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Friday Nugget Blogging

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“I do too know what a pay-phone is! That’s one of those booths in the library where you can pay to go in and use your cell-phone, right?”

Let’s face it, teens these days see the world differently than people even ten years older, to say nothing of twenty or thirty. It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because the world they live in is different than it was ten years ago.

This was brought into sharp relief this week when Yahoo announced that 2/3 of the searches for “Who Is Osama Bin Laden?” were initiated by 13-17-year-olds (more on how they know this). Daily Beast has similar examples from twitter feeds.The story has caused various commentators to refer to US teenagers as “dumb.”

I have five rejoinders.

1) This statistic also shows that 1/3 of the searches were done by adults who probably should know the name, having lived through 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, the point in history when bin Laden became a household word and everyone knew why.

2) I’m a lot less worried about teenagers realizing they know little enough (and being interested enough) to type a query into a search engine than I am about teachers who are certain they know bin Laden was the “Uncle” of the Muslim girl in class and are willing to jeer at her about how she “must be grieving” publicly in front of other students. Information-seeking isn’t dumb. Acting like you’re informed when you’re actually just bigoted is. And this is the environment in which our kids are supposed to absorb a basic understanding of world history.

3) We need to step back and remember how many adults in America were confusing bin Laden and Saddam Hussein during the run-up to the Iraq invasion (by design). We need to remember that since 2003, despite the Administration’s attempt to convince us otherwise this week, the war on terror has been synonymous not with the hunt for bin Laden (a failed early goal subsequently downplayed by both Administrations for a decade) but rather with the occupation of Iraq and the counterinsurgency against the Taliban. We need to remember that the bogeyman mastermind of 9/11 that has received the most news coverage in recent years (the years that would count for 13-17 year-olds) is not bin Laden but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (see below).

4) We self-righteous American adults should remind ourselves of the kind of information sources routinely available to our youth – in check-out lines, commercial media, and on mainstream news outlets – and most importantly on, Facebook, which I may use to crowd-source news stories on Pakistan and Libya from my professional friend circle, but which my daughter’s friends use to circulate Julian Smith videos and celebrity gossip. My kids have social science professors for parents who force them to watch 60 Minutes every week and often discuss politics at the dinner table, and we are still unsatisfied with their ability to retain details of world events; but then our standards are high and we also know that we simply don’t have that much control over the overall content they’re absorbing. Nor, frankly do their teachers. Small wonder teens know the intimate details of the American Idols’ childhoods but have a more superficial understanding of the world beyond our borders.

5) Ironically, given that, the “bin Laden who?” views of teens on the significance of bin Laden’s death aren’t so dissimilar from reactions in parts of that world. Few believe that this signals a milestone in the war on terror. In Brazil, a soccer match received more coverage. Many in the Middle East are far more focused on the Arab Spring than on the death of one individual that the US elite and media belatedly found to be the biggest story of the decade.

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