Born Digital - New book for better understanding teenagers

Book cover via Amazon

Children born after 1980 were raised in a digital world and are therefore considered "digital natives". The first generation of digital natives are just coming of age and will soon be reshaping the world. Society needs to better understand them. And we as parents, need to better understand our kids. There is a new book out called Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives that will hopefully help us do so.

The authors of Born Digital, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, are both law professors at Harvard and St. Gallen respectively. Born Digital is an initiative of the Digital Natives project, a collaboration of groups from each University. "The aim of the Digital Natives project is to understand and support young people as they grow up in a digital age."

From dealing with your teens you will recognize so many of the issues that the book addresses:

Identity - with online profiles and avatars, does it have the same meaning to them?
Privacy - should we be worried?
Online Games - violence and addictiveness
Creativity and Learning - How does the Internet impact?
What lies in their future?

I highly recommend reading an excerpt of Born Digital. This seems to be a book that parents and teachers can use to understand and relate better to teenagers, digital natives, the millennial generation, or whatever we want to call our children that grew up using computers. When I was growing up I used to ask my parents how they lived without television when they were young. My children have a long list of things that they can't believe I grew up without, but computers top their list.