I'm not totally sure what constitutes a digital native and/or a digitial immigrant but I would say that there are large populations of both and only one group is getting smaller. This idea of digital immigrants is dying with social sites such as facebook and twitter so much that my goddamn grandma has a facebook. Now whoever thought my grandma, a chain smoking cancer survivor from the 1950s with a bark that stings like a big ole gulp of Tabasco, would be on her computer 4 hours a day poking other grandpas in town and kicking some serious ass on Farmville? If you say you thought that would happen, I'll chop my own foot off.
So this new age has to be doing something to spark this new craze for people to practically leap onto their computers, even those who barely know how to use a microwave like my parents. This digital space that we see all around us and don't even think about anymore is something more to the older generation. Something that is ripped straight out of an aldus huxtable novel and scared the day lights out of them when they told ghost stories around the camp fire of talking machines and artificial intelligence.
So these digital immigrants are becoming more accustomed and tech savvy everyday because we make it apart of our lives. When you think about how new the Internet is, it's staggering. The Internet is nearly 25 years old and look at how quickly we have put our entire lives into it (literally- bank accounts, photo albums, our romantic endeavors, etc). 25 years after the first car was made it was still a pretty shitty car in our eyes, where as now cars practically drive themselves. 100 years from now our grandchildren will be at a loss for words knowing that we were born with the Internet next to us. Now maybe it's not wrapped up in a pink blanket with a hospital bracelet and a tag on it's wrist that reads "It's A Girl!". But I'm growing up with the Internet and this new digital frontier. As much as I haven't explored the nooks and crannies around every corner on the web, I would say that I'm a native or at least I'm just not ok with someone calling me an immigrant to my own computer. I fucking belong here.
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I love the details about your grandma - so funny, and so true about many of the people who have "immigrated" to Facebook. I think that even though nearly everyone is adapting to the use of Facebook and the internet in general, there will always be a disconnect between people who have grown up with the internet/computers and those who have adapted to them later in life. I'm just thinking of my dad who has a Facebook, yet doesn't know how to use it, still types with two fingers, and doesn't know how to use the printer...not sure if he'll ever feel like he belongs on the computer.
ReplyDeleteYou're so right about how our generation takes the internet (and all that comes with it) for granted. My parents always talk about how they had to use type writers in high school and college, and I can't even comprehend that. It's pretty impressive that older generations are able to adapt to all this new technology. Especially your badass grandma!
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