Silicon Insider: Tech Revolution -- Girls Rule!

May 4, 2006 — -- A shocking new gender divide has appeared in the computer age!

Oh, wait a minute, this time it's the boys who are falling behind. So, nevermind.

In the United Kingdom, The Guardian newspaper ran a story on Wednesday with the lede: "They mature more quickly, are said to be more responsible and do better at school. Now media-savvy girls are putting another one over the boys by leading the digital communications revolution."

Now, one should always be skeptical of any article in the Guardian (especially when it deals with the United States), but this one had the ring of truth. Anybody who drives by, or in my case, delivers kids to a high school on a regular basis knows that it is the girls who are the ones with cell phones glued to their ears, or typing into Blackberrys. And if, as I do, you have a 6-foot-tall, green-eyed, 15-year-old guitarist son, you also know that it is the girls who do most of the instant messaging and the MySpace maintenance.

A year ago, during a brief interview when my son Tad's computer was down and he had to use mine, I found my PC inundated with so many AIMs from teenaged girls, even well after midnight, that -- until I learned how to turn the system off -- I had trouble keeping my screen clear to get this column done.

The Guardian story went on to say that "after one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion of media of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls."

Adapting to Technology on Gender Schedules

What a surprise! One might have predicted a few years ago -- actually, I think I did in this column -- that the cycle of adoption for the Internet would replicate most other new technologies: i.e., boys, with their innate gizmology, in-your-face competition and love of the edgy and new, would be the first adopters of cell phones, instant messaging and the Web; then, when the technology was sufficiently civilized and complex, girls would take over, developing complex social networks and "civilizing" the technology. Meanwhile, the boys would either retreat into the darker fringe niches where solitary expertise and team problem-solving are rewarded -- or off in search of the next cool technology.

Of course, even suggesting such a thing is all-but taboo in our society. It can even cost you the presidency of Harvard. Nevertheless, once again, whatever advocates think ought to be true about boys and girls, this gender-driven market evolution once again has proven to be what is true. Boys go to where girls aren't, the girls pursue them there, and the boys move on -- and the world (and certainly technology) is better for it. The moment, a few years ago, when I first heard my son talking about "texting" on cell phones, I already knew he would grow bored with the idea in about six months -- just at the moment his female classmates turned it into a new mass communications medium.

Unfortunately, some people never learn. If you'll remember, just a few years ago, the great fear was that girls were turning up on the wrong side of the digital divide. It was the boys who were becoming the programmers, the game players and the Web surfers. The great fear was that somehow this would make men the great winners of the Digital Age, while women would be left behind -- once again in that long historical train of sexism -- as also-rans.

Catering to the Sexes Not Always the Best Option

This ritual discovery of yet one more impending disaster facing the majority of our population seems to have become a perennial feature of modern American life. It now seems pretty obvious that the great girl crisis of a decade ago -- the notion that female elementary school students were getting less attention than their male counterparts -- was not only wrong, but dangerously misguided.

But as the girl panic set in, the result was to turn classrooms into perfect little quilting bees for girls -- and torture chambers for boys. Tad got caught right in the middle of that one: at his oh-so sensitive private school, one sport after another was banned during recess for being either too competitive or involving physical contact…until he and his buddies were reduced to running down the soccer field and slamming into the goal posts -- until that too was banned. Happily, his little brother (now at a different school) gets to come home from school bruised and bloody.

Not all school-aged boys escaped unscathed. Driving to high school each morning it's not hard to miss the victims of that little piece of misguided social engineering: the lumpen boys in their heavy metal T-shirts shuffling along, their lousy grades all-but guaranteeing a limited future, their brains still mushy from too many years of Ritalin and enforced conformity. And they, of course, are quickly passed by brightly-dressed girls chatting away on their cell phones about where they are sending their college applications.

Luckily for all of us, the Great Internal Gender Divide Scandal was outrun by the pace of events before every teenaged girl in America was subsidized to buy a laptop and cell phone, or 10 year-old boys saw their PS/2's legally confiscated. Still, there was enough time to begin banning video games deemed too violent for teenaged boys, thus taking away the last means -- going into online video 'God mode' and slaughtering everything in sight -- by which they felt any sort of power and control over their lives.

So, let me make a prediction: within five years, the number of teenaged girls participating in online gaming -- currently the last area of dominance by boys on the Web -- will approach parity with their male counterparts. This will occur because: 1) Game makers, faced with falling revenues, will begin to develop new games and reorient old ones with great requirements for communication and social hierarchies; 2) Girls will attack en masse the last redoubt of the boys-only Web, precisely because it is there; and 3) As more girls move into games, more boys will move out, accelerating to rush to equilibrium.

Furthermore, I predict that once this occurs, you will hear no more worried talk in the media about how bad computer games are for America's youth. Instead, a new scandal will emerge wherever the boys are.

It's All About Control -- Adult Control

In the meantime, we all might want to give some serious thought as to whether these endless worries are really about the emotional health of children, or in fact about our own adult fear of change and loss of control.

Not coincidentally, the same day the Guardian story broke, the wires carried a story about the growing number of college lecturers, most recently law Professor June Entman of the University of Memphis, who are banning laptops from their classrooms. It turns out that -- horrors! -- students are often using their computers to text message, play poker, and surf the Web. University of Oregon chemistry professor Paul Engelking unwisely even admitted that the students are so busy taking notes (or whatever) on their computers that they don't laugh at his jokes.

Leaving aside the fact that this is college, and students, having paid enormous tuitions, ought to be allowed to learn (or not) any damn way they want, this once again strikes me as a classic example of adults not being able to cope with technological change and justifying their frustration by claiming it is a threat to children. Most college kids of my acquaintance these days is just as smart, and a whole lot more ambitious and disciplined, than my peers of 30 years ago -- even more than the college students I taught 10 years ago.

Furthermore, these kids can multitask in ways we can't even imagine ? downloading music, researching on the Web, doing homework, instant messaging and a half-dozen other things all at the same time. The professor who still expects undivided attention from 21-year-olds for 90 minutes is delusional.

On these matters, public concern always masks private terror. And what I think these professors are frightened of, with good reason, is that the cozy and autocratic world of the lecturer in the classroom is about to disappear into some new virtual arrangement of online messaging, podcasts and video feeds. Even now, students are beginning to experiment with those powerful new pocket digital recorders which, pumped as an MP3 file through speech recognition software, can produce an accurate transcript of an entire lecture -- meaning that even if they ban laptops, (as they once tried to ban calculators -- remember that?) those seemingly attentive students might merely be listening to Wilco through ear buds under their long hair, and taking down the entire lecture with that suspiciously motionless pen.

Tad's Tab: The latest from the teen tech trenches from my 15-year-old son, Tad Malone.

If you are a teenager like me, you are constantly broke. And the only way to get extra money is on your birthday, Christmas or chores (like that's going to happen). But that's why the Internet was invented: to give you as many freebies as possible. On the Net I've found many things that are free, and some that are even worth it. For example, if you have an iTunes account, every week that site offers a free song download, and, lately, even free TV shows. Frankly, half of the stuff I've "bought" from iTunes has been free.

Another great source of freebies are trial and beta versions of games. If you're a big gamer, then you can play the full beta versions of games to test them out. And, though they are only partial experiences, there are also a lot free trial versions of massive multi-player online (MMO) games all-but begging to be tried. Between those things, and all the free videos on places like YouTube, there's enough to keep even an ADHD teenager entertained until he gets his next allowance.

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone, once called the Boswell of Silicon Valley, is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is best-known as the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public-television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNEWS.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.