[survey | read | learn | other | about ]

« McJobs & the OED | Main | Finding Something Sort of Like a Specific, Unnamed Font »

Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants

I get the basic premise of the Digital Native project (coordinated by the Berkman Center at Harvard and the Research Center for Information Law at U of St. Gallen).

"Digital Natives" are those people for whom the internet and related technologies are givens, whereas "Digital Immigrants" migrated to these technologies later in life (Prensky, 2001). Digital Immigrants know how life existed in the pre-networked society, whereas Digital Natives take networked communication as the foundation of their lives.

The metaphor—if it's even a metaphor—plays out in interesting ways: social mores, communities and all their processes of inclusion and exclusion, processes of acculturation and discrimination, etc. And I haven't read Prensky's work, which the term is taken from. But I can't read the overview page of the project without thinking that "digital" is now the new "civilized" and "non-digital" is the new "primitive," an implied hierarchy that tends to rehearse the same status issues that "immigrant" scenarios invariably play out in (pun intended) black and white/us and them ways. Perhaps the work will be more nuanced and sensitive than that, but the overview page makes claims such as, "Most digital natives (DNs) live online, 24/7" and "The digital world is inherently more vulnerable to malicious intent via badware, viruses, hackers." Who, really, lives online 24/7? Is the digital world really more dangerous than the realworld? (Or is the distinction just in terms of being open to attacks by digital means? That only begs the question.)

Or maybe we just need to turn this on its head and embrace the positive connotations of "immigrant" rather than see it as something to be gotten beyond.

[via Alice Robison's Twitter feed]

Comments

The thing I like too, Johndan, is that you and I are both over 30 (ahem) and the following just happened:
1. I got an email from the Berkman Center re: their upcoming events. I read the email.
2. I went to the link in the email that sent me to the wiki. I cringed.
3. I emailed a bunch of friends about it.
4. I posted a status update to Twitter.
5. You read the Twitter update (because we are friends there).
6. You blogged about it.
7. I received a Google Alert of my name, indicating that you linked to my Twitter post about it.
8. I am now commenting on your blog about it.
9. I am about to go blog it myself.
10. You are invited to comment on my blog.

In the meantime, I've received emails in two different accounts, an email via Facebook, a phone call, a text message, and several IMs about it. All of this happened within the past 5 hours.

Does that make me a digital native, I wonder? Hrm. ;-)

Thanks for posting such terrific thoughts on the subject. I'll post my own in a bit.

Maybe we need something like, "Digital Naturalized Citizens." Or perhaps we're just "Undocumented Workers."

Like I said, part of me understands the general division—I do see very rough generational distinctions played out in understanding/working/living online. But the distinctions break down (as you pointed out) frequently in ways that aren't simply generational. And the choice of terminology just brings too much ugly baggage. And in the long run, the native/immigrant distinctions proposed seem to ignore the fact that very few people are completely either native or immigrant (or digital/meatspace). Instead, most of us "occupy' different spaces depending on the types of activities we engage in, who we engage in them with, what our goals are, and much more.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)