anywhere and any time. The centerpiece of that is the cell phone. Which about three quarters of adults own and about two thirds of teenagers own. And it's actually it's not as big of a story in America as it is in a whole lot of other places. Both at the highly developed country end in Norway they're fanatic about their cell phone. And in Japan even fanatic about it. But cell phone is now becoming the technology of choice in the poorest parts of the world as well for all the reasons that are understandable. It helps people communicate. It helps people gather information in ways that they never had access to before. But they're using their cell phones for lots of different things. And this is maybe a bit hard to read and the only reason to show it is that in these three columns we asked people about the capacities of their cell phones. So, three quarters of the Americans who own cell phones say those cell phones have the capacity to do text messaging, but for adults, this is only adult data this not teen data, for adults only thirty-five percent of cell phone users actuallym send and receive text messages. And about thirteen percent of those who have cell phones don't have cell phones with text messaging, but they would like to have them. If you look at this column here and compare it to this column here there's a tremendous amount of greater functionality in peoples phones than they actually use. And my favorite sort of phrase of the season is feature fatigue. There's some interesting new scholarship, particularly coming out of the business world, showing that for a lot of people they just want simple devices to do simple things. And they hate that extra functionality is packed in things when they want to make a phone call, that's when they want their cell phone. If they want to shoot a picture, they'd like some other device to do that. And so one of the big stories in America is the difference between those people, tends to be young people, who use their devices for all of the things that those devices are for. And people who have devices with lots of stuff packed into them, but only use it for one or two things. It's a big gap that tends to fall along generational lines, but even it's somewhat different inside generations. But it's important to understand, because not every kid in your classroom with a cell phone is snapping your picture or posting to stuff to Flickr. It's just, I wouldn't want to have your jobs. Because there are there are now sort of new ways that you have to take account of all of this new technology, but at the same time be sensitive to the needs and capacities of students who might not necessarily care about all this stuff. Or be as wildly enthusiastic about these technologies as some of their peers are. The other big thing that's going on with cell phones in addition to packing up all this stuff there are other devices that are going on. A lot of people have digital cameras, but the big part of the digital camera story, for young people especially, is that they are sharing their pictures. They're posting and sharing their pictures. Visual imagery for young people is now as important a communications and storytelling and community building tool as text is. My daughters will not leave their home without their cell phone in one part of their purse and their digital camera in another. And I can sort of watch what's happening every Friday night in real time as they post their pictures on their Facebook accounts. Not for them, but I can see other people at the events that they're at watch their blood alcohol rise with each picture and stuff like that. But this is a way. They chronicle their lives. They post stuff on each others lives. They share their thoughts and comments and stuff like that. It is very much a currency, as I say, of conversation and community. Same thing with video cameras except a little less though. They're a little more expensive. But there is a decent amount of sharing of videos going on online. It's a part of social currency. I put game consoles in here not because they're necessarily terribly mobile devices although some of them are. But again it's to emphasize this social story. Two-thirds of the teenagers who play games do so online and with other people. It's a way for them to be interacting with others. Not necessarily disclosing their true identity, not necessarily giving up a lot of information about themselves, but they are interacting with others and their avatars are active participants in the social lives and communities of others. A lot of laptops are owned in America as well. A critical moment for laptops or sort of one milestone moment for laptops came in August of 2005 when for the first time in America more laptops were sold than desktops. And the line for laptop sales continues to go up and the line for desktop sales continues to go down. It's partly a story about how laptops are so highly functional for people. And you don't lose any computing power or any application capacity now with current laptops. But it's also tied to wirelessness. About a third of all Americans have logged on wirelessly and about half of college students now are very active wireless users. And that's why the laptop is so attractive to them because they can move around with the internet with them. And another sort of story that our data tell is that the internet has become the computer for most people. I mean that is one of the underlying stories of what is called Web 2.0. When we first started asking this stuff and when our colleagues who pre-dated us in the survey research at Pew funded operations, there was a big gap between the number of computer owners and the number of internet users. And those lines have essentially converged. There are only a handful of people who now say that they use computers, but don't use the internet. So all of the applications, all the functionality, all the web services, all the web tools that they use are now sort of built into the machine that they walk around with. And it doesn't necessarily reside on their hard drive. It's out there on the web. It's a huge part of the Web 2.0 story and something for you guys to understand. A lot of MP3 players owned out there. Fifty-one percent teens own them. That's pre-holiday season data from 2006. We did this survey in November that's over sixty percent now. And my guess is the adult ownership is close to a third or more. It's an enormously popular, highly functional device that Steve Jobs is changing all the time. And making even more attractive for more stuff. And then there's PDA ownership just to round out the suite of stuff we use. Now what happens when all this mobility is built into peoples lives? There are a couple of major social things. And one of the most striking things relates to presence. In the face to face world we know we digital immigrants know exactly what presence means. And the mobile cell device world, presence doesn't mean the same thing anymore. My daughters, again just to use them as my guinea pigs, when they leave class, when they leave a party, when they've left a coffee shop, when they've encountered other people, they will often just pick up their phone and continue the conversation that they were just having a minute ago face to face with somebody. And so in some sense conversations never end. Because you can always renegotiate the social space. You can always just process information that you've just had with somebody else. And at the same token you can be somewhere physically with someone, but not really be there. As you're taking a phone call or your working on your IM client or something like that. You could absent while you're physically present with someone. Similarly you could be present with someone even mif you are physically absent with someone. It's an enormous social change that we haven't yet begun to understand all the dimensions of it. It's annoying in some cases when you're trying to get somebody's attention and they're off in cell phone land or their eyes have rolled back in their head because they're watching or doing a website or something like that. And it's really annoying for teachers who can't tell as they look at the back of computers in their classrooms and people furiously typing away whether those kids are taking notes in the class. Whether they're doing really important research related to the subject at hand or whether they're filling out their emails or IM's or playing a game or something like that. It's a big social moment. And again this notion that conversations never end and data just keep flowing around. Data are now sort of in the air in the way that light waves are in the air and oxygen is in the air. People can access them at any moment that they choose. And so lots of peoples encounters now are what I call, or what other scholars have called, incipient. You don't necessarily access all the things that you want at the same moment, but you have the capacity to do that at any moment. You can make a phone call as you're driving down the road as the whim strikes you. Or you've got other things that you want to accomplish. And it changes again the way that we expect other people to be available to us and we expect data to be available to us. I mean from a classroom perspective this adds to the burden of thinking that you got to get your material out there in the hopes that students will access it when the spirit moves them. Because you can't necessarily count on the fact that it will move them at the moment that you're teaching it to them. Or that you hope they're digesting it. But at some point they might really care about it and you want to make sure you are findable. The information is readily accessible. And that people can use it and manipulate it in the ways that will help them learn stuff. Again, this notion of being findable and being present is really important now because the information just doesn't reside in books. Or just doesn't reside in your campus library or in your professors head. It's all out there and so making sure that information and learning contexts are as available and open and accessible to people as possible is one of the main jobs I would argue that is important for you guys. That's reality number two. How am I doing? Any questions? Oh, I hope this is a good sign. As opposed to he's talking like a New Yorker. People say I talk too fast and I'm really sorry. But that's one of my rain man coping mechanisms. Reality number three. Yeah, yeah! { inaudible question } Both people and information. There is an expectation, the question was find-ability of what? And my argument on that is increasingly for young people and increasingly for information they expect to be able to encounter the folks that they want to encounter and the information they want to encounter quickly. I mean it's Google searching. If you can't be found easily in some readily accessible search function, you're suffering for it. That's why the search optimization industry is a mighty thing to behold now. I mean there are lots of people who worry about making sure that they are that people can navigate to them or navigate to their information quickly. And I would argue that the premium on that, which would change is that the premium on that now is a lot higher because kids have these expectations about these tools. And if you can't be found on Google, you don't exist. That's a new Cartesian rule isn't it. The internet and reality three. Let me just check for other questions. Internet, especially broadband is at the center of the revolution. Here's our data about the growth of internet access, which is the top line and broadband at home access, which is the much more dramatic story of the two thousands. Where it grew from virtually nothing in 2000 now to fifty percent or just under fifty percent of American households have high speed internet connections at their home. They're not great, necessarily, connections and one of the most interesting challenges that we as researchers face and you guys will probably face is as broadband capacities segregate you know there will be super hyper broadband as opposed to plain Jane broadband and we know from our research that as people make the leap from dial up to broadband they become radically different internet users. Our suspicion is that as they leap from plain Jane broadband to super broadband and particularly for the upload capacity. I mean that's a big thing. Because broadband users are content creators in a way that dial up users can't hope to be. But they also broadband users also use the internet more, they spend more time online. Their suite of applications is much bigger than dial up users. They're reported outcomes. Both social outcomes I can meet the people I want. I can join the communities I want. As well as economic outcomes or other things they report much higher levels of satisfaction with their experience. The other thing that broadband changes is that it makes the internet a much more desirable place just to hang out. We've seen substantial growth over the course of our life that absolutely correlates with broadband growth. That people are saying now in ways they didn't say before I some times just go to the internet just to hang out. Just to browse around for fun. Just to kill some time. There isn't any great purpose to my work, but it's a destination in a way that in my life my digital immigrant life, I plop down in front of TV. If I just wanted to veg at for awhile. Well the vegging at experience particularly for younger people now is often just hanging out on their Facebook account or checking out some news. Or checking out a store or two or something like that. But feels to them not like purposeful instrumental work, it just feels like they're hanging out and having fun. That's what broadband does because it just makes the internet so much easier to use and these applications so much easier to use as well. The other thing that broadband has now introduced to the online experience, that wasn't as nearly as evident before, is the video experience. Tremendous numbers of people now are enjoying the video that's available online. And for young people one of the striking differences between them and older video consumers online is they love the amateur stuff. They're hanging out on YouTube looking for those fun amateur videos or those poyant amateur videos or those treatly cute amateur videos in a way, they're also looking for Saturday Night Live features and Daily Show features, but they are much more into the amateur stuff and much more avid about it. Commenting on it. Putting in their favorites list and stuff like that. And that's what broadband does. It is now transforming the internet for many people from a largely text experience to a visual experience and think about the difference the newspaper universe and TV universe. And you begin to get a sense of what that also means for the way that we convey information. The way we share stories with each other. The implication of that is pretty simple. Media making is interactive now and participatory. We are not in a broadcast universe where one central location of gate keepers disseminates information to lots of people. We're in a to many to many environment where it's possible to be a broadcaster. You post a YouTube video and you can get thousands, tens of thousands, some times even millions of people to watch it. So you're broadcasting in some respects. But the most interesting part of story is that people are conversing about it and sharing it and mashing it up and changing the media experience themselves because they are actively participating in it. There was a wonderful survey in the Economist last year, just about this time, that talked about the people formally known as the audience now actively becoming involved in creating media, sharing media, mashing up media, and certainly wanting to be part of the process. They did not want to be passive recipients of that kind of material. Multi-tasking, here we go. Multi-tasking, these kinds of technologies are just afford multi-tasking in a way that's never been know before. One of my frustrations as a researcher is that we can't even compare the multi-tasking environment now to the pre-internet environment. No one even thought to ask those questions in a really robust and serious way. So I've desperately searched for about two years for pre-internet data about multi-tasking and come up with some decent time diary stuff that talks about people who had the radio on while they were making dinner or had the TV on while they were making phone calls and stuff like that. But there's nothing like this. And here's one to show you about it. Remember that slide? Kaiser Family Foundation, eight and a half hours a day generation M spent on a typical day. They actually cram it into six and a half hours worth of time. There's also wonderful experimental research that's being done on the West Coast where they're putting people in self-contained hermitically sealed boxes and try to figure out what they like. And the normal American adult human being apparently, according to this research, wants to cram thirty-one hours worth of experience into each twenty-four hour day. And part of this story is that this stuff now allows them to even think in those terms. Because they can be doing multiple things. Well one big implication of all this multi-tasking is sort of the dark side of it. My friend Linda Stone who is a fabulous, thoughtful technology analyst and consultant talks about all of us, but particularly young people living in a state of continuous partial attention. And in many respects that's the life that you all lead too. When you are in your office you've got the land line phone on. You've got your cell phone on. You've got your computer on of course with your IM client running as well as your email inbox open. You've got your door open and stuff like that. So you are open to all the inputs that this stuff can bring into your life. And you dare not shut off that stuff very often. Because god knows that there might be a wonderful input or important input that changes what your boss wants. Changes the nature of your understanding of the project you're working on or supersedes the sort of humdrum you're working on with something more important. And Linda talks about how this adds stress to peoples lives. It absolutely does. And it's partly related to this availability and presence and find-ability. People dare not take themselves off the grid, because others expect it. And others want it. And others expect their emails or their IM's or their Skype calls or something like that to be answered immediately. And you don't want to disappoint them and you don't want to seem like you're unenthusiastic about this stuff. But it certainly adds to the notion that you're on the clock in multiple ways when you're officially on the clock. But you're also on the clock when you're not on the clock. You go homeand read your email. Or you check out your email before you get to the office. Or you take your laptop on vacation. Who does that? Yeah, you're sick like me. And not only does she worry about this sort of psychological dimensions of this, but there's plenty of research suggesting, at least for older folks, that when they're trying to process multiple things, that they do any of them as well as they would have if they did them seriatim. The quality of their outputs or the quality of their deliverables goes down a little bit. Certainly their ability to retain information about what's important to them goes down if they're trying to, if there's a buzz going on in their head with other stuff. And they're sort of more frazzled, which effects the work environment. Last years keynote speaker, Henry Jenkins, wonderful, I consider him my teacher, from MIT though talks about a different side of multi-tasking that's important to hold in your heads as well. And he says, it's part of human nature to want to multi-task. And he talks about the people who do one job at a time and do it seriatim and concentrate on each task at a time, he says, that comes from humans farmer heritage. Where you had to do things in sequence because if you screwed it up then things would get out of order. And if you'd lost your focus you might not plant at the right time. Or you might not reap at the time or something like that. So there's definitely one part of human life that wants you to concentrate and wants you to contemplate every once in awhile and wants you to have some down time. That's fine. Jenkins points out that there's hunter aspect of life, which is multi-tasking writ large. You can't shut off any sense. You can not be open to all the inputs that matter. In part because of the threats they pose and in part because of the opportunities they pose. And there's a tension in our life that now the balance has shifted more towards the hunter side of life rather than the farmer side of life. And that's one of the impacts that these technologies have. But Jenkins, I think his original contribution to this argument, is that dismissing the hunter life or dismissing the hunter reality is not a good thing. And particularly for those of you who deal with younger people, they just have these capacities. There's other research suggesting that for younger people, and maybe it's just because they're young, but they can toggle more quickly, more readily, and more fastly between things than older folks can. And these technologies are just an enabler of that, but it's already a trait that they enjoy. Think about the grad students that you work with. I mean they can do stuff on the fly that it would take me fifteen minutes just to work through the process of getting to that stuff. They are sort of differently wired. And there's also some interesting research that their synapse are differently firing because of this stuff. I hold it up as a reality there's things to worry about it, but there are also things just to accept about it. Because it's there and because these young people are particularly good at it. That's reality four. Any questions? Yeah! { inaudible question } Yeah, the question is do the children who maybe toggle relatively well do they over time how does this effect them and is it tied to Attention Deficit Disorder? That's a question that is out there and we don't know. I mean at the same time all of this stuff is happening. Our cultural awareness of a thing called Attention Deficit Disorder has grown. Certainly the level of families trying to get treatment for it. The level of medications that are applied to it and stuff like that have grown. And we don't know what the correlations are and we certainly can't unpack the causality of it. It's something to worry about and from a classroom experience, but also from a the realities of new employers of these workers. It's something to negotiate with them. And I think one of the things that could be taught for instance in classrooms and certainly new employment situations is that there is a value to shutting your door and turning off your email client and being in a period of contemplation and being in a period of quiet. It's not a bad skill set and it's not a bad sort of mental framework for you guys to be encouraging on people. In part because there is research suggesting that people at their often are at their most creative when they're technically in down time. When they're shaving, when they're in the shower, when they're on a wonderful bike ride, when they're on a hike and stuff like that. That's when inspiration strikes as often or more often than it does when they're sitting there with their [ inaudible ] saying, I got to think of a new idea. { inaudible question } Yeah, it's helps explain the gap between the cons I listed on cell phone functionality. And it's feature fatigue. People just we're about to release a report about people and their use of technology and their feelings about it. And there is a substantial cohort of Americans who just want the simple stuff to do the simple stuff and they are really mad at their devices for knowing more and doing more than they know how to use in those devices. They don't want to wade through nine hundred page users manuals to find out how to use every function. And they don't want to be embarrassed to ask their friends show me how to use the text message T9 function because I hate typing out each individual letter on the darn phone. So that's a great incite and it exactly ties to that. People feeling that their gadgets are more in control of their lives. That's exactly where it comes from. { inaudible question } I'm here all day. So seek me out. I'll be down here for awhile as you to your break outs until people run out of questions. So anybody who's got questions. I should also say that our red site Pew internet. org, pewinternet.org, all of our stuff is free. All of our reports and all of our data. And we allow people to download our data sets and our code books so they can play with our data and stuff like that. And I wish more people would do that. Because it's a rich data set now. We've probably talked to a hundred and thirty or a hundred forty thousand people over the course of the project. And you guys ought to be aware of that. How much more time do I have? A couple minutes. Ok, well let me, literally should I show my movie? Let me just quickly go through content creation. Because it's a big part of this story. People are media makers. We are gonna release a report on Wednesday that talks about teenagers and social network sites like MySpace, Facebook. Fifty-five percent of those between the age of twelve and seventeen have Facebook profiles. They manage their privacy and disclosure in interesting ways. It's not just a case of willy nilly sort of hanging out out there and opening themselves up to predators. They're much more sort of sophisticated than the sort of cultural messages would indicate. A lot of people upload photos to internet. If you go to Flickr and search for Penn State you're gonna get a lot of pictures of the lion. A lot people just share their own stuff. Much more so than adults. You think of YouTube creations like that. A lot of people though, a lot of young people, are the tech support and content creation support for their families and their organizations. And so a lot of people a lot of teenagers especially are the ones who build websites. This is my church website. And the youth group of the church is completely in charge of it. And they won't let anybody over twenty-five go near it because we'll all screw it up. A lot of people with tag content. Thirty-two percent of young people have created their own information. Their own meanings. Their own understandings. Their own taxonomies of information. A lot of created their own blogs. Thirty-three percent of college students have blogs. And there's some data now hinting that it might be close to forty or forty-five percent. It's an amazing part of the college story now. And it's partly because a lot of classrooms are encouraging it is part of the classroom development. People keep their own personal web pages still. People do a lot of mash ups to think Photoshop as well as think Music Mash just because they take material that they find and use it as raw material for their own creations. And again they are tremendous number of young people. A fifth of young people who have internet accounts have uploaded a video. It's just an amazing part of the story. Now some times it's not YouTube. Don't just think YouTube here. It's to their own personal blogs or sending it to a friend or something like that on a website. But it's now a major part of the story. This slides for Brian. A fifth of younger adults now have avatars that interact with others. Yes, there's a question back there. { inaudible question } Yeah, it's a great question. I guess, I don't know enough. I'm not a scholar in human development, but I've seen enough of the literature to suggest that teenagers are pretty narcissistic already. These technologies give them new platforms and give them new ways to share material and nobody has yet done any sort of causation related longitudinal research, but my hunch is that the kids that we would have identified as extraverted or storytellers or people like to sort of hang out with others are the exact kid you know in my generation would be bloggers and video posters today. The other thing that is part of this story is that not everybody is, and matter of fact, the majority of teenagers who are doing this stuff, aren't necessarily doing narcissistic things. In other words, standing up on stage, spiking their landing and saying, look at me. They are hiding profiles only to their friends. Their conceptualization of their blog is I'm writing for my three best friends who have actually given the url to of this blog it's horrible. It's a breach of faith. It's just a crime against humanity that my parents can read my blog. Or that the school administrators can read my blog. Or that admissions offices could read my blog or my perspective employers could. They think of themselves as writing for lowercase A audiences. Of small numbers of people who really matter to them. So their model in their head is not a narcissistic model, but it's me at the mall with my buddies. Or me at the cafeteria lunchroom hanging out at the table with people. And it's a really important part of the story to try to figure that out eventually. But this sort of circumstantial evidence that I'm aware of suggests that the portion of kids who are out there hasn't changed dramatically because of this new stuff. The way that they're out there. The way they can be found has changed, but that's an audience story more than it's a internal, me showing off, kind of story. And so this is content creation just by age. Just to show you this. And I'm gonna quickly, well here's my last slide and I'll bow out. Everything that I've said is gonna change even more. So the realities that you think you now have grasped are gonna go even more dramatically in directions we don't necessarily anticipate in part because computing power continues to grow. You know Intel has now come up with new ways to keep Moore's law going for at least the next half generation. Storage power is absolutely tracking with computing power. When we invent new increments of computing power the storage capacity of the little things that are plugged into our computers all of those servers that Google's building and stuff like that goes up and it's really cheap store now. Communications power is growing the same way. We're finding new ways to push stuff through pipes in part because the pipes are getting better and in part because the compression technology is getting better. And one of the big stories that will be happening in the next couple of years is that we're gonna be able to find new ways to push a lot more things through the air. We're gonna open up Spectrum. We're gonna find more efficient ways to use Spectrum and that's all gonna change. So that this slide, remember this slide, at the current moment now the media ecology looks like this. It's gonna look like that to most kids and they aren't even gonna know. And so here is how we are building this future. This what I'm gonna end on. You might have already seen it or some of you have. There's a wonderful cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University who he and his students created this video. { music } { showing video } Thank you very much! { applause }