Yesterday I posted my first impressions on The Don Tapscott Show at FastFoward 09. Here are some more thoughts. I said that rather that trying to figure out which generation is smarter or dumber, it is more useful to say that the definition of intelligence is changing. Prior generations were smarter than ours on many skills that were important to them. My grandfather was a college professor but he also worked his way through school by building houses, a skill he got form his father. So when he obtained his first teaching job on a low salary, he built his own house for his young family. Now people are more specialized. Some of this broader range of practical skills in the real world may become useful again in today╒s down-turning economy. I am sure you can think of examples with your own grandparents.
So if we look at new skills in the virtual world, it also allows us look at the specific
skills needed in our changing world and what skills may be enhanced by use of these media. Each medium is not a complete representation of reality. Each represents a different look at reality and each requires different skills. My grad school advisor, David Olson, said that if you read a book on skiing you enhance your information on skiing and enhance your skills in reading, not skiing. Among other things, he looked at what skills we gained as a byproduct of reading.
Each new medium brings us new skills as byproducts that are not always apparent. For example, researchers in the 70s showed film with zooming in to one group and similar film without zooming in to others. Then the two groups were given unrelated tasks and the people who saw the zooming in film paid more attention to details. Of course, whether this lasted more requires long-term research. Understanding the real impact of our new media also requires long-term research (see What Does Computer Use Really Do to Our Minds?)
Since each medium draws on different skills and supports different cognitive processes, we want to properly map media to tasks once we better understand their characteristics. For example, in some cases a picture is worth a thousand words, but in other cases a few words can be worth a thousand pictures. I did research in the 70s that showed that words were much better for certain spatial tasks that required location definition because they provided a way to codify the spatial environment to pinpoint locations and describe them. In other cases, with tasks that involved the mental manipulation of images, words did not help in the same way.
With the Web, text is still king for many purposes. It allows us to better codify information than images for certain tasks and in this way allows search to more easily find this information. Generally, we have to add text to images through tags to allow today?s search engines to find the images. Text also allows us to process information silently. The younger generation understands this since they can text message each other in the presence of their parents without their parents listening in.
This silent processing also makes text better than videos for sharing information in certain other environments. I often get videos sent to me when I am surrounded by others and have to save them for later. Then I never get around to looking at them. Text based messages allow instant processing in more environments like the conference session I am sitting through right now. As I wrote before, it took almost a thousand years for people to realize that you could process text in silence (see Phonetic Alphabet: the Information Technology That Keeps On Giving). I am sure it will take a while for us to better understand how to use the new digital media.
However, text is not always the right answer, as I found before. For example, the combination of audio and images can work better, in some cases, than the combination of text and images. You can only process one visual channel at a time but you can dual process an audio and visual channel. So you cannot read a text caption and look at the image at the same time. You have to go back and forth. However, you can listen to an audio description and process the image simultaneously. There is much research work to be done here. Getting back to the beginning in this post, the research is better focused on what are the skills and requirements that the new media bring and not which generation is smarter. I think the generally more inclusive younger generation would agree.
If you want the video version of this text message, here is the conference interview I did on it.
Other conference posts include:
Charlene Li on Social Technologies
Orion Corporation’s One Search Experience
Comments