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owl writes:

https://curlybracket.net/2022/03/31/internet-kids.html

I wanted to understand how kids between 10 and 18 conceive the internet. Surely, we have seen a generation that we call "digital natives" grow up with the internet. Now, there is a younger generation who grows up with pervasive technology, such as smartphones, smart watches, virtual assistants and so on. And only a few of them have parents who work in IT or engineering...

Pervasive technology contributes to the idea that the internet is immaterial

With their search engine website design, Google has put in place an extremely simple and straightforward user interface. Since then, designers and psychologists have worked on making user interfaces more and more intuitive to use. The buzzwords are "usability" and "user experience design". Besides this optimization of visual interfaces, haptic interfaces have evolved as well, specifically on smartphones and tablets where hand gestures have replaced more clumsy external haptic interfaces such as a mouse. And beyond interfaces, the devices themselves have become smaller and slicker. While in our generation many people have experienced opening a computer tower or a laptop to replace parts, with the side effect of seeing the parts the device is physically composed of, the new generation of end user devices makes this close to impossible, essentially transforming these devices into black boxes, and further contributing to the idea that the internet they are being used to access with would be something entirely intangible.

But it seems that some things don't change...

Question: Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first?

Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time on their phones and people should rather spend more time with their children.

Three of the interviewees agreed that they see way too many advertisements and two of them would like ads to disappear entirely from the web. The other one said that she doesn't want to see ads, but that ads are fine if she can at least click them away.

If we could start again, what design changes would you make for the 'new' internet and how would you want it to be used?

Original Submission