Interesting that she says in the Q&A that much of the use of social media by “young people”, which wasn’t very well defined in the talk, is about media consumption. Obviously, that seems rather accurate (although I would guess there are socioeconomic factors that play into this), and it’s not so much using Twitter to post links to New York Times articles.
One woman asks during the Q&A about if we’ve lost something by moving to online communication (namely, losing non-verbal communication), which I think is an important consideration. Although, I think what often gets left out of this common discussion are the (potentially) the new ways in which it’s possible to communicate online. Body language could be substituted in online communication by, for instance, two individuals communicating via different media (starting a conversation via email sends a different implicit message than one via text or gChat).
Dynamics of distraction: loved that she mentioned (compulsory) school being meant to train for the labor force, and her surprise that there hasn’t been some radical revision to retrain the populous for modern, often times multifaceted, labor. This ties in to what she said about parents’ attitude toward’s children’s circadian rhythms, where she wondered why it was that parents blamed kids for wanting to be on their cellphones at night rather than questioning the social practice of sending them to school very early in the morning. These two points really highlight to me society’s attitude toward school and how relatively unchanged school has been compared to industry in the past 50 years.
I also thought it was very interesting that she said that young people are reading more than adults, even elderly adults who supposedly have more time. Curious about the content of that reading.