Tek4L

It is good to see that the ‘Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants’ concept is being questioned

http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/01/19/digital-natives-and-spaghetti-sauce

I agree with D’Arcy that the concept of ‘digital natives’ and ‘net genners’ is an overgeneralisation. These labels were good to get discussion going, and yes a bigger percentage of young people may be more comfortable/in-tune with technology than the ‘old folks’, but fitting into the digital world is as much a personality traight as a generational one. I have four children and while they all tinker around a bit with the computer and online things, three off them struggle with some things, and have to ask the fourth one for help, who is just naturally much more competent in this area.

As the title suggests I think some people are digital naturals, some aren’t. The only difference with the younger generation is that an early exposure to things digital has perhaps predisposed a large percentage of them to be ‘naturals’. But there are a huge number of people in the 30+ age bracket that are even more ‘Digital Naturals’ than the 30- age group - after all it was this generation that invented the digital age!

Perhaps we could liken it to rhythm - some people have it, some have a little, and some just don’t have it at all. However, if you expose a large number of children to intensive music education from an early age then I have no doubt that a larger percentage of them would be able to keep the beat on the dance floor, than from a second group that had no formal music education - but there would still be some from the second group that would do it naturally.
So perhaps we should drop Digital Native, or even Digital Natural, and go with Digital Groovers

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 3:25 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.