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by Max Lehmann

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Our children will not remember the same kind of a past that we do. Think about it: A child knows all about iPods and mobile phones, TV on demand and instant access to information.

Todays children will grow up never considering how once upon a time we used to make a telephone call to a building and hope that the person we wanted to contact was inside it. They don't know what it is to be unable to answer a question or find a recipe because for them the answer is to go to the nearest computer terminal. They marvel over big flat black disks of vinyl that hold one song while they have their entire music collection at their fingertips.

This next generation is the connected generation, part of the information age. We can already carry around an internet connection in our pockets, that's going to become more widespread until everyone simply accepts that it's there. Just as many kids aren't that hot on basic arithmetic because they were allowed to use calculators at school, future children may never bother to learn historical dates or new languages, instead relying on on-the-fly lookups of information they desire.

Because they've never known the world to be otherwise, children embrace this all encompassing flood of information and they contribute to it themselves. In years to come our kids are going to be bewildered by our sense of privacy. They share their music, their opinions, their photographs and their thoughts on sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and their connections are global. Their friends are one amorphous mass - the kids they know at school and the ones they know from outside school are all listed on one LiveJournal friends list or Facebook group. They can almost always find somebody to talk to on MSN or Yahoo messenger and they're creating art that we could never dream of because software is the new artists' tool. We are building a new kind of society where privacy is less tangible. Blogging kids won't wonder what they were doing in their youth, they'll simply look back at their writing and their photographs. We're recording more information than ever before and one day it's all going to slot together and become an even fuller picture of a life than we can build now. Our children's children will be able to get to know their parents in a way that ours can't know us.

We shouldn't be asking what technology is doing to our children, the implications are far further reaching than that. We should be wondering how it is changing society and how much of it the children can see. We're on the brink of change and the kids are leading the information revolution.

Learn more about this author, Max Lehmann.

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