At the Institute, we spend a fair amount of time talking to teenagers, who are some of the most creative adapters and reinventors of technology. The Financial Times is running a series on digital media (available to subscribers only), and had the sense to talk to teenagers in "Tokyo, Mumbai, Beijing, London and New York about their media consumption and leisure habits in a bid to see what trends emerged to support survey findings in individual markets":
Three prominent trends which appeared were:One thing that is particularly striking is that the "urban child" has very similar experiences in the digital world, wherever they live. Only 38 per cent of Indian households have TVs and 0.6 per cent have home computers, according to Mediaedge:CIA.
- the use (except in the US) of mobile phones as personal organisers as well as communication tools;
- the in-roads made by video games, on and offline, into more traditional pastimes and media;
- and a comfort with using the web for information, entertainment and community - "more like a magazine, and less like a directory", as MindShare's Sheila Byfield says....
But an affluent 11-year-old in Mumbai "Googles" the same word on the web as an 11-year-old in New York. And a child living in Beijing exposed to computer games, mobile phones and the internet may have more in common with a child in London than someone growing up in rural Guizhou.
This last point is perfectly consistent with what the likes of Manuel Castells has observed, that the "space of flows" created by digital networks has created an interconnected world of high-tech islands, all of which tend to converge into a common social and cultural type, and which have less and less in common with whatever surroundings they happen to be in.
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