Young and the Digital (eBook)

The diffusion of the Internet in American homes was considerably more rapid than the computer. The Census Bureau's Current Population Survey began probing Americans about home Internet use in 1997. That year 18 percent of households in America reported using the Internet. At the start of the millennium, in the year 2000, four in ten households, or 40 percent, were connected to the Internet. By the close of 2001 more than 50 percent of American homes were accessing the Web. Sixty-two million households, or 55 percent, had Internet access by 2003. That was more than triple the proportion of Internet households in 1997. Nearly all households with a computer in 2003, 88 percent, had access to the Internet. Indeed, by the late 1990s the Internet was the primary motivation for purchasing a computer, as the two, in effect, became synonymous. Our lives, needless to say, have never been the same. The generation of young people we met came of age in technology-rich households. In fact, they were the first generation of American teens to grow up with computers and the Internet literally at their fingertips. It was their presence in the household, more than any other factor, that correlated most consistently with the presence of computers in the home. In 2003, 76 percent of homes with school-age children, six to seventeen years old had a computer compared to 57 percent of homes without kids. Also, homes with school-age children were more likely than homes without them to be connected to the Internet, 67 and 57 percent, respectively. Not surprisingly, many of the young people we talk to share stories of how the Internet has become a routine part of their everyday lives, shaping how they learn, live, play, and communicate with their peers. Many of them were introduced to computers at an early age, around nine years old. Many of their earliest memories involve computer games, the gateway experience to computers for most children. But not long after that, many of the young people we met were introduced to the Internet. As twenty-one-year-old Jonathan told me during an interview, 'I can't imagine living without computers because I've never really known a world without them.' Like many of his peers, Jonathan has also never known a world without an Internet that offers unprecedented access to information, entertainment content, and, most important, his close circle of friends. The initial attraction to the online world for many young Internet users was e-mail. Twenty-year-old Allison recalls e-mailing her friends when she was ten. 'At the time, 'Allison said, 'e-mail was the cool thing to do and it was new and a lot of fun too.' Allison laughed at herself now: 'I would call my two closest friends and ask them to go online and respond to my e-mail.' Early in the Internet's history, researchers often considered e-mail the 'killer app' because of its heavy use. Young people's new media behaviors turned a pivotal corner in 1997. That was the year AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was introduced and became an immediate hit with teenagers. When we asked young people to describe their first true adventures online, they easily shared vivid memories of IM and the time they spent communicating with their friends on the service. As young teens they rushed home from school to use IM. For decades, when American youth arrived home from school, they turned on their television screens. But the enthusiastic embrace of IM reversed, almost overnight, a four-decade-old habit of daily life in America. IM was a way to extend the time teens spent with their friends. The rise of the instant messaging generation was a harbinger of things to come, namely, the Internet as...