Scroll down to watch full program online.
Here is a link to my CNET review of PBS Frontline special Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier which airs on PBS stations Tuesday at 9:00 PM and now on the web.
But don’t just take my word that this is an important and provocative program. Two other respected Internet safety experts and youth advocates have weighed in with their thoughtful analysis of the show.
Read Anne Collier and Stephen Balkam’s reviews not just to help you decide whether to watch the film but for their own perspectives on the important issues that the film brings to light. Anne Collier’s NetFamilyNews post is titled “PBS Frontline’s ‘Digital Nation’: Presenting our generation with a crucial choice. FOSI CEO Stephen Balkam’ wrote Are We (Virtually) There yet? for the Huffington Post.
Anne picked up on one of the things the show taught us about how children learn by quoting the show’s interview with James Paul Gee who, in Anne’s words, “told of how, in virtual worlds and multiplayer games, young people function in teams in which “everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else’s; they know how to understand the other person’s expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world’”?
Balkam notes that “the real battle grounds fought over in this film include the future of education and how we raise our kids. The recent Kaiser Family Foundation research found that kids were consuming 7.5 hours of media per day. Add in multi-tasking — texting while watching TV while listening to music, for instance, and the figure reaches an amazing 11 hours.” My own analysis of the Kaiser study is here.
On a related topic, also see Are you an Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s impact on Society by Adam Thierer. Thierer does an excellent job summarizing how different people view the social and technology changes over past three decades concluding “On balance, I believe the optimists generally have the better of the argument today. But pessimists make many fair points that deserve to be taken seriously; they just need a more reasonable articulation of (some of) those concerns.”
You now can watch the full program online.
Click to watch Digital Nation
1 Comment to 'Read reviews & watch ‘Digital Nation’'
February 6, 2010
I remember when Paul McCartney was said to have died in a car crash, and the other Beatles covered it up with a look-alike, and campus radio spoke of nothing else for days on end. My roommate urged me (unsuccessfully) to install a reverse gear on my turntable so as to play all Beatle records backwards, looking for hidden clues such as were to be found in someof their songs. The mainstream media was oblivious to the story, notwithstanding that the Beatles were the most popular rock group to date. They didn’t ignore substantive news to break in breathlessly with update after update, as they would today, as they recently did with….say…the Tiger Woods sex escapades. I recall only one grumbling opinion piece, after several days had elapsed, to the effect that the Beatles…those unpredictable kids… may have fooled us all with their practical joke, but it was a sick laugh they must be having.
I was upset about it. I wanted more airtime for our generation. But now I see it was a protection, from adults who still felt a collective sense of responsibility toward the younger generation. Or maybe they were just fuddy-duddys out of touch with changing times, but nonetheless, it was a protection. Let kids have their own generation, let them cultivate their own interests, but not to the exclusion of all else. Construct your society so that doesn’t happen. Link them with ideas of the past, ideas that have roots, ideas that have endured over time.
Leave a comment