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To describe online discussion as a 'burble of banalities' is unfair

This article is more than 15 years old
Richard Leyland
The web has democratised comment and given young people a much-needed voice, says Richard Leyland

Jackie Ashley, worrying about the state of our nation's youth, asks: "Where is the narrative in a life reduced to a never-ending stream of bite-sized thoughts?" (The digital revolution risks injuring the way we think, 23 February).

I've spent the last nine months interviewing and observing young people and their use of technology, and I can assure Ashley that the multiple threads of communication found in our children's digital lives - SMS, Facebook, Skype et al - are bursting with narrative. It's often mundane but sometimes expresses the real emotion in young lives. These complex webs underpin and are indivisible from "real world" relationships, which continue unabated.

It seems that Ashley has swallowed the doom and gloom recently expressed by Susan Greenfield, in worrying about "short attention spans" and people "'twittering' a burble of banalities". I've heard these cries before, but my interviews found nothing of the sort. Social networks were for social relationships and Twitter, a platform waiting in vain for a profundity, was of no interest at all.

Ashley is right to point out that "mankind faces very difficult long-term choices. They are about energy use, the consumption of natural resources, security threats and, not least, our apparent inability to learn lessons about booms and busts", and that online communication lacks the face-to-face immediacy often required to affect real change. But she's assuming that children spend their days cloistered in an online world. On the contrary, my work with London secondary-school children suggests they spend between one and two hours daily online. Outside of that, they're out in the real world with the rest of us.

When Ashley writes that "we are living in a world of fact boxes, ever shorter sentences and flatter, simpler statements", I suspect she's thinking of blogs, YouTube video responses, Facebook status updates and the like. I prefer to see these tools as a democratising of comment. If they're more blunt or "simple" than she'd like, perhaps that's because they come from people who haven't previously engaged, and who don't know the rules. Good. When it comes from children, we should applaud impassioned debate.

The mundane truth is that children have merely shifted much of their television watching time to social networking time. While the educational merits of both can be debated, at least children have moved from an essentially passive pastime to one in which they can create content, communicate with others and develop IT skills.

My research found that the culture of communication and influence, seen online and in the real world, is leading to a generation which is used to being heard and which doesn't "know its place"; the digital world they've been born into has taught them not only that everything is discoverable, but that anything is possible. Their career aspirations included "the work of a designer and lifestyle of a writer", "share-dealing musician" and "photographer gardener", while almost all wanted to work for themselves.

We should stop worrying. The youth of today are a vibrant, ambitious lot and their Technicolor digital lives are working to create ideal managers for the future knowledge economy.

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