Young People's Attitudes to Technology

Abstract

The discussion about young people's attitudes to technology seems to confirm observations made during the great debates on youth in the early 1980s and that also hold true for other topics (for instance, the change in values with respect to achievement and work). The problems that are discussed in terms of young people, their relationship to institutions and their attitudes to the demands of society, are in fact not problems of youth, nor even problems that the younger generation has in dealing with older people, but problems of society in coping with progress. Thus, the issue of the attitudes of young people towards technology and the extent of their alleged hostility to it is based on a special point of view. The younger generation as a whole is always taken to be (hopefully) the vehicle of social change, and not only with respect to technical progress. The rapid spread of new information and communication technologies, as well as the increasing destruction of natural resources, have sharpened public awareness of the risks of technical progress. The question of whether society can count upon the next generation to be prepared to go on accepting this role has received attention above all in political and business circles (cf. Klages & Kmiecziak, 1981; Inglehart, 1989), where the reason for the interest can be summed up in the statement: 'the future of our country is based on youth and technology'. This view considers technology to be the main driving force of social change, and links prognoses and hopes for future modernisation intimately to its progress. Taking this approach as the starting point, one can see the deeper justification for the concept of 'technology acceptance' which is frequently used in this connection, especially in public opinion research: it is in fact about the acceptance of a development that young people have not initiated themselves, that does not necessarily affect them personally in any direct way, but belongs to the dynamics of an economically and politically ambitious industrial power at the beginning of the 1990s [1]. It is in sharp contrast with this pro-technology viewpoint that technological developments, and above all their industrial applications, have increasingly been in the headlines in recent years and have generated some scepticism (cf. Brannigan & Goldenberg, 1985). A series of disasters linked with placenames in all the developed countries and also in the Third World has sharpened people's sensitivity to technology and its industrial exploitation. The rise of new social movements (e.g. the ecology movement, the opposition to nuclear power plants, the Greens) starting in the mid 1970s, which emphatically warned and still warn of the threat posed by even greater exploitation of natural and human resources, was an indication of a change in the public's awareness. Given that these movements have found wide acceptance particularly among the younger generation, it is not surprising that some see a change of