Generation FB
By Katrin Bennhold, NY Times
By Katrin Bennhold, NY Times
“My e-mail?” The boy looks at me as if I had just suggested staying in touch by carrier pigeon. “What, you don’t have an email?” I ask, insecure now. “Sure I do. But I only use it for my parents and my grandparents,” he says. “Aren’t you on Facebook?” I am. Phew. Of course I mostly check my Facebook profile when I’m prompted by an e-mail notification, but I don’t tell him that. Trevor Dougherty is 19 and to him, I am a geriatric 36-year-old who belongs to that amorphous generation of people-who-don’t-really-get-social-networking that stretches all the way back to, well, his grandparents.
I met Trevor in January, during a dinner debate on social networking at
the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was by far the youngest and most
eloquent speaker on the subject. I have perhaps 100 people in my life I call
friends. Trevor has 1,275. At one point he tried to add someone called Trevor
in every capital so he would have friends to visit across the world. He chats,
posts, tweets and consults “his community” on important decisions: “I’m going
to start producing/DJing electronic music. What should my stage name be?
#youtellme.”
The encounter made me curious: what does it do to teenagers to be “on”
all the time? Are they just doing what we did 20 years ago—gossiping, dating, escaping
pubescent solitude—and simply channeling those age-old human urges through this
new technology? Or is this technology changing humanity in a more fundamental
way? What kind of citizens, voters, consumers, leaders will kids like Trevor
grow up to be?
I decided to go back to the place I was a teenager in the days before
cellphones and e-mail: the Ratsgymnasium in Osnabrück, an average school in an
average town in northwest Germany. For three days in April I embedded in the
everyday lives of 13- to-19-year-olds, hanging out in and after class, watching
them interact and interviewing the adults in their lives.
Their teachers say they have poor spelling and short attention spans.
(“This is an ADD epidemic in the making,” one muttered darkly.) I found them
hyper self-conscious, narcissistic and a little superficial. Memory is on a
hard disc—many of them don’t even know their own mobile number by heart.
But most of the Facebooking teens I met among the 1,280 students here
are also infinitely more international-minded, flexible and tech-savvy than we
were 20 years ago. They can study for a math test whilst IMing and listening to
music; they take piano tutorials on YouTube and battle monsters in virtual
games with virtual friends from all over the world. They share everything, from
their latest break-up to prized study notes.
The social networking addiction may be accentuating the worst in youth,
but I also saw it bring out the best: this is not Generation Y, this is
Generation Why Not?—multi-tasking and crowd-sourcing, collaborative and
open-minded. The kids of today may not be able to spell Zeitgeist but they are
fundamentally of their time. And after getting to know them a little I came
away reassured that the many daunting problems previous generations are bequeathing
on them might just be in good hands.
When I ask the 25 students in his class, all but two are on Facebook, a
ratio confirmed in every snap poll I conduct over my three days here.
Volkers is popular. At 41, he is one of the younger teachers here and is
respected by students as someone “who can actually operate the screen
projector” installed in most classrooms. But even he is a year behind.
As the half-life of technological innovation shrinks, so do the
generations.
My Walkman accompanied me throughout high school. I got my first e-mail
address in college and my first cellphone when I started reporting, a clunky
Nokia with an antenna sticking out that I thought looked terribly avant-garde.
These days the 15-year-olds barely keep up with their 13-year-old siblings (who
apparently prefer Skype video conferences to Facebook chats).
The main gateway to the Internet for today’s teens, social networking
seems to have deepened a technology rift that has always divided young and old.
In 1991, teachers asked us to help get the video recorder to work; in 2011
technology has in many ways become a generational battleground for completely
different concepts of how to communicate and deal with information.
My old school has banned the use of all electronic devices (save
calculators). If a phone so much as vibrates, it is confiscated for 24 hours.
But sitting in on one class, I see at least half a dozen students tapping away
at deliberately dimmed smartphone screens. The transgressions are chronicled in
comments posted squarely during school hours: “Physics is soooooo boring.”
When the school encrypted its Wifi code so only teachers could get
online during class, a student cracked it and posted it. When teachers ruled
that phones had to be put on their desk during exams, students started bringing
in their old phones and kept the new ones hidden. When one boy was caught
cheating in a Latin test, his punishment was to give a workshop to teachers on
how students use technology to fool them.
Teachers worry about cheating, plagiarism and a casual attitude toward
online sources. (“Students believe that everything on the Internet is true,”
grumbles my old geography teacher Dagmar Rösner, who is still teaching at the
school. “Teachers suspect that everything on the Internet is made up,” counters
17-year-old Johannes Bommes).
But most of all they worry that students today have more trouble
learning than we did.
Headmaster Lothar Wehleit is waiting for me in his office with a little
pile of photocopied articles: Computers make children “Fat, Stupid and
Violent,” the first proclaims. “Classwork didn’t used to be buried under so
much cognitive material,” Wehleit laments. “At the end of one class they all
seem to get it. But at the beginning of the next class it’s no longer in their memory.
They leave school, play with their phones, turn their computers on and put
their earphones in.”
The subtext is clear: when teenagers are ‘on,’ their brains are off.
Two decades ago Attention Deficit Disorder was barely on the radar in
Europe. But in recent years the number of cases has gone up, and not just in my
old school. Studies by psychologists and educators have linked excessive screen
time to a loss of concentration and deep thinking. In one of them, published in
the journal Pediatrics last year, Douglas A. Gentile of the Media Research Lab
at Iowa State University studied 1,300 school-age children and found that more
than two hours a day in front of a screen raised the odds of exceeding the
average level of attention problems by 67 percent.
Many teenagers I met say they spend at least two hours every day in
front of some electronic device. But not all that time is wasted. I witnessed
an impressive capacity for self-directed learning. Arne Thate, 18, got bored
with his classical piano lessons so he started teaching himself pop songs with
YouTube tutorials. Marcel Sievers, a 14-year-old fan of computer games, taught
himself Camtasia, a screencasting software. Many more are members of
interest-driven groups on Facebook with peers in far-flung places whom they
have never met.
Like most teachers and parents here, the headmaster is not on Facebook.
And I can’t help wondering: Are teachers who do not understand the way their
students communicate able to effectively teach them?
The young couple is kissing. Her left leg rests on his right thigh, his
arms are wrapped tightly around her waist. They are sitting in the park behind
the school during break time amid clusters of chattering, giggling students.
But just as I’m feeling the warm glow of early ’90s nostalgia coming on I see
the outstretched hand with a nail-polished thumb scrolling down the touch
screen of an iPhone4. Without detaching her lips, the girl is surveying the
hallmark blue-and-white of the Facebook app.
Social networking has penetrated just about every aspect of teenage
interaction, not least dating etiquette. When you like a girl, explains
19-year-old Leo Laun, a teenage heartthrob who reminds me of Robert Pattinson
minus the messy hair, it’s much easier to send a friend request than to ask for
her phone number. Then you can check out her photos, her profile information
and her posts. “You know whether she is single, what she looks like in a bikini
and what music she likes,” he says, counting these clearly crucial points off
on one hand. “If you’re still interested, chances are she’s worth pursuing.”
It all sounds a little unromantic to me, but also pretty efficient. They
court each other with studied casualness in one-liners on their public walls
(and no, spelling is not a priority) before moving on to chatting, texting and
eventually—this at least hasn’t changed—a date at the movies. They post a
heart-shaped icon to publicly declare a new relationship and then change it to
a broken heart when it ends.
In many ways this isn’t new. I remember feverishly trying to find out a
boy’s name, looking through the phonebook for his address and riding my bike by
his house to glean some—any—nugget of information. But sometimes it’s not clear
whether the kids today control the information or the information controls
them.
“Deciding what to put on Facebook is a bit like deciding what to wear,”
says Leo’s friend Arne, the one who likes Fat Boy Slim. “You try to impress
people, maybe with an intellectual-sounding comment or a video in a different
language. When you decide what to list as your music taste you think “what kind
of music do my friends like and who is the coolest of them?’ ”
After he posts something, he says, he sits in front of the screen and
waits for reactions.
“When you get 10 likes and 8 comments you’re on top of the world. When
no one reacts, it’s a bit embarrassing.”
Leo and Arne check their girlfriends’ profiles obsessively, scanning
posts and counting “likes.” Facebook jealousy can eat him up, Leo admits. “That
boy Alex,” he groans, “he ‘likes’ everything she writes, it drives me nuts.”
Cleaning up the data traces of former sweethearts on your profile is a whole
other challenge, Arne says.
Zita Kantus knows all about managing data traces. The school counselor,
she is the first point of contact for bullying complaints and 80 percent of
those now involve social networking sites, she says. In one recent case a girl
became the target of an elaborate plot by a group of classmates. They created a
fictional boy character online and started courting her. When the girl
eventually agreed to come on a date, she found a crowd of mean girls laughing
in her face. Facebook has empowered the bullies who in my days were largely
confined to nasty little notes handed around in class.
“It has taken the phenomenon to a whole different level,” says Kantus,
pointing out that there was police involvement in three cases last year. “It
now happens at all hours and not just on school premises. And it has become
meaner. I think sitting in front of a screen has reduced inhibitions.”
But it’s also a case of the kids not always grasping the implications of
what they are doing, she says, recounting an episode where a student was caught
just as he was uploading a friend’s picture onto a gay site “as a joke.”
Privacy concerns divide the generations almost as much as technology.
“They have a very casual attitude to privacy,” says Wehleit. But that’s just
it: The flipside of this attitude is that teens like Eva, Johannes, Leo and
Arne are much less selfish with their knowledge than we were. They share their
study notes not just among friends or in their class, but across the country:
Abiunity.de is a goldmine of shared files on every exam subject on the German
syllabus. Unlike us, many of them study regularly in groups and seem to be much
better at it.
“They are much less hierarchical than you guys were,” observes my former
biology teacher, Gerd Schiefelbein.
Arne plans a trip around the world after graduating from high school
this summer and dreams of studying marine biology in Australia. Leo wants to
move to Britain.
Today they use social networking to rally around the coolest band of the
day and organize ad hoc parties with amazing turnout. As adults they will have
the tools to rally large communities around the causes they care about at
unprecedented speed. They don’t mind small tailored ads, but abhor big
intrusive ones. They trust one another more than politicians and big companies.
My bet is that they will be demanding customers and demanding voters.
At my old school I was struck by how much teenagers have changed. But I
was also struck by how little the school had changed, and I don’t think it’s an
exception. Teachers are right to fret about attention deficits and lazy
thinking. But no fundamental rethink seems to have occurred about how teaching
and learning should take place in the age of social networking.
“The problem is with adults,” says Leo.“If they say we’re becoming more
stupid, it’s perhaps because we’re in a school system they invented.”
“We need better teachers and talk about more relevant stuff in class,”
he adds. “Maybe
they should ask us for some advice.”
