Day 106, digital immigrants/natives, a rant

This rant was written on 27 February 2009, it is still relevant.  It also refers to the more wider example of how soundbites can misrepresent people, ignore people, and generally remove any form of sensible discussion about important topics, when picked up by the wider media.




The Digital Dispossessed

The Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives analogy by Marc Prensky is getting a bit of an airing at the moment.  It ties into the media scare stories about web 2.0 technologies altering how young adults brains might be wired up – I get an image of a cosmic determinist electrician using a crack team of programmers to long-windedly restructure human thought processes without recourse to the roll of synapse solder.

As a person that by fact of age would come under the umbrella of Digital Immigrant I am not convinced by the analogy, ok I haven't read the two part series in depth and I could easily fall into the category of old nay-sayer and stick in the mud when in actuality I would like to have an open mind and take a positive view.  Prensky.  Part1  Part2

The things I don't particularly like about the analogy are that the term Digital Immigrant seems intentionally to carry a pejorative feel of having old-fashioned ways rather than that of an immigrant enriching a culture by bringing new ideas.  This is probably more of an example of the clunky nature of this analogy and how it has been used in the media.  The other thing I find wrong is that it ignores the idea that all we are talking about fundamentally is technology, and that as each generation ages then it is not unusual that a proportion of that population has difficulty adapting to and using newer technologies.

Prensky refers to an example of a Digital Immigrant having an odd or thick accent demonstrated by, for example, printing out emails. Nice to know the Digital Natives don't have much need for something with a history dating back to the 15^th Century, I'll be turning off those heavy power consuming servers that deal with the print queues, spooling, jobs and release stations next week! Ok the machines are virtualised and not so power-hungry and some departments still insist on receiving double spaced printed work.  Yet there are other organisations, the Open University is one, that prefer to handle electronically submitted work.  But there are plenty of Digital Natives printing out websites, emails and PDF documents, what went wrong?

Also it is not always apparent when using new technologies that not all of our information is there.  A lot of people may not use the immediate and at hand research tools of the internet and search engines, but a lot of us do use them as a first line of investigation – yet it is still only one line of research.  How much use is the internet for providing the meta-data that is presented with print media, the annotations scrawled in the margins (not only by the likes of Fermat or Joe Orton), physical feel, size, binding, and other elements that make up an object like a book, a journal, a newspaper or other types of printed documents? How sad would it be to lose those extra quantifiers of context.  In some cases the physical object is the actual subject of study. But I have heard of Digital Natives turning up at libraries only willing to read a document if it is in electronic format, if the document only exists in paper format the student will shrug and say they can't be bothered.  In what other areas do we decide that resources are of no use if it presents a mild inconvenience to use them – after all after learning to drive I would still use the upstairs loo even if there isn't a well lit dual carriageway leading to it.  If physical documents aren't used they may be disposed of, depriving potential researchers of resources even if they have been digitised in a high quality format (which is not always the case, there are many examples of grainy reproductions of images and badly scanned pages).

I know that the analogy is really about young students and new ways of thinking, but I don't think that the new ways of thinking belong exclusively to the young.  My main grumble about the analogy is not Marc Prensky's use of it but the way it is used in the media.  The media informs us that we are one or the other, it provides a nice dualist argument to be lined up for a five minute filler piece which helps to get the Daily Mail readers large intestine clear before the morning commute.  A couple of talking heads are lined up with their diametrically opposed arguments and allowed to let rip until there is no more time available as we have to move on to the weather report.  The disappointment heard in the voice of the interviewer on the occasions that the supposed adversaries agree with each other is a joy I mark with a gold avatar in my online calendar.

I am biased, I feel peeved because I'm no snake hipped teenager, my winning smile is now a lop-sided smirk and I have to work harder to keep from standing still, but I like technology and I love learning about the new ideas and opportunities it can reveal. But what happens is I turn into a fundarantelist with a half-cocked, semi-baked argument and start wondering about the massive number of people out there that are the Digital Dispossessed.  The ill educated, disabled, elderly and poor are the people that are likely to have had little or no contact with the new media and technologies.  Whether they are on a council estate in this city, or in a low-tech nation washing gold from semiconductors with acid in the open air, they don't get much of a mention in this technology and education debate.

Here's Bob with the weather...