Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. This chapter reflects on the effects and implications of the discrepancy between adult perspectives on digital media and youth experiences. Through an analysis of public discourse by marketers, journalists, and new media researchers compared with statements by young technology users, it is proposed that the current so-called "Internet generation" is in fact a transitional generation, in which young Internet users are characterized to varying degrees by a dual consciousness of both their own and adult perspectives, the latter of which tend to exoticize youth. An analogy with the first television generation is developed to suggest that the birth of a true Internet generation, some years in the future, will pave the way for more normalized, difficult-to-question changes in media attitudes and consumption, and thus that the present transitional moment should be taken advantage of to encourage conversation between adults and youth about technology and social change

Susan C. Herring

English

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Questioning the Generational Divide: Technological Exoticism and Adult Constructions of Online Youth Identity

Children born in the mid- to late-1980s and the 1990s have been labeled the “Internet Gen-eration”: the first generation to grow up in a world where the Internet was always present.1 Surveys show that this generation (sometimes also called the “Net Generation, ” the “Net-Gen, ” “Generation i, ” the “Digital Generation, ” or the “Millenials”) socializes more online, downloads more entertainment media, and consults the Web for a wider range of purposes than do present adults or young people of the previous generation.2 As a result, members of the younger generation are often more Internet savvy than their teachers, parents, grand-parents, and even older siblings. The age gap with respect to technology is referred to here as the generational digital divide, or simply the generational divide.3 The growing awareness of age-based differences in technology skill and use has given rise to rampant speculation about their nature and effects. As with other types of digital divide, the generational divide is typically interpreted to mean that people on one side of the gap—youth—have more access and a greater ability to use new technologies than those on the other side—the adults (and especially, older adults) who had the misfortune to be born before the advent of the Internet. Yet while there is little doubt that young peopl

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