| This part of the actual article contradicts the implication of the title: I asked Nielsen if he thought children’s tendency towards an app mentality was a broader trend, and that everyone would be less dependent on search in the future — both because these habituated children will age into adulthood and because alternatives to search like apps and the social web are growing in usefulness. He said he didn’t think that was necessarily the case, because kids in the upper age range of the study — 11 and 12 years old — were observed to be avid searchers. Further, the study itself (http://www.nngroup.com/reports/kids/) was on how children used websites. Not on how children used the the internet. As far as I can tell, he means that children did not use the search features on a particular website. Which I rarely do, too. If I need to search a website, I usually do a search on Google. I've learned that most websites have terrible search results. But even if the study had demonstrated that young children don't use search engines to navigate the internet, it wouldn't necessarily mean that future generations will use the internet differently. I think people tend to underestimate how subtle searching the internet can be. We see a single text box on Google's homepage, so it has to be simple, right? But that implies that the work to figure out what to put in that text box must happen in our heads. Being able to synthesize what you want to find into a few keywords that you think are likely to be associated with what you're looking for requires sophisticated cognition. That, to me, would be an interesting psychology topic to study: how early can we effectively search the internet? Is there any connection to the existing models of cognitive development? |