Saturday, March 10, 2007

Kids Today...

New York Magazine has a fantastic article on the vast (and growing) generation gap between kids today and their parents. Pull quote featuring Clay Shirky, new media studies professor at NYU:

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”


It's nice to see some generally pro-kid coverage of Internet trends, for a change.

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