Trends in Technological Development

Research on television use provides the following estimate: American youth born to the television generation will spend the equivalent of 7 years of their lives watching television (1). But what about the Internet generation, the generation starting with children born in 1994? The computer is what famous nterface designer Alan Kay called a meta-medium, a medium that potentially combines TV, the book, the radio, the typewriter, and the game console into one interface (2). Based on time spent with these other media over a lifetime, we can make a rough estimate that members of the Internet generation may spend
as much as 20 years of their lives in front of,interacting with, and connected to this medium.
If we put this 20-year interaction in the context of
some recent neuroscience literature showing significant
cortical reorganization based on motor and sensory stimulation (3,4 ?), this long-term interaction with virtual environments presents us with many cognitive unknowns. How yout...