Latitude

Researchers theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.

New York Times, “The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s”

Children as Active Users

The majority of content written about children and information psychology conceives of them as passive entities—describing how new connectivity and heavy media interaction is affecting them. (How do we monitor kids’ Web activity? Is it making them overweight? Unhappy? Unsuccessful in school?)

Instead, Latitude’s 42: Children’s Future Requests for Computers and the Internet, is interested in the unique perspective that children bring to the realm of innovation as active thinkers.

“It’s certainly no longer true that kids are just blindly consuming what commercial culture has to offer.”

One obvious result is that younger generations are going to have some very peculiar and unique expectations about the world.

New York Times, “The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s”

Tech’s “Critical Period”

A 2006 study by Zheng Yan found that age was a significant factor in children’s objective, “top-down” understanding of how the Internet works as a technical and social system (even most adults never reach the “scientific” level).

But, as the study only examined one cohort of children, it left off asking: “How do children learn and understand concepts that are newly emerged and highly complex?”

“My 3-year-old has become so accustomed to her father’s multi-touch iPhone screen that she approaches laptops by swiping her fingers across the screen, expecting a reaction.”

There’s evidence to support that, like language-learning, there may be a “critical period” or optimal stage of life (in childhood) during which some skills and concepts can take hold with more “fluency” than when acquired at later stages of life. Because technology, digital interactivity, and the psychology of new connectivity are so fast-evolving, younger generations may be uniquely positioned to understand these concepts, if primarily through intuition.

What are the Differences Across Mini-Generation Gaps?

A recent study by Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that kids (8-18) spend about two hours per day interacting with media on their mobile phones (and another hour viewing “old” content, like television programs, via newer mediums such as Hulu and iTunes).

The technology and interaction expectations for children today (dubbed “the iGeneration,” by one NYT article) include real-timeness, altered notions of community and geography, and, increasingly, interoperability across devices / device-agnostic content, as well as touch-screen/gestural interfaces—to name just a few.

If these standards are intuitable to children even just a “mini-generation gap” shy of millenials, it’s conceivable that their vision into the future spans further, even if it’s not well-articulated or concretely imagined.

Latitude 42: Children’s Future Requests for Computers & the Internet

To extrapolate real business opportunities from children’s creativity and their unique relationship to technology, Latitude is asking children to create visual representations (drawings) of something they’d like to do on their computers/the Internet, but can’t right now, as a structured problem-solving exercise. With some creativity, acumen, and analytical rigor of our own, we’ll extract some practical applications from the visual submissions (in tandem with a brief survey).

What would be really interesting or fun to do on your computer/the Internet that your computer can’t do right now? Please draw a picture of what this activity looks like.

To request participation, please send a brief email to innovation@latd.com.

Learn more about Latitude 42: Children’s Future Request for Computers & the Internet.

Header image courtesy of ciadefoto’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.