Growing Up Digital

The Net Generation has arrived! And so has the first book to chronicle how this new generation — raised on digital technology — is engineering a revolution that's happening all around us.

Growing Up Digital shows how today's kids are leading the charge into the 21st century using the new media that's centered around the Internet. Just as the baby boomers of the TV generation dictated the economic, political, and cultural agenda of its time, the Net Generation, or "N-Gen", is developing and imposing its culture on us all, thereby reshaping how society and individuals interact. By the year 2000, there will be more than 88 million people in the U. S. and Canada alone between the ages of 2 and 22. They are the offspring of the baby boom — the baby boom "echo". What makes this generation stand out is not just their large numbers, but the fact that they are entering their formative years when the digital media, too, is taking its first — albeit giant — baby steps.

And who's better than Don Tapscott, the best-selling author of The Digital Economy, to profile the Net Generation from every angle. He explains how members of the N-Gen are beginning to think, learn, work, play, communicate, shop, and create in fundamentally different ways from their parents. Written in collaboration with over 300 N-Geners who shared their opinions, experiences, and insights, Growing Up Digital offers an eye-opening, fact-filled picture of the new youth culture.

Tapscott identifies the shift from the traditional broadcast medium to the new interactive medium as the cornerstone of the N-Generation and he compares the passive medium of television — which your people increasingly dismiss as old fashioned — to the Internet, in which the consumer has control. Tapscott vividly illustrates a new "generation lap" in which the N-Gen is lapping its parents on the "info-track".

Growing Up Digital also examines how the Net Generation is influencing the whole spectrum of society: the way we create wealth, the nature of commerce and marketing, the delivery system for entertainment, the role and dynamics of our educational system, our culture, and arguably the nature and influence of government and politics. Tapscott points the way forward through hot-button issues such as cyber-porn, Internet addiction, and the dangers of a "digital divide" between information haves and have-nots - those who have access to computers and the Net and those who are forced to sit on the sidelines due to forces beyond their control.

Growing Up Digital offers an overview of the Net Generation's fearless overhaul of our culture. What's more, it gives everyone directly or indirectly affected by this powerful force for change a chance to anticipate and act on what lies ahead.

1. The Louder Echo
2. The Net Generation
3. The Generation Gap
4. The Culture of Interaction
5. The N-Gen Mind: Part I
6. The N-Gen Mind: Part II
7. N-Gen Learning
8. N-Gen at Play
9. N-Gen as Consumers
10. N-Gen at Work
11. N-Gen and the Family
12. The Digital Divide
13. Leaders of the Future

• Appendix

The usual bullshit.