Oh, Those Web Savvy Kids Today!
|
Written By Reprise Media | July 7, 2006 | Share This
|
|
It turns out the young people really may not be so clueless about the Internet after all. A free feature in the Wall Street Journal today reports the shocking news that college students across the country are ignoring free music download services provided by their schools, even though the programs offer heavily restricted songs that may not even play on their computers.
We know. Who’d a thunk it?
To the apparent dismay of numerous institutions trying to avoid the nuisance of RIAA lawsuits, most students are greeting free downloads from the likes of Napster with a collective shrug. Why pooh-pooh one free service for other free download options that aren’t quite as legal? We’re guessing it’s the quality of the product. An illicitly downloaded song plays on any computer, can load onto any portable device, and lasts forever.
In contrast, the schools’ downloads are rife with headaches. They don’t work on Apple computers (19 percent of students own’em), it costs extra to burn songs to CD or download onto MP3 players, and the songs vanish upon graduation. Maybe it’s a ploy to keep more students on the rolls for seven or eight years, but the idea of building up an utterly temporary music collection is, uh, kind of not that fun. And the services aren’t really free, as they’re often factored into the cost of tuition or subsidized by “student fees” (via Digg).
On the other side of the tracks… While it’s not actually too surprising that college kids are hipper to the ‘net than their school administrators, a less obvious youth demographic is also warming to the web: street gangs. Slashdot points to this AP story about the online turf of Crips, Bloods, and other infamous groups. The so-called “web bangers” are using sites like MySpace to show off and brag about gang crimes, which might not be the best idea ever - it turns out cops are reading the Internet, too.
Topics: Technology |