Generation FB

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

“My e-mail?” The boy looks at me as if I had just suggested staying in touch by carrier pigeon. “What, you don’t have an email?” I ask, insecure now. “Sure I do. But I only use it for my parents and my grandparents,” he says. “Aren’t you on Facebook?” I am. Phew. Of course I mostly check my Facebook profile when I’m prompted by an e-mail notification, but I don’t tell him that. Trevor Dougherty is 19 and to him, I am a geriatric 36-year-old who belongs to that amorphous generation of people-who-don’t-really-get-social-networking that stretches all the way back to, well, his grandparents.

I met Trevor in January, during a dinner debate on social networking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was by far the youngest and most eloquent speaker on the subject. I have perhaps 100 people in my life I call friends. Trevor has 1,275. At one point he tried to add someone called Trevor in every capital so he would have friends to visit across the world. He chats, posts, tweets and consults “his community” on important decisions: “I’m going to start producing/DJing electronic music. What should my stage name be? #youtellme.”

The encounter made me curious: what does it do to teenagers to be “on” all the time? Are they just doing what we did 20 years ago — gossiping, dating, escaping pubescent solitude — and simply channeling those age-old human urges through this new technology? Or is this technology changing humanity in a more fundamental way? What kind of citizens, voters, consumers, leaders will kids like Trevor grow up to be?

I decided to go back to the place I was a teenager in the days before cellphones and e-mail:the Ratsgymnasium in Osnabrück, an average school in an average town in northwest Germany. For three days in April I embedded in the everyday lives of 13- to-19-year-olds, hanging out in and after class, watching them interact and interviewing the adults in their lives.

Their teachers say they have poor spelling and short attention spans. (“This is an ADD epidemic in the making,” one muttered darkly.) I found them hyper self-conscious, narcissistic and a little superficial. Memory is on a hard disc — many of them don’t even know their own mobile number by heart.

But most of the Facebooking teens I met among the 1,280 students here are also infinitely more international-minded, flexible and tech-savvy than we were 20 years ago. They can study for a math test whilst IMing and listening to music; they take piano tutorials on YouTube and battle monsters in virtual games with virtual friends from all over the world. They share everything, from their latest break-up to prized study notes.

The social networking addiction may be accentuating the worst in youth, but I also saw it bring out the best: this is not Generation Y, this is Generation Why Not? — multi-tasking and crowd-sourcing, collaborative and open-minded. The kids of today may not be able to spell Zeitgeist but they are fundamentally of their time. And after getting to know them a little I came away reassured that the many daunting problems previous generations are bequeathing on them might just be in good hands.

Clash of Generations “None of them are on Facebook,” Dietmar Volkers says confidently. It’s Monday, 9.30 a.m. and we’re walking across the schoolyard to room D083, a bike shed in my days and now a bright new classroom where he teaches English to 9th graders. “They’re on a local social networking site called OScommunity.”

He is wrong. When I ask the 25 students in his class, all but two are on Facebook, a ratio confirmed in every snap poll I conduct over my three days here. OScommunity? “That was last year,” says 15-year-old Eva Hempel.

Volkers is popular. At 41, he is one of the younger teachers here and is respected by students as someone “who can actually operate the screen projector” installed in most classrooms. But even he is a year behind.

As the half-life of technological innovation shrinks, so do the generations.

My Walkman accompanied me throughout high school. I got my first e-mail address in college and my first cellphone when I started reporting, a clunky Nokia with an antenna sticking out that I thought looked terribly avant-garde. These days the 15-year-olds barely keep up with their 13-year-old siblings (who apparently prefer Skype video conferences to Facebook chats).

The main gateway to the Internet for today’s teens, social networking seems to have deepened a technology rift that has always divided young and old. In 1991, teachers asked us to help get the video recorder to work; in 2011 technology has in many ways become a generational battleground for completely different concepts of how to communicate and deal with information.

My old school has banned the use of all electronic devices (save calculators). If a phone so much as vibrates, it is confiscated for 24 hours. But sitting in on one class, I see at least half a dozen students tapping away at deliberately dimmed smartphone screens. The transgressions are chronicled in comments posted squarely during school hours: “Physics is soooooo boring.”

When the school encrypted its Wifi code so only teachers could get online during class, a student cracked it and posted it. When teachers ruled that phones had to be put on their desk during exams, students started bringing in their old phones and kept the new ones hidden. When one boy was caught cheating in a Latin test, his punishment was to give a workshop to teachers on how students use technology to fool them.

Teachers worry about cheating, plagiarism and a casual attitude toward online sources. (“Students believe that everything on the Internet is true,” grumbles my old geography teacher Dagmar Rösner, who is still teaching at the school. “Teachers suspect that everything on the Internet is made up,” counters 17-year-old Johannes Bommes).

But most of all they worry that students today have more trouble learning than we did.

Headmaster Lothar Wehleit is waiting for me in his office with a little pile of photocopied articles: Computers make children “Fat, Stupid and Violent,” the first proclaims. “Classwork didn’t used to be buried under so much cognitive material,” Wehleit laments. “At the end of one class they all seem to get it. But at the beginning of the next class it’s no longer in their memory. They leave school, play with their phones, turn their computers on and put their earphones in.”

The subtext is clear: when teenagers are ‘on,’ their brains are off.

Two decades ago Attention Deficit Disorder was barely on the radar in Europe. But in recent years the number of cases has gone up, and not just in my old school. Studies by psychologists and educators have linked excessive screen time to a loss of concentration and deep thinking. In one of them, published in the journal Pediatrics last year, Douglas A. Gentile of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University studied 1,300 school-age children and found that more than two hours a day in front of a screen raised the odds of exceeding the average level of attention problems by 67 percent.

Many teenagers I met say they spend at least two hours every day in front of some electronic device. But not all that time is wasted. I witnessed an impressive capacity for self-directed learning. Arne Thate, 18, got bored with his classical piano lessons so he started teaching himself pop songs with YouTube tutorials (Praise You by Fat Boy Slim is a favorite.) Marcel Sievers, a 14-year-old fan of computer games, taught himself Camtasia, a screencasting software. Many more are members of interest-driven groups on Facebook with peers in far-flung places whom they have never met.

Like most teachers and parents here, the headmaster is not on Facebook. And I can’t help wondering: Are teachers who do not understand the way their students communicate able to effectively teach them?

Dating 2.0

The young couple is kissing. Her left leg rests on his right thigh, his arms are wrapped tightly around her waist. They are sitting in the park behind the school during break time amid clusters of chattering, giggling students. But just as I’m feeling the warm glow of early ’90s nostalgia coming on I see the outstretched hand with a nail-polished thumb scrolling down the touch screen of an iPhone4. Without detaching her lips, the girl is surveying the hallmark blue-and-white of the Facebook app.

Social networking has penetrated just about every aspect of teenage interaction, not least dating etiquette. When you like a girl, explains 19-year-old Leo Laun, a teenage heartthrob who reminds me of Robert Pattinson minus the messy hair, it’s much easier to send a friend request than to ask for her phone number. Then you can check out her photos, her profile information and her posts. “You know whether she is single, what she looks like in a bikini and what music she likes,” he says, counting these clearly crucial points off on one hand. “If you’re still interested, chances are she’s worth pursuing.”

It all sounds a little unromantic to me, but also pretty efficient. They court each other with studied casualness in one-liners on their public walls (and no, spelling is not a priority) before moving on to chatting, texting and eventually — this at least hasn’t changed — a date at the movies. They post a heart-shaped icon to publicly declare a new relationship and then change it to a broken heart when it ends.

In many ways this isn’t new. I remember feverishly trying to find out a boy’s name, looking through the phonebook for his address and riding my bike by his house to glean some — any — nugget of information. But does the fact that so much of their fragile teenage egos is on public display make a difference? Sometimes it’s not clear whether the kids today control the information or the information controls them.

“Deciding what to put on Facebook is a bit like deciding what to wear,” says Leo’s friend Arne, the one who likes Fat Boy Slim. “You try to impress people, maybe with an intellectual-sounding comment or a video in a different language. When you decide what to list as your music taste you think “what kind of music do my friends like and who is the coolest of them?’ ”

After he posts something, he says, he sits in front of the screen and waits for reactions.

“When you get 10 likes and 8 comments you’re on top of the world. When no one reacts, it’s a bit embarrassing.”

Leo and Arne check their girlfriends’ profiles obsessively, scanning posts and counting “likes.” Facebook jealousy can eat him up, Leo admits. “That boy Alex,” he groans, “he ‘likes’ everything she writes, it drives me nuts.” Cleaning up the data traces of former sweethearts on your profile is a whole other challenge, Arne says.

Mean Girls

Zita Kantus knows all about managing data traces. The school counselor, she is the first point of contact for bullying complaints and 80 percent of those now involve social networking sites, she says. In one recent case a girl became the target of an elaborate plot by a group of classmates. They created a fictional boy character online and started courting her. When the girl eventually agreed to come on a date, she found a crowd of mean girls laughing in her face. Facebook has empowered the bullies who in my days were largely confined to nasty little notes handed around in class.

“It has taken the phenomenon to a whole different level,” says Kantus, pointing out that there was police involvement in three cases last year. “It now happens at all hours and not just on school premises. And it has become meaner. I think sitting in front of a screen has reduced inhibitions.”

But it’s also a case of the kids not always grasping the implications of what they are doing, she says, recounting an episode where a student was caught just as he was uploading a friend’s picture onto a gay site “as a joke.”

Privacy concerns divide the generations almost as much as technology. “They have a very casual attitude to privacy,” says Wehleit. But that’s just it: The flipside of this attitude is that teens like Eva, Johannes, Leo and Arne are much less selfish with their knowledge than we were. They share their study notes not just among friends or in their class, but across the country: Abiunity.de is a goldmine of shared files on every exam subject on the German syllabus. Unlike us, many of them study regularly in groups and seem to be much better at it.

“They are much less hierarchical than you guys were,” observes my former biology teacher, Gerd Schiefelbein.

Arne plans a trip around the world after graduating from high school this summer and dreams of studying marine biology in Australia. Leo wants to move to Britain.

Today they use social networking to rally around the coolest band of the day and organize ad hoc parties with amazing turnout. As adults they will have the tools to rally large communities around the causes they care about at unprecedented speed. They don’t mind small tailored ads, but abhor big intrusive ones. They trust one another more than politicians and big companies. My bet is that they will be demanding customers and demanding voters.

At my old school I was struck by how much teenagers have changed. But I was also struck by how little the school had changed, and I don’t think it’s an exception. Teachers are right to fret about attention deficits and lazy thinking. But no fundamental rethink seems to have occurred about how teaching and learning should take place in the age of social networking.

“The problem is with adults,” says Leo.“If they say we’re becoming more stupid, it’s perhaps because we’re in a school system they invented.”

“We need better teachers and talk about more relevant stuff in class,” he adds. “Maybe they should ask us for some advice.”

 A native of Germany, Bennhold has lived in five countries on three continents, but she never thought of herself as an outsider. So she was surprised to find herself a “digital immigrant” at her old high school. Technology was never much more than a work tool for Bennhold, a reporter for the IHT and The New York Times in Paris. But she found the next generation clicking at a different rhythm.

Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone

It took just a day for the Internet to identify the “kissing couple” as Scott Jones and Alex Thomas.

By BRIAN STELTER

Not too long ago, theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived.

Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.

A commuter in the New York area who verbally tangled with a conductor last Tuesday — and defended herself by asking “Do you know what schools I’ve been to and how well-educated I am?” — was publicly identified after a fellow rider posted a cellphone video of the encounter on YouTube. The woman, who had gone to N.Y.U., was ridiculed by a cadre of bloggers, one of whom termed it the latest episode of “Name and Shame on the Web.”

Women who were online pen pals of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner similarly learned how quickly Internet users can sniff out all the details of a person’s online life. So did the men who set fire to cars and looted stores in the wake of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup defeat last week when they were identified, tagged by acquaintances online.

The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view.

To some, this could conjure up comparisons to the agents of repressive governments in the Middle East who monitor online protests and exact retribution offline. But the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons.

When a freelance photographer, Rich Lam, digested his pictures of the riots in Vancouver, he spotted several shots of a man and a woman, surrounded by police officers in riot gear, in the middle of a like-nobody’s-watching kiss. When the photos were published, a worldwide dragnet of sorts ensued to identify the “kissing couple.” Within a day, the couple’s relatives had tipped off news Web sites to their identities, and there they were, Monday, on the “Today” show: Scott Jones and Alex Thomas, the latest proof that thanks to the Internet, every day could be a day that will be remembered around the world.

“It’s kind of amazing that there was someone there to take a photo,” Ms. Thomas said on “Today.”

The “kissing couple” will most likely enjoy just a tweet’s worth of fame, but it is noteworthy that they were tracked down at all.

This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people’s views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private. Experts say that Web sites like Facebook, which require real identities and encourage the sharing of photographs and videos, have hastened this change.

“Humans want nothing more than to connect, and the companies that are connecting us electronically want to know who’s saying what, where,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “As a result, we’re more known than ever before.”

This growing “publicness,” as it is sometimes called, comes with significant consequences for commerce, for political speech and for ordinary people’s right to privacy. There are efforts by governments and corporations to set up online identity systems. Technology will play an even greater role in the identification of once-anonymous individuals: Facebook, for instance, is already using facial recognition technology in ways that are alarming to European regulators.

After the riots in Vancouver, locals needed no such facial recognition technology — they simply combed through social media sites to try to identify some of the people involved, like Nathan Kotylak, 17, a star on Canada’s junior water polo team.

On Facebook, Mr. Kotylak apologized for the damage he had caused. The finger-pointing affected not only him, it affected his family: local news media reported that his father, a doctor, had seen his ranking on a medical practice review site, RateMDs.com, drop after people posted comments about his son’s involvement in the riots. Other people subsequently went to the Web site to defend the doctor and improve his ranking.

Predictably, there was a backlash to the Internet-assisted identification of the people involved in the alcohol-fueled riot. Camille Cacnio, a student in Vancouver who was photographed during the riot and who admitted to theft, wrote on her blog that the “21st-century witch hunt” on the Internet was “another form of mobbing.”

In the New York area, the commuter who was the subject of online scorn last week shut down both her Twitter and LinkedIn accounts once her name bubbled up on blogs. Though the person who originally posted the cellphone video took it down, other people quickly reposted it, giving the story new life. The original video poster remains anonymous because his or her YouTube account has been shut down.

Half a world away, in Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Syria, activists have sometimes succeeded in identifying victims of dictatorial violence through anonymously uploaded YouTube videos.

They have also succeeded in identifying fakes: In a widely publicized case this month, a blogger who claimed to be a Syrian-American lesbian and called herself “A Gay Girl in Damascus” was revealed to be an American man, Tom MacMaster.

The sleuthing was led by Andy Carvin, a strategist for NPR who has exhaustively covered the Middle Eastern protests on Twitter. When sources of his said they were skeptical of the blogger’s identity, “I just started asking questions on Twitter and Facebook,” Mr. Carvin recalled on CNN. “Have any of you met her in person? Do you know her at all? The more I asked, the less I learned, because no one had met her, not even the reporters who had supposedly interviewed her in person.”

Mr. Carvin, his online followers and others used photos and server log data to connect the blog to Mr. MacMaster’s wife.

“Publicity” — something normally associated with celebrities — “is no longer scarce,” Dave Morgan, the chief executive of Simulmedia, wrote in an essay this month.

He posited that because the Internet “can’t be made to forget” images and moments from the past, like an outburst on a train or a kiss during a riot, “the reality of an inescapable public world is an issue we are all going to hear a lot more about.”