Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation - Hardcover

Tapscott, Don

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0070633614 ISBN 13: 9780070633612

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Inc.,US, 1998

Synopsis

The first generation to grow up digital has arrived, and they are transforming the way we work, play, and communicate. In Growing Up Digital, bestselling author Don Tapscott profiles this net generation and how its use of digital technology reshaping the way society and individuals interact. Unlike the Baby Boomers who grew up with the passive medium of television, children today, in ever-growing numbers, are embracing interactive media such as the Internet, CD-ROM, and video games. Growing Up Digital highlights how young people-empowered by digital media-learn, work, play, communicate, and shop differently than their boomer parents. It examines what this means for the whole spectrum of society, including our education system, the government, and economy. Taken together, Growing Up Digital offers an overview of the Net Generation's fearless overhaul of our culture; and it gives the members of this generation-and everyone affected by their use of new media-a chance to anticipate and act on what lies ahead.

About this title

Review:

With the help of about 300 members of the Net Generation, or N-Gen, Don Tapscott explores what the Internet and other digital interactive technology is doing to and for our children. Despite fears that new technology is making kids more antisocial and less intellectual, Tapscott shows that kids are using it to play, build relationships and explore their world. And while the digital world has dangers, it also has greater opportunities.

Tapscott shows the role technology plays in how N-Genners learn, socialize among themselves, and interact with friends and family--often through insightful quotes from the kids themselves. Tapscott demonstrates how many clear truths, for instance that learning is social, have led to false conclusions, such as that computer use, being an individual activity, hampers social learning. And, with his N-Gen helpers, he puts the hype about Net porn in perspective. As one 15-year-old puts it, "I have never 'stumbled' into a site I didn't want to see. Not like on TV where I have occasionally flicked the channel only to 'stumble' into some gruesome murder scene." Yet the author also acknowledges that every new development has its problems and offers commonsense caution, quoting Alan Kay: "We don't have natural defenses against fat, sugar, salt, alcohol, alkaloids--or media. Television should be the last mass-communications medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon general's warning."

From the Publisher:

Growing Up Digital has some very good insights
Like most US business books, Growing Up Digital, has some very good insights.

Tapscott, a US internet guru, explores the simple premise that the "net generation" will have a huge impact on the way we work. That's because they are teaching us. "n-genners" are today's two-to 22-year-olds who have grown up digital, and are utterly comfortable with technology. In fact, such is the speed at which kids are outpacing adults, there is now a generation 'lap' rather than 'gap'.

This book helps explain the draw of the computer for children, and how it affects the way they think.

Marketing - March 2000

About this edition

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Inc.,US
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0070633614
• ISBN 13: 9780070633612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352