Only a few years ago, commentators could ply their technological determinism toward children and technology to a willing technology wanting educational audience. Its limitations were easily over looked in the welcomed belief that children were using technology in new ways to their parents.
This year, hundreds of speakers will regurgitate this fallacy to educational audiences sitting obediently in conference halls. Despite numerous floors in the original story, it still feels good, playing to children at risk politics which gets parent and teacher attention.
Today, one only has to catch a train or eat in a restaurant to see adults are not incompetent fools who know less about media than their kids … or teachers. The era of dumb parents and superior tech savvy teachers is over (if it ever existed). The story needs to move on.
Growing up digital was a compelling story at a time where others, such as Jenkins using actual evidence to describe participatory culture. GuD was romantic and also strangely similar to the “Californian ideology” used by marketing companies to sell materialism.
My point is, don’t accept generational spin assertions from professional speakers about kids being fundamentally ahead of their parents in all media forms. They are not. Families have changed remarkably in the last five years, unlike the rhetoric of technological and economic determinism that emits from Twitter.
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