TheSite.org's Outposts

Interesting new report from think tank Demos:

As they enter the next decade, British young people are in a precarious position — demographically, economically and politically. Stereotyped by newspapers, sensationalised by marketeers and pigeon-holed by politicians, our cultural narratives about young people are not fit for purpose. It is little wonder that young people are more alienated from formal politics than at any other point in recent history. But that matters, more now than ever.

Their generation will need to work with governments to solve an array of intractable problems; from adapting to low carbon lifestyles to caring for an ageing population. But the inequality between this cohort and older generations means that politicians will have to do more than associate themselves with the trappings of youth culture to prove their relevance. They need to start taking their cue from the values and concerns of the next generation of British citizens and find a convincing way to describe the future they face.

Starting from an analysis of the attitudes of 16 – 25 year olds and some of the key trends they are living through, An Anatomy of Youth is a resource for anyone interested in what politics can do for the next generation. With a foreword from David Willets MP, new essays from Zygmunt Bauman, dana boyd, Katherine Rake, Peter Madden, Stuart White, original data from v’s ‘Voicebox’ survey and portraits of young people, this report reveals a generation that is creating social change rather than simply experiencing it.

An Anatomy of Youth shows that the greatest asset we can give this generation is more political capital and the chance to shape the debate about the issues that will affect them tomorrow.

British teens are gearing up for a world first: an epic live and interactive chat show featuring leaders from the worlds of music, movies, sport, business and the community in general. The Youth of Today Show is being created by teenagers for teenagers and was broadcast online on Thursday 18 March.

The Youth of Today is funded and supported by the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Communities and Local Government.

It is managed by a range of leading organisations. They are: The National Youth Agency (NYA), Changemakers, The Young Foundation, UK Youth Parliament, British Youth Council, the Prince’s Trust and the Citizenship Foundation.

This the blurb from the movements.org website:

About the Alliance for Youth Movements

The Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting, connecting, and supporting digital activists from around the world. AYM hosts annual conferences, events, and trainings that link influential leaders in technology, media, private and public sectors with the some of the world’s most promising digital activists. AYM’s website, launching soon, will serve as a hub for discussion, resources, and news about digital activism around the world.

About the 2010 AYM Summit in London

The 2010 AYM Summit in London will explore how youth activists can better utilize online and mobile tools to diminish violence. Attendees will convene at InterContinental Park Lane in London from March 9-11, 2010. The Summit is supported by Access 360 Media, Causecast, Edelman, Gen Next, Google, Howcast, the Legatum Institute, MeetUp, MTV, the Salesforce Foundation, and YouTube, among others.

SUMMARY

Judy Woodruff takes a look at how the millennial generation — people born after 1980 — fits into the current political and economic spectrum. The Pew Center’s Paul Taylor and Amanda Lenhart discuss their new report.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

[via Mashable]

Social network age distribution

More detail on these stats over at Pingdom.

Age distribution per site

From Australia:

Youth Tree is launching Big Help Mob in 2010! Imagine a diverse army of 100+ young people who act like a rent-a-crowd for non-profits by doing monthly massive favours from tree-planting to shelter-renovating, beach-cleaning and beyond… and then performing ludicrous, well-executed flash-mobs in public places. We’re on our way to making volunteering as mainstream as cheeseburgers and breathing.

Sir Bob Geldof addressing delegates at the One Young World forum meeting in London (which is taking place 8th-10th Feb.

Aardvark is a fairly new question and answer service that’s takes a fresh approach to online Q&As. A couple of things make it distinctive.

First, it nudges people in your network to get your question answered, rather than waiting for people to come across your question and answer it unsolicited- as with Yahoo Answers for example. It’s a push, rather than pull strategy.

Second, it aims to build your network with people you know or our connected with in some way building on your ‘social graph‘ from social networks you may be active on like Facebook and Twitter. In this way, it attempts to make incentive for answering questions the same as answering questions you might get ordinarily away from the web.

This strategy tends to mean you’ll get responded to quickly, although there may well be less depth to responses that you might get from Q&A services working over a longer time frame. It also means that it’s a service optimised for answering questions that can’t answered by a quick bit of internet research.

Here’s a link to some of the more technical theory behind the website but the best way to find out is to test it yourself.

Here’s Damon Horowitz Aardvark CTO on the theories for artificial intelligence:

The US based Pew Research Center recently released a report “Social Media Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults“.

It grabbed headlines for saying young people aren’t as interested in blogging as they used to be and aren’t as active on Twitter as other age groups. However, it was particularly interesting to read about its finding in relation to where young people in the US go to get health information:

About a third (31%) of online teens ages 12 to 17 use the internet to look for health, dieting or physical fitness information, a finding that has remained relatively stable since the question was first asked in December 2000, when 26% of online teens gathered health information online. Older teens are more likely than younger teens to look online for health information (38% of teens ages 14‐17 vs. 13% of teens ages 12‐13). Back in 2000, when we first asked teens about their online health information seeking practices, teens showed similar variations ‐ older teens, particularly older teen girls were more likely to look for health information online.

Teens also use the internet to look for information on health topics that are hard to talk about, like drug use, sexual health or depression. A bit more than one in six (17%) internet‐using teens look online for information about sensitive health topics, statistically equivalent to the 22% who reported such searches in 2004.

Girls are more likely than boys to look online for sensitive health information (23% vs. 11%). Younger boys are the least likely group to look for information on a health topic that is hard to talk about—just 4% of online boys ages 12‐13 have done so, compared with 13% of older boys ages 14‐17. Teens from the lowest‐ income families – those earning less than $30,000 annually – are the most likely to seek health information online. Just about a quarter (23%) of online low‐income teens look for health information compared with 11% of teens from households earning more than $75,000 a year.

Great presentation from Steve Bridger at the Media140 event for the Third Sector looking at what voluntary organisations like YouthNet should be thinking about in terms of embracing social media and digital technology.

David Wilcox chats with Huw Bryant, Lowri Fflur Davies, Eleri Fflur and Lowri Jos about their day as interviewees and uploaders.

The Digital Youth Wales Network was launched at the WISE KIDS – WISP conference 2010 on Feb 1st 2010. Its aim is to be a space for professionals (teachers, youth workers, LA staff, and others) interested in the Digital Livs of young people to share their good practice, resources, questions and knowledge, to PREPARE, SUPPORT and INSPIRE young people in their Digital Lives.

Clip from the interesting new series on BBC2 exploring the development of digital technology and how it’s changing our lives.

Comediennes Isy Suttie and Josie Long star in the Happiness Project raising awareness about mental health and emotional wellbeing for charity YoungMinds.

Wikipedia sums the origins of the term ‘digital natives‘ in this way:

Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term digital native in his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants published in 2001. In his seminal article, he assigns it to a new breed of student entering educational establishments. The term draws an analogy to a country’s natives, for whom the local religion, language, and folkways are natural and indigenous, over against immigrants to a country who often are expected to adapt and assimilate to their newly adopted home.

Since the term came into common usage there has been continuing debate about the usefulness of the term. Born Digital (see video above) is a book, published in 2008, that teases out some of this issues.

They make the following points:

• Digital natives are a population, not generation
• Those born digital are just as clever as previous generations- young people interact with information in a very different way
• Young people are not more in danger than previously, although safety education needs to develop to take into account the new online spaces
• Young people are not meaner to each other than before, just more visible than it was before

Below are some posts that give different flavours of this debate:

Net generation or Digital Natives: Is there a distinct new generation entering university? Jones, Chris; Ramanau, Ruslan; Cross, Simon and Healing, Graham (2009)  Computers and Education (In Press)

Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’ – Dave White – Tall Blog

“Born Digital” by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser – blog post by Danah Boyd

Grown up digital – Don Tapscott

Digital Native – Myth and Reality – Neil Selwyn CILIP – University of London

Who’s a Digital Native? – Simon Columbus

Essentially a lot of the argument boils down to:

“In their 2008 book “Born Digital”, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser make it explicitly clear: Not everybody growing up in these times, as Internet use is the norm, is a digital native. The authors rather describe them as the heavy users and early adopters of the Internet and the social web among the young generation.” – Simon Columbus

This documentary profiles the Obama campaign’s massive youth movement and Obama’s 27-year-old speechwriter Jon Favreau.

What made the Obama speeches so appealing to young people? And why does the Millennial generation born after 1981, and now coming of age as voters, seem the perfect generation for Obamas message of hope and optimism? What impact did the campaign rhetoric have on the Millennials and is Obamas young speechwriter Jon Favreau the voice of this new generation?

Young campaign volunteers in Virginia and Obama’s national student leader in Washington DC explain how the Obama speeches inspired them to join the movement. There are also interviews with Jon Favreau’s former college professors. Who is Jon Favreau? What shaped his political views? And how much of the speeches that gave words to the hope, aspirations and energy of a new generation is Jon, and how much is Obama?

Hey you…yes you! Watch this first! from Leapanywhere.com on Vimeo.

“New comedy talent, Josie Long brings her unique brand of cheeky, sweet humour to the “Alcohol, It’s No Joke” campaign. Josies film deals with teenage drinking and the consequences for one particular teenage girl.”

The Prince’s Trust YouGov Youth Index

Not sure what to make of this. On the face of it it seems to confirm what most already suspected. Interesting attempt to quantify emotions though. Press release led with the linking between unemployment and drink and drugs.

“The Prince’s Trust YouGov Youth Index reveals that those out of work are significantly less happy with their health, friendships and family life than those in work. One in ten young people (11 per cent) claim that unemployment drove them to drugs or alcohol. According to the report, based on interviews with 2,088 16-to-25-year-olds, unemployed young people are also more likely to feel ashamed, rejected and unloved more of the time. If trends follow those of previous recessions, these can become permanent psychological scars.”

While their results (PDF) seemed to point to a stronger link between mental and general health and employment status.

This was a project led by Barnados. You can find out more from the webpage for the project here.