The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.

He goes on to highlight how unusual this is when compared with the previous generation, who rarely had the need or opportunity to write outside of school assignments.

What intrigued me, though, wasn’t the amount of extracurricular writing, but how students’ perception of writing has changed in a culture where most of their work is widely shared.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This struck a chord with me. I left my university after two years. Originally, I intended to go back after a year or two, but I never did. There were a lot of reasons why I left, but a big one was that, like these students, I had a lack of enthusiasm about my course work. School assignments seemed pointless to me. Most of them didn’t really benefit anyone, maybe not even myself. Sure, sometimes the process of completing an assignment helped me learn the material, but a lot of the time the purpose felt more like I was just proving that I had already learned it. Not putting my knowledge into practice, not creating something, just going through a literally academic exercise.

This was especially true because by the time I was halfway through my freshman year, I scored a part-time job as a Java developer, thanks to some good luck and the help of my roommate. I had the freedom to work remotely from my dorm room for as many or as few hours as I could manage each week. This made it hard to feel motivated to spend a lot of time writing trivial programs that demonstrated some principle or data structure without actually accomplishing anything useful, when I could spend the same time writing software meant to be used by real people, while learning skills I knew were applicable to real-world work, and get paid for it.

(As an aside, none of that software I worked on in my college job actually was used by real people, as far as I know. Frankly, it was pretty pointless too, and I quickly realized that I would never want to actually use the software myself, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, either. Despite that, I learned more skills while working there that I still find useful now than I ever did writing map coloring programs and merge sorts in my CS courses.)

So I find it really interesting to learn that a whole generation of students shares my disdain for purely academic exercises. OK, maybe that’s an overstatement, but I think the article does point out a need for change in the way school work is assigned. Students who are used to creating and sharing their creations as a part of their daily life won’t be motivated to work on projects that they’re expressly forbidden to collaborate with their peers on, and which effectively die on the day they’re handed in for grading.

Maybe schools need to learn how to engage students in work that is essentially open and collaborative, not just with their classmates, but with the world at large. Work that helps build their reputations, and provides real value to a broader community. Work that feels meaningful to both the students themselves and the people they involve as their audience and co-participants.

Maybe schools need to learn how to recognize the creative work that students are already doing, on their own initiative, and nurture it into something that also has academic value.

Maybe schools need to realize that it is increasingly important for people in all sorts of careers to take an active role in shaping the world, and that working through scripted assignments for evaluation by an academic authority is teaching students skills for twentieth-century jobs, instead of helping them master the creativity and boldness that they will need for the future that they’ve already started building.

Florida points out that industries in large cities have become far more specialized:

New York is great in fashion design and investment banking. San Francisco’s great in software. L.A.’s great in entertainment technology. And Nashville is the epicenter of music production. So if you want to pursue a given career, it’s not just that you can make it in any big city, because now there is a smaller number of big cities that will be the key places for you.

He goes on to emphasize the influence that an individual’s choice of a place to live will have on his or her opportunities in life:

But many of these people give little thought to the fact that where they live will have an effect on so many facets of their lives—from their ability to find a mate to their access to certain careers. You need to be smart about place to actually have the life that you want to have.

I think that we’re in the middle of a large global reorganization. For a very long time predating mass communications, local cultures were highly individualized and often cut off from one another. People’s values and customs were a product of their culture, of their specific geographical location, of their ethnicity.

With the mass media, rapid travel, and global economy that developed in the 20th Century, local cultures broke down in some ways as the boundaries were no longer defined by geography or ethnicity. People were exposed to new ideas, and new cultures of like-minded people grew up as a new layer above (or below?) the geographic centers. You saw the emergence of cultures that exist both as a subset of any given local culture, and as a global culture with mirror images that sprung up across the world. As examples, I mean things like youth cultures (punk, goth, rave, etc.) as well as tech/geek cultures, and as more people become connected online, more and more niche cultures arise with both local presences within geographic communities, and global bonds via the Internet. These are cultures based on ideas and outlooks, rather than upbringing, and increasingly, people are finding cultures that fit their personalities, joining those communities, and ignoring or rejecting the traditional cultures that they were brought up with.

But the really interesting part is how ease of travel means that more and more people with a strong foundation in one of these new cultures are banding together in geographical locations. You can see this especially in the Bay Area, home of not only tech culture, but also progressive politics and a certain artistic aesthetic. It seems that so few people here are native, most having moved here to join one of these cultures, and the ones that are native are just as fully immersed. The natives who don’t identify with the new culture of the Bay Area are barely present — maybe they’re leaving the area, or perhaps they’re just drowned out. You can see this in many other cities too, like Berlin’s young bohemian party culture, LA’s entertainment industry, DC’s political machinery, etc. Affluent people are both flocking to these cities, and flocking away from them, depending on their affinity for the new cultures that have arisen within them. Many young people who are raised within the metropolitan area of these cities either accept the values of their dominating cultures, or they leave for a city that fits their personality better.

What this all adds up to, IMO, is a mass reshuffling of the deck. Within time, the whole world — or at least the portion of it with the means to do so — may rearrange itself according to the personalities and preferences of its inhabitants. And then it seems like we’d be right back where we started, in a way, with cultural boundaries drawn by geography. On the one hand, we would still have the communication technology to provide exposure to other cultures, but on the other hand, as the access to this increases and people have to filter more and more of it, I wonder if people will choose to expose themselves to other cultures.