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A small-scale study by Stanford University has found that teens in the US spend significantly more time using the internet than their Chinese counterparts but Chinese students are more likely to own an iPad.
The study was conducted by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE), part of the Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and investigated how the digital lives of high school students aged between 16 and 18 differed between the two countries.
Overall, teens in the US spent more time online than their Chinese counterparts, however, teens in China were more likely to embrace the latest technology.
Students from Silicon Valley spent almost twice as long on social networking sites (two hours per day). Beijing teens were more likely to go online to watch videos and films.
Forty-four percent of Chinese students surveyed owned an iPad compared to just 16 percent of students in the US.
More than 90 percent of students in Beijing said they have online friends that they have never met in person.
While some digital habits may differ between the two countries, teens in technology hotspots such as Silicon Valley and Beijing are embracing technology and their online lives.
"In certain urban locations, today's teens are native 'netizens'," said Marguerite Gong Hancock, associate director of SPRIE. "Most teens in our survey in both Palo Alto and Beijing have had mobile phones since the age of 12. They lead a large part of their daily lives online."
Technology and the internet are becoming increasingly important for young people. A separate study by the University of Maryland found that college students around the world become distressed and experienced withdrawal symptoms when deprived of their gadgets.
In June, a Chinese teenager was so desperate to get his hands on Apple’s new iPad 2 he allegedly sold his kidney to pay for the device.
The extremely small sample size of Stanford University’s study (which included 44 students from Palo Alto and 27 students from Beijing) means the findings should be taken with a grain of salt, but the results are interesting nonetheless.
Is just amazing the number of reports of cyber attacks and hackers breaking into large corporations. It seems each day we see that there have been cyber attacks on our government, military, and our Fortune 500 companies. Now not only the government, but also the citizens are calling for more cyber defense, and better and stronger computer systems. Obviously, this totally is appreciated by the lobbyists in the computer industry, and the cyber security software sector.
Perhaps you are as troubled as I am about the future of computer security? I recently, noted an article in Homeland Security News, one of many indeed, but it made me stop and think. The article was published on July 15, 2011 in the Cyber Business Section titled; "Recent deluge of cyber attacks results in record spending," and it stated;
"The deluge of high profile cyber attacks on major corporations and government entities like the U.S. Senate, the CIA, and Sony has driven a sharp increase in demand for cyber security experts; in the first six months of this year alone, cyber attacks and data breaches have cost U.S. companies approximately $96 billion, nearly the total for 2010; analysts project 2011 to be the busiest year yet with an estimated $75.6 billion in cyber security spending, surpassing last year's record $63 billion."
Now then, how come the more we spend, the more attacks we get, and the more security systems we put up in defense, the more chinks in the armor the cyber hackers find? It seems to me that the hackers are just as smart as those designing the systems, and perhaps, even amongst the same group of friends as those designing the firewalls. It seems too bad that we have a game of immediate escalation, and maybe we need a new strategy.
Maybe what we need to do is change the game completely, go to a totally different system, and change everything around so that we prevent the types of cyber attacks we've been having. Each time we spend more money, there seems to be more media about the cyber attacks, and it seems to be creating a feeding frenzy in Washington DC, as they spend our taxpayer's money for more robust computer systems. One might also ask; why is the government collecting so much information, what do they need it for - and is it really helping their efficiency?
Consider this if you will, government is already inefficient by its very nature, bureaucracies always are. Just because the bureaucracy is more efficient moving information around, doesn't mean what it is doing is correct, or an efficient process in the first place. The ability to do more using computers is irrelevant if what you are doing is just shuffling paperwork - if you shuffle the paperwork faster or more of it, are you really succeeding at anything?
Now then, hold that thought for a second, and let's go back to the other topic, that is to say the challenge of our current Internet, and computer systems. No one tries to hack into mainframes anymore right, everyone is trying to hack into the Internet now. What if we changed our system completely, creating a whole different system, something well beyond what we are currently using now. In that case our computer systems would not be open to cyber attack. And it might give us time to breathe and beef up our systems until the cyber attackers figure out the new system.
Just a thought, and indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it. If you have additional thoughts on this topic, please shoot me an email.
Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,222 articles by July 22, 2011 at 2:22 PM is going to be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..
