Are you a Digital Native?
Comments: 11 - Date: July 3rd, 2008 - Categories: Identity, Participation Gap
I thought I was. I was born January 9th, 1980. I missed the 70s by just nine days.
I love technology. I was luckiest 6 year-old kid in he world when my uncle gave the family a Commodore 64 for Xmas. I programmed in BASIC. I was in chat-rooms on Prodigy and CompuServe. I played in Multi-User Doors (MUDs) on local direct dial-up bulletin board systems before I even knew what the Internet was.
I thought that I was a Digital Native.
I’m an active participant in “online culture”. I can name every YouTube reference in Weezer’s “Pork and Beans” video. I get ALL of my news online and I own a television almost exclusively for the purposes of watch media that comes to me across the Internet. I conduct 80% of my professional life online and maintain only the fuzziest of boundaries between my work and play time. I multi-task. I transition between IM, SMS, email, telephone, and face-to-face seamlessly. I Facebook. I Myspace. I Flickr. I LinkedIn. I Wiki. I YouTube. I twitter (sort-of). I code a little.
I thought that I was a Digital Native, but I am not.
When I twitter, I often do it alone. (I’m more enamored with the concept than the practical application.) Although IM has become an indispensable tool for getting work done and telecommuting, most of my friends and family are not usually logged in. Aside from email, most forms of online communications never gained enough a critical mass in my age bracket to endure past our extended adolescence. My Skype window sits idle, displaying a grey-out contacts displaying ghostly reminders of my fleeting online social life.
With much enthusiasm and the best of intentions, I try to co-ordinate social events and camping trips with friends using online calendars, forums, social networks, or email lists. But more often than I think is reasonable, I need to resort to the phone to really make things happen. Most of my people just don’t live online.
I am not a Digital Native, but I would like to be.
I’ve had a lifelong love affair with technology and it’s potential for creating change. My age bracket, generally speaking, has not shared this interest with me. True Digital Natives have a mainstream culture of online connectivity. My interest in digital technology has been exploratory and forward thinking, and placed parts of my life-style on the geeky fringes of American culture.
I’m probably more tech-savy than most Digital Natives today, yet I am not one of them. The Digital Natives around me have been shaped by a totally mainstream digital lifestyle, a norm that enables allows them to digitally communicate and collaborate with their peers with ease. Their habits have been formed by their lifetimes of digital communication and complete immersion in digital spaces.
In contrast, my lifetime has been a lifetime of waiting. Waiting for the digital spaces held in the collective imagination to come online. Now that the early, early alphas of the meta-verse are here, I am shocked that my peers aren’t rushing in to them as I always imagined. It’s too late for me. I missed the 70s by nine days. I just realized that I missed the life-style I’ve always imagined would come by about a decade.
I adore the Internet. The possibilities that are provided for by massive digital collaboration and open access to information are the single biggest factor in my having any hope of a brighter future for the human species. (Clay Shirky’s talk on excess cognitive capacity gives me chills.) I wish that my generation was going to play a major role in that imagined future. …But sadly, I will have to go it mostly alone because their embrace of life-changing technological innovation seems to have stopped at Tivo.
UPDATE 2008.08.04: More on the term “Digital Native” here.
Comment by Fred - July 3, 2008 @ 11:29 am
I’ve always had problems with strict definitions of digital natives, so I’ll put that out there right away. But my reaction to this post would be to take a longer view, one that acknowledges a constant evolution of technology and socio-technical behaviors. With enough distance, we’ll always look at our technologies and socio-technical situations as barbaric in the light of evolution. There is no doubt that, in time, we’ll look at the odd, self-decriptive sociality of Facebook as the party line of the digital age (that’s a telephone party line, a few of which existed in my lifetime).
The other point that I want to react to is this notion that digital natives will adopt and run with a specified behavior. If they grow up digitally socializing, they’ll always digitally socialize, right? Here I’d also argue the long view, as I think digital natives will continually redefine their processes of sociality over the life-course. Just because they’re native, future 30 year olds aren’t going to communicate with the frenzy of today’s 15 year olds; these processes are evolutionary and needs-dependent.
So don’t fret – you’re a digital native – in your own way.
Comment by John Randall - July 3, 2008 @ 11:41 am
Thanks. I hope so.
Although I don’t expect that todays 20 year olds will still be checking their FaceBook profiles daily in 20 years, I do suspect that they will have a bunch of wikipedia edits under their belt, and will continue to engage in the kinds of public projects that digital fluency enables.
And… I do wish I could enjoy these new spaces and their possibilities with all of my friends and family, and not just the few geeky ones who share my enthusiasm.
Then again, I suppose that every generation who sees a bright future yearns for the opportunity to partake in more of that future…. Perhaps we were all born just a little to early.
Comment by Ismael - July 3, 2008 @ 11:45 am
Hi John,
You might be a Digital Native, but your closest environment might not.
You might be a Digital Native, but your closest ecosystem lacks the critical mass to be called a Digital Native Ecosystem.
I’m from the 70s (I missed the 80s by some years, lucky me 😉 but I’m either a Digital Native or quite a well integrated Digital Immigrant.
As you, I’m one of the geekest around.
We maybe just have to either wait or find our critical mass outside our first circle of acquaintances. But we will, because it’s just this that’ll make of us _real_ Digital Natives.
At least, I guess so.
Comment by John Pallister - July 3, 2008 @ 1:08 pm
Hi John – As a child of the fifties, I missed the digital native tag by quite some time, but I did enjoy your post and still aspire to be a productive digital imigrant – I must thank your gereration for letting me in!
Comment by Tim - July 3, 2008 @ 11:43 pm
Hi John,
Great post. What’s scary here is that I’ve hired someone to coach me about church ministry to digital natives. He told me to “get it” and thats how I found your blog. No coincidence for sure. But more frightening than that is the fact that you are describing the world of my nearly seventeen year old daughter, and here I am a child born of the 60’s trying to figure out the world my kid lives in. I am huanted by reality. Great and informative post. Thanks.
Comment by Brit Bohlinger - July 4, 2008 @ 7:35 am
Born in 69 but without kids I feel less under pressure to fit myself into that prestigious category. Has it become chic to call oneself Digital Native, another must-have/be or just one more label in the sphere where attaching icons and memberships signify the extent to which we have been recognised online – doomed to fade away as soon as the digital space is saturated with those born later and presumably less obsessed with being recognised as members of the in-group as they were born into that group?
Perhaps it is a question of degree rather than strict categorisation, after all just another dichotomy, still rather meaningless to those who resist any temptation to make their lives public in blogs, online social networks, wikis etc. Digital nomad, seems to be more appropriate in my case. After all, I was born in offline space…
Comment by alex juhasz - July 5, 2008 @ 10:19 pm
Perhaps the fault is not to be found in you (or your peers) but in what the technology has yet to provide. Meanwhile, the Natives don’t know any better, they don’t know what they might ask for, what they might be missing.
Comment by Jayne - July 8, 2008 @ 2:16 pm
John,
Fantastic post… I fall into the same camp (and general age bracket) as you, and remain solidly at the geeky fringe (I work at a technology startup and teach a class in digital studies).
You’ve described the Digital Native “cut-off” quite accurately and eloquently… The strange part is that while we may not be included in the DN culture, it’s mainly those our age bracket who are defining it (at least academically).
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[…] then still maybe I am not. I feel with John Randall who writes: I’ve had a lifelong love affair with technology and it’s potential for creating change. My age […]
Comment by Gunnar - August 6, 2008 @ 7:15 am
I’m born in ’75, almost as geeky as you, and so are 50% of my peer friends, at least. But friends of mine that are 5-10 yrs older don’t know what we’re talking about. So I’d say you’ve bad luck in friends/ecosystem 😉
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