George Murray of Bookninja wonders/worries about the effects of computers and video games and TV on the younger generation that has never known a world without them:  will they still have an appreciation for books?  He goes so far as to wonder whether his own kids will actually be harmed by their (now forced) focus on books.

Will there be enough kids like them to keep books alive? Will this early education in books (and holding off on the tv and internet) pay off for them as adults or hobble them? Certainly in our little urban literary/academic biosphere of a social circle it will be an advantage, but what about the larger world? [snip] My kid will be literate and well-read if it kills us both. But will his peers? Will their kids?

No worries, George.  People of our generation didn’t read books when we were younger because there was nothing else to do (well, there was almost nothing else to do where I grew up, but that’s another story).  We still had that evil TV and radio.  We even had relatively primitive video games back then, not to mention sports and bikes and that “doctor” game.  The reason we read books was because they provided a level of intellectual satisfaction that nothing else could.  That still hasn’t changed.  Naturally curious and intellectually hungry people will still exist and will gravitate toward books no matter how many gaming levels they’ve passed through in their lives.

Of course, I don’t have kids, so I’m just theorizing here.  George is the one having the experience first hand.  In any case, I hope his kids and those like them grow up to rule the world (though they might just be too busy reading to worry about world domination).

Via Janneke Adema, and related to this, Michael Bhaskar at The Digitalist envisions an evolution away from a text-based culture and text-based internet:

However the Youtube generation isn’t even reading online. It’s, er, watching Youtube. In “Is Youtube the Next Google” read/write web outlined a growing trend- rather than looking for a search term in Google kids will type into it Youtube and see what turns up. Alex Iskold writes:

“Whenever his son needed any information, he would open up YouTube, type in the search term and then just watch the videos that showed up as matches. He never Googled anything; he never went to any other site; his entire web experience was confined to YouTube videos.”

Phooey!  Anecdotal evidence!  That kid is just good old fashioned LAZY!