The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future

(Paperback)

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In The Young and the Digital, S. Craig Watkins skillfully draws from more than 500 surveys and 350 in-depth interviews with young people, parents, and educators to understand how a digital lifestyle is affecting the ways youth learn, play, bond, and communicate. Timely and deeply relevant, the book covers the influence of MySpace and Facebook, the growing appetite for "anytime, anywhere" media and "fast entertainment," how online "digital gates" reinforce race and class divisions, and how technology is transforming America's classrooms. Watkins also debunks popular myths surrounding cyberpredators, Internet addiction, and social isolation. The result is a fascinating portrait, both celebratory and wary, about the coming of age of the first fully wired generation.

Reviews

With thorough research, deep thinking, and lively prose, Watkins adds enormously to our understanding of how the combination of new media and a new generation is changing the world. Read this refreshing book to understand our future!
Don Tapscott, coauthor of Wikinomics and author of Grown Up Digital

The best and most nuanced report yet from the digital frontier.
James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

A must-read for parents and educators!
Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online

The Young and the Digital is remarkably readable. Maybe even more remarkable is what a focused account Watkins has produced about a media climate that is still in flux, in which he ponders questions that may not be answered until this moment in media history has long passed.
Belinda Acosta, Austin Chronicle

Bracing yet reassuring, often surprising, and always substantive, Craig Watkins acts as an honest broker, testing the contradictory claims often made about young peoples digital lives against sophisticated fieldwork.
Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

Watkins convincingly captures the digital world inhabited by todays young adults while illustrating what the digital landscape means for our future. Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

Author Bio

S. Craig Watkins writes about youth, media, technology, and society. He is Professor of radio-TV-film at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Hip Hop Matters- Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement and Representing- Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema.