HuffPost Blog – 25 September 2015 – Generation Aware: The Importance of Conversation in the Digital Age
The usual term for capturing the lived-experience for those growing up in the digital age is ‘digital native’, but this is incorrect. Digital natives are in reality, information natives. Millennials now grow in a world in which they are likely to witness all that is good and bad in the world at younger and younger ages. With all of the best parental controls in operation, news will still slip through, and sometimes automatically play for you, whether you wish to view it or not, as we saw in relation to the recent, tragic shootings in Virginia. As Amazon announce the £50 tablet that will go some distance to close the gap between the digital ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, it is inevitable that more and more young children will occasionally stumble across content that we would think is better shown only to adult eyes. As the world shrinks, and information from all of its corners drips through your newsfeed, we realise that we can no longer just try to listen to young people as they navigate the digital world; we need to be able to talk to them about what they are learning. This means that we too are having to view and acknowledge all sorts of uncomfortable truths, and then be able to talk about them…
Read the full blog here
