Digital Natives, Immigrants and Pioneers

October 31st, 2006 Stewart Posted in Uncategorized |

New Workers — pewresearch.org version _final_.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Thanks to Marilyn Pukkila via Barbara Fister’s ACRL blog entry and for pointing me to this little article from Pew that had slipped under my radar.

I continue to be a bit flummoxed over the fallout from Prensky’s article on Digital Natives, where he contends that there are only Digital Natives (Millennials) and Digital Immigrants (everyone else). It’s the sort of thing that is easily popularized in media. “Digital Natives” sounds more savvy than “Millennials,” and dividing everyone into two groups with no middle ground keeps things nice and simple for the average reader.

Of course, it’s all nonsense, in many respects. It suggests that there are no shades of gray — you either grow up with technology to the point where you are blind to it, or you can see technology and therefore must be a “Digital Immigrant.”

(For some time now, I’ve been suggesting another alternative: The Digital Pioneer. After all, someone had to first break the digital sod, yes? I think of myself and many of my peers as Digital Pioneers, first adopters and ground-breakers over all new types of resources and media. A quick search suggests I might just have coined it — Anyone else ever found it mentioned?)

Of course, all of these parallels are somewhat moot. Many so-called Digital Natives are as naive about information technology as the weariest Digital Immigrant, but they assume that what they don’t know cannot hurt them. Their gamesmanship and “Nintendo approach” to learning life lessons means that they leave themselves open to fraud and abuse that they cannot “see,” more of the “blurring of boundaries” that Barbara and Marilyn suggest.

As I say in my talks, Millennials believe in “unlimited lives” and they believe that technology can never harm them. This naivette makes them perfect targets for abuses that they might never even see coming.