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Worth reading! "Such enthusiastic assessments also grace the rapidly growing body of academic and popular literature on digital natives in the United States and Western Europe. Books such as Born Digital by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott, iBrain by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, and The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason, as well as a recent three-year study on digital youth by the MacArthur Foundation, come to mind. In these already-democratic societies, optimism about the Internet's impact on the civic engagement of young people-even the notion of "digital citizenship"-is a justified, if not particularly new, intellectual thread. "However, outside of the prosperous and democratic countries of North America and Western Europe, digital natives are as likely to be digital captives as digital renegades, a subject that none of the recent studies address in depth. If the notion that the Internet could dampen young people's aspirations for democracy seems counterintuitive, it is only because our media is still enthralled by the trite narrative of bloggers as a force for positive change. Recent headlines include: "Egypt's growing blogger community pushes limit of dissent," "From China to Iran, Web Diarists Are Challenging Censors," "Cuba's Blogger Crackdown," "China's web censors struggle to muzzle free-spirited bloggers.""

63% of urban students spend over an hour online daily; 93% are aware of social networking; Orkut and Facebook are most popular online destinations; 46% use online sources to access news; TV, Newspaper users at 25%; 62% have a personal computer at home; 1 in 4 students own laptops in metros; 2 of 3 own music players; IT and engineering remain overwhelming popular career choices; Media & Entertainment, Travel and Tourism are emerging careers; USA, UK top list of international destinations for higher studies.

There are two common assumptions about the relationship between age and technical competency that rear their heads whenever the internet is discussed. The first assumption is that young people have a natural affinity for technology and both understand and use it in ways that older people cannot. The second is that anyone over the age of 60 is not only technically incompetent but also uninterested in the internet, using it only under protest. Both of these assumptions are flawed, yet have worked their way firmly into the public consciousness. Because they seem like 'common sense', these concepts are spread by policy makers, the media and technology companies alike. But if civil society associations take them at face value, they risk forming strategies and policies that are as flawed as the assumptions they are based on.

How many children today are becoming Socrates' nightmare, decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes? Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination, and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate, and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life, and collective wisdom as a species?

Forty percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research for the People and the Press, get most of their international and national news from the Internet. This is up from 24 percent in a similar poll taken in September of 2007. This is the first time that the Internet has been more popular than newspapers, which dropped to 35 percent in this most recent poll. Television news, however, is still the most popular source, and is cited as the place where 70 percent of Americans get their national and international news.

Very interesting analysis by Jeremy Wagstaff on Google search trends for "commit suicide painlessly", "how to commit suicide", and suicide statistics. He questions the possible correlation of this to economic climate.

Of course you'd like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together.

Indian children on an average spend 34 hours online every month against the global average of 39 hours, revealed a recent survey. Children of only two other countries - China (33 hours) and Japan (31 hours) seemed to spend fewer hours online, according to the Norton Online Living Report 2009, which was based on a survey of adults and children in 12 countries.