I like this foru msooo much, thanks for the creators.

By that time, nearly all my friends were working on computers and mostly on the Net at DEC, the AI Lab, LCS, various startups around Cambridge, all the companies on 128…oh, and hundreds of places that were also on USENET, BITNET, or whatever.

I felt a little alienated from even some of geek culture of the time. I spent most of the 80’s and early 90’s trying over and over again to get my parents (both born in the early 20’s) to understand what it was that I *did* for a living.

Saying that my friends and I were the vanguard of digital natives is kind of like saying that people in the 20’s were the vanguard of non-participatory music, or that youth in the 50’s were the vanguard of the TV generation.

It’s all true, but it’s only meaningful in very specific contexts, perhaps. EVERY generation changes. We haven’t invented change with the Internet. The changes with the advent of TV, or the advent of recorded/broadcast music, or the “invention of childhood” are all also significant periods of change in social interaction, even globally.

That said, what is the Digital Natives project doing to study my generation of 40-50-somethings who may predict some of their ideas of what comes next for this critical mass of millenials? Do folks like me even come onto your radar?

However, I think it assumes a number of things I take issue with: that digital natives know more about new technologies than: 1) they actually do; and 2) than digital immigrants.
1) I’m most often surprised at how little, not how much the digital natives in my classrooms know. It’s easy for them to learn the technology, but it’s hard for them to get accustomed to the culture of blogging, for example. The pressure of public discourse silences them. Many of them argue against social media, they claim they’re sick and tired of too much technology and they crave direct, f2f human connection. If we assume they know, we’ll never teach them…

2) the metaphor places digital immigrants in a position of inferiority (as an immigrant myself – born in Romania, living in the U.S. I can comment a lot on the connotations of “immigrant”). But being conversant in two cultures can be a position of strength (see the “outsider within” concept).

It’s a metaphor of division and separation – there are probably more constructive ways of looking at things.

So of course, this metaphor blinds us to certain aspects of the world, and packs within assumptions we need to think about. But at the same time, as a catchy phrase, it has the power to start a conversation, and that’s very valuable.