A New Digital Landscape

If you read the press you probably see the future of the Internet as commercial. It's all a matter of business models and revenue streams. It's a sort of 'virtual business'. Or perhaps you see it as a 'library in the sky'. In fact neither is very near the truth. The Internet will turn out to be something quite different from both of these, although it will contain elements of both.

Children are growing up in a connected world and, unlike adults they can't imagine anything else. They are increasingly at home on line, and they don't just surf the world wide web, they are also creating web sites and building communities.

We're beginning to realise that children use the Internet in a different way from adults. We almost invariably turn to the net to look up information and we don't go much beyond that. We might do a little shopping but even that may be what we set out in search of in the first place. Children approach online activity with a completely different mindset.

Neil McLean is a director at BECTa, the Government Agency for ICT in Education. He writes:

"When you talk to children about their use of the internet, you find that they think of themselves as being inside something whereas adults think of themselves as looking at something. Whilst most adults tend to just look for information, children are increasingly aware that they need not simply receive information, they can shape it too."

In their teenage years the Internet opens up a whole new world. The media constantly tell us how dangerous chat rooms are but for teenagers things appear very different. The Internet offers them vital private space as they grow up and become more independent. They see chat rooms as a public space where they can remain anonymous. If you think back to your own adolescence you'll see how appealing - and important - this is. Adolescence is a time of acute self-consciousness and the anonymity of a chat room is very attractive.

"A friendship on the internet can change a person's life," says Kerry, a child in Cape Town, South Africa. "Some people are judged by their looks and therefore have no friends, but on the Internet nobody is judged and a friendship is so strong that the look of a person doesn't matter."

Teenagers are acutely image conscious. The right brand of shoes with the correct number of holes for the laces can render you socially acceptable - or an outcast if you don't have them. It's all false of course, but the manufacturers of the 'in' products do nothing to alter things. To a sensitive young person these things are acutely real and can stifle the person you are or wish to be.

The Internet, with its anonymity and its lack of cultural barriers presents an open and free place where you can be yourself and be judged by what you have to say with no need to worry about your looks, your spots or your clothes. Is it any wonder that young people flock to the Internet and completely ignore our cries of 'danger'.

And it doesn't just apply to looks, it is even more important for children with serious handicaps.

"Nobody knows you are deaf on the Internet," says Tomi, in Lagos, Nigeria.

Of course we are right to warn children of the dangers but we are wrong to become paranoid about the Internet or to regard anything other than searching for information as dangerous. After all, we teach our children about 'stranger danger' in our streets and parks and we teach them how to cross the road safely. The Internet need be no different. We must teach them how to use it safely and then help them on their way to adulthood with our blessing.

The recent US report, 'TeenSites: The New Digital Landscape' explores the new world that teenagers live in and finds that the internet is replacing the telephone as the teenager's primary means of independence and connectedness to the larger social world. Download the document in PDF format here.