The Rise of Young Digital Mavens in the US and China

A new study by IAC and JWT, two large internet advertising agencies, have announced a new study detailing the rise of the "Young Digital Mavens" demographics in the United States and China.

"The study found that while a large majority of youth in both countries now feel dependent on digital technology, this attitude is especially pronounced in China. As many as 80 percent of Chinese respondents agreed that 'Digital technology is an essential part of how I live,' compared with 68 percent of Americans. The Internet is such a vital part of life for Chinese youth that they are twice as likely as young Americans to say they would not feel OK going without Internet access for more than a day (25 percent vs. 12 percent). And more than twice as many Chinese youth admitted they sometimes feel 'addicted' to living online: 42 percent vs. 18 percent of Americans.

"'The Chinese people seem to be way ahead of Americans in living a digital life,' noted IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller today in Beijing, where he spoke to more than 350 Chinese students at Peking University. 'More activity online means a more connected and a more evolved workforce - just what China needs as it makes its move from being the workshop of the world, to a developed economy in its own right.'

"'Like many other areas in comparing Americans to the energy and progress elsewhere in the world, China's speedy evolution in its use of the internet is fast eclipsing that of the US. I think this is great for China, not so great for us,' Diller added."

A more detailed report of this study is available as a press release at China Leads the US in Digital Self-Expression, CNNMoney, November 23, 2007. http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/NYF00723112007-1.htm

http://iac.com.

http://jwt.com

AP image of a internet cafe in Beijing from Time Magazine, September 11, 2006. http://img.timeinc.net/time/asia/magazine/2006/0918/internet_cafe.jpg. Photographer Gregg Baker/AP. Caption: Sociologists worry that Internet overexposure could be harmful to China's youth

Special Theme: Social Network Sites

danah boyd and Nicole Ellison are the guest editors of a special issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication exploring issues in social computing and networking. The articles explore the feature sets of social networking sites, their audiences, the cultures and sub-cultures, and issues that occur in both the sites and their study. Not surprisingly, the field turns out to be quite a rich one for study.

Here's a table of contents for the eight articles found in this special section:

danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

Judith Donath, Signals in Social Supernets

Hugo Liu, Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances

Eszter Hargittai, Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites

Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun, Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site

Dara N. Byrne, Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com

Lee Humphreys, Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball

Patricia Lange, Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube

URL: Special Theme: Social Network Sites, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Volume 13, Issue 1, October 2007. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/index.html

Image: A cybercafe from the JCMC page.

Mindmapping Your Seminar

This morning, a fascinating google alert appeared in my email, a posting by Kevin Lim, University of Buffalo, describing a recent graduate seminar. The posting was accompanied by the mindmap above ..

[Recently, Kevin Lim] presented “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams at [his] graduate reading seminar. [He] created a simple mindmap as seen above, as a way of navigating the text and drawing out more thoughts during discussion.

As you will be able to tell, Wikinomics runs polar to Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” as well as Jaron Lanier’s “Digital Maoism“. While the latter folks speak about the hazards of the online collectivism, Wikinomics runs on a high with optimism about our new world of online collaboration and crowdsourcing.

If nothing else, a mindmap like this breaks out of the "powerpoint to death" trap - participants can't just easily "follow the bouncing" bullet from a though z. The two dimensional model immediately triggers a lot of questions that lead to thinking about the map: why is this pink and that yellow, why isn't it the reverse, why is this here and not there, etc ... Even this slight break from linearity encourages the reader to begin to develop her own authority over the subject.

We will have to experiment a bit more with this model in our plans for great leap forward ...

Resources:

[0] Kevin Lim, Mindmapping Wikinomics, flickr.com, November 9, 2007. http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/1925928543/

[1] Kevin Lim, Mindmapping Wikinomics…, theory.isthereason.com, November 9, 2007. http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=1950

Japan Moves Towards the Post PC Era

Hiroko Tabuchi, reporting for the Associated Press in Tokyo, observes that "a new PC or laptop computer may be the last thing a Japanese student will want to buy for college." Leaving aside the differences between the Japanese and American undergraduate curriculum, several important observations stand out:

the Japanese PC market is shrinking, rather than growing. PC sales have declined in each of the last 5 sales quarters.

Hitachi, like IBM in the United States, has announced that it will cease manufacturing home computers,

hand-held keitai devices are providing more and more of the computing power usually associated with PCs.

The last item points to an important component of the platform shift ... keitai devices and services in Japan are where the action is.

More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.

The fastest growing social networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites like mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.

Story: Hiroko Tabuchi, PCs being pushed aside in Japan, Associated Press, November 4, 2007, 5:49 AM (ET). http://apnews.excite.com/article/20071104/D8SMQ8DG0.html

Image: Ken, Keitai = Cellphone = modern security blanket, http://artsyken.com/2004_07_01_archive.php

Cappuccino culture for teenagers

In some schools, classrooms are being redesigned to resemble cyber cafés. Virginia Matthews of the Independent [London] reports

"At Colne Community School in Brightlingsea, Essex, the ICT Learning Centre – despite its 60 or so matt black, flat-screen computers – is designed to look more like a coffee bar than a secondary school, according to Mark Thomson, assistant principal.

"Yet despite the significant increases in GCSE grades, the better coursework presentation and what he calls "rising engagement levels among less motivated pupils" that have followed a £3m investment in technology, Colne's cyber café is just the start of things. ..."

Article continues at Virginia Matthews, Secondary teaching: Cappuccino culture for teenagers, The Independent [London], 01 November 2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/education/schools/article3113582.ece

Image credit: University of Pennsylvania, Accenture Cyber Cafe, http://www.seas.upenn.edu/cybercafe/