Customer Reviews

The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book will get you up to date on what life is like for teens and tweens and twenty somethings. There is an opening survey of the history of technology in the home, starting in the days when most people just had a radio and a phone. But the narrative quickly moves into the present century. You read about the rise of the internet, email, instant messenger services, My Space, and now, Facebook. You learn about why people started moving from My Space to Facebook almost overnight, and how young people see Facebook as primarily an opportunity to enhance and support their current relationships, and not so much as a tool to search for new ones. You also read about how time online is starting to overtake the amount of time in front of the TV. The book seems to make more of this than warranted. Kids still watch hours of TV a day and often multitask by texting and Facebooking and You Tubing and watching Lost all at the same time.

You also read about the online gaming world. This medium, more than any other, makes it easy to create for yourself an alternate universe where people often create alternative characters for themselves and chat online with their gaming comrades.

There is also an interesting chapter about the idea of being addicted to the internet. The APA is not convinced at this time that internet use is an addiction, but apparently many young people feel that it is, and it is a problem in South Korea where PC Bangs command many hours of attention. Some people also report playing online games 8-12 hours a day.

There is a closing chapter about President Obama's huge online support and how much money he raised, and also how supporters created their own online Barack for President rallies.

This is a good book that should be read within the next year before it becomes out of date.

I've read five books so far for my graduate school research and the most substantial ones are Wikinomics and The Young and The Digital which is a more scholar and complete study yet easy and fun to read.
Disappointing books on this topic are:
1. The Cluetrain Manifesto which misleadingly is rated 4.5 stars. However, you can buy it new for 38 cents (that should have given me a clue).
2. Here Comes Everybody. It gets off the topic and after reading Wikinomics you don't really need to read this book.
3. "Groundswell" which is full of unnecessary details. The essence of it is about 30 pages. The rest are case studies and I'm not sure how they hold true today.

I found this book to be engaging to read and well-balanced in how it evaluated the digital patterns of young adults and teens. In the past year, I have been researching "Internet Addiction" and so much of the writing and research feels very sensationalized. In this book, I got the opportunity to look at how young adults engage with technology and understand the patterns as part of the culture and generation, and this came across as more informational and illuminating than judgmental and pathological. It also helped that the author included so many descriptions from young adults.

This is a fine book if you're thoroughly clueless as to what's going on in these modern times, but otherwise it is a shallow, rambling, exploration of youth and media. The author asks timeless questions regarding what is lost and what is added, and even though he defeats simple assumptions like "are people becoming more isolated with media?," they are still questions that shouldn't be asked any longer. The analysis of race and social media is also less than insightful. It's a case where statistics are only as good as the person using them. Watkins notes that a majority of everyone uses Facebook more than MySpace, but instead interprets the fact that only 60% use MS compared to 80% as signs of a racial disparity without entertaining the fact that people are actively migrating to FB across racial racial lines. The whole chapter is a terrible mess that considers the two systems as being roughly equivalent in their utility when they are not. Essentially Watkins is trying to hard there. Yet it doesn't get any better as the chapters roll by, and proves itself as a superfluous entry in internet scholarship.