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Laptops and iPhones and texting, oh my

Dante Chinni

Posted: 05.22.2009 / 8:02 AM PDT

In a time that feels fluid and unsettled, perhaps the biggest changes are in one area: technology. It is changing (and has already changed) how we communicate, how we get news, how we work, how we entertain ourselves. The list goes on and on.

Those changes have been embraced most rapidly among those 20 and younger – the digital nativists who are growing up with iPods and PSPs glued to their palms. (PSPs are PlayStation Portables for the rest of us.) These youngsters have grown up believing a cellphone is an essential tool and texting is critical life skill.

Over the coming months, Patchwork Nation will monitor how young people are using technology in our 11 communities with the help of Syracuse University in New York and the News21 project. The observations will be posted on a blog called the Young and the Wireless.

The Syracuse team is out in some communities now and will be there for two weeks. The goal: to study how youths in each place use technology, noting likenesses and differences.

The News21 initiative is funded by the Carnegie Corp. and the Knight Foundation (which also funds Patchwork Nation). It explores new paths for journalism as old news delivery systems wither and fresh ones arise, offering more options for storytelling.

The blogging, pictures, and video on the Young and the Wireless offer examples of new kinds of storytelling.

What they will find

Even from our nontechnology-based reporting, we’ve discovered just how broad the reach of things like laptops and cellphones is among the young in our communities.

In Sioux Center, Iowa (our agricultural “Tractor Country” community of 6,500 people), longtime residents told us about how the younger generation’s technological savvy has in part made the youngsters more engaged in the world. Town elders say that young people are also more likely to enlarge geographic boundaries for their personal plans, with paths leading to distant cities and even countries.

The superintendent of schools in Sioux Center says cellphones are regularly confiscated by teachers.

In Philadelphia, our big-city “Industrial Metropolis,” one newspaper editor said that an indelible memory from election night last year came when an impromptu parade of young people went by the paper’s offices. When the editor ran out of the building to show the group the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News for the next day, she saw hundreds of cellphone cameras go up to snap a picture.

The Syracuse students will spend time in all 11 of our communities and will talk to young people about how they use technology. They’ll even have youths use diaries to track their personal technology use. What they learn may tell us a lot about how the boundaries between different kinds of communities in the United States are coming down or simply how they are changing – if they are changing at all.

We’ll be checking in with them periodically to see what they’re seeing and hearing.