A reader responds to my thoughts on Digital Natives:
There needs to be new term created for those who fall into the in-between native and immigrant category. The sudden acceleration of new technologies during the 80's clearly separated the Digital Natives from the Digital Immigrants but what about the ones caught in between in the "gray area"...those who can multi-task when necessary but also enjoy the outdated way of just focusing on one task such as reading a "real" book with physical pages. I believe the group in this gray area are unique and more adaptive than the true Digital Natives that can be misdiagnosed as ADHD.
I agree that those of us caught in the "gray area" between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants are often left out of the discussion of how technology is changing people. But while part of me agrees with this reader that we constitute a unique hybrid-group, another part of me thinks that this is just more evidence that these broad-sweeping generational categories simply don't work. After all, throughout history members of the youngest generation have frequently used newer, more powerful technology than their parents. But this begs the question: what makes this time different? What is it about the Internet and modern digital technology that has changed the youth so profoundly that they require a new label -- Digital Natives?
One answer might be that we are indeed in a period of unusually rapid change -- akin to a scientific paradigm shift. With the seemingly accelerating pace of technological change, there may well be a greater experiential gap between the Millennial Generation and their parents than between previous generations. I find it hard to think of an appropriate historical analogy to the Internet -- perhaps when reading and writing was first taught to children they could have been called Literate Natives? But this could just be another example of bias toward the present. Is the Internet really changing our brains as profoundly as the written word did? Or would comparing it to television, radio, the telegraph or any of the other myriad advancements in how we get our information be more appropriate? If it is more similar to the latter, then the hype surrounding Digital Natives hardly seems justified. After all, we know that the brain is plastic and that everything we do changes it -- not just the Internet -- and so the real question is how significant those changes actually are. Too often, it seems, the mere fact that changes in the brain occur is taken as evidence of profound functional difference in Digital Natives.
I think the danger with these generational categories is that they put too much emphasis on experiential changes without establishing how different the effects are on our brains, consciousness and functioning. If we simply focus on separating generations by their experience with new or different technology, then we could label each generation going back indefinitely as some ____ Native or another. When we change our focus to the physical changes in the brain and functionality, the differences seem to diminish. Cognitive scientist David E. Meyer has studied multitasking and found that Digital Natives are no exception to its ill effects on task performance. UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small performed a study that found people who commonly used the Internet showed more brain activity during Google searches than those who were less experienced on the Net. But after only 5 days of 1-hour practice sessions, the "Internet naïve" users were already beginning to show similar brain patterns to the more experienced users. These findings lead me to ask: does Digital Natives' life-long experience with technology enable them to do anything that Digital Immigrants can't learn how to do later in life through practice and experience (controlling for the superior abilities younger people have anyway)? And if the Internet and all the new digital technology can have some ill effects, are Digital Natives any more at-risk or immune that Digital Immigrants?
If there is no solid evidence for functional and physiological differences that are more substantial than the differences that have been present between any two generations due to their unique experiences, I'm not quite sure what the use is for the terms Digital Native and Digital Immigrant.
A while back, Charles Nelson wrote an informative series of posts challenging the notion of Digital Natives here, here and here.
-Jeff
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