“Digital natives” under attack! (as a metaphor)
Comments: 8 - Date: December 19th, 2007 - Categories: Identity, Learning, Uncategorized
MIT professor Henry Jenkins is one of several bloggers who have criticized the Digital Native/Digital Immigrant metaphor in recent weeks. Jenkins argues the metaphor oversimplifies and exaggerates generational distinctions, in the process letting adults “off the hook” for getting involved with technology and how kids use it.
Last week, I had the privilege of seeing Jenkins discuss these concerns, along with many other issues, on stage with two other brilliant luminaries: Katie Salen, a game designer and professor at the Parsons School of Design, and Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard School of Education.
When Jenkins’s “native/immigrant” critique came up, Gardner responded that though the metaphor may be used simplistically, it still has value. “There’s clearly a difference between people who use these things easily and naturally and reflexively, and people for whom everything has to be translated into kind of another language.”
Jenkins acknowledged this, with what struck me as the ideal point of view.
“Metaphors are powerful things. They allow us to see some things clearly and they blind us to other things. And so I’m not saying we should throw out the metaphor and what it allows us to talk about. I’m saying we should constantly interrogate the metaphor for what it blinds us to seeing.”
Indeed. All along with this project, we’ve made a point to continually search for nuance and question our assumptions. In that spirit, over the next few days I’ll be writing more here about some of the questions that have been raised, both at last night’s forum, and in the blogosphere.
That said, I should make clear that the debate over metaphors constituted only a small part of an extremely fascinating 90 minutes, spanning a multitude of topics such as online ethics, cyber-bullying, media literacy, games, commercialism, curricula, and more. Video and audio of the forum is available from the Global Kids’ Digital Media Initiative blog, and I highly recommend checking it out.
Although there was way too much great material at the forum to cover it all on this blog, I do plan to write more about Katie Salen’s ideas about gaming’s social and educational aspects. I found them perhaps the most fascinating part of the whole evening, largely because the subject is one I was hardly aware of coming in.
In the meantime, what do you think of our much-maligned metaphor? Does it oversimplify, or simplify just enough? In Jenkins’s words, what does it show us, and what does it blind us to? Sound off in comments!
Jesse Baer
Comment by The Waving Cat » Blog Archive » Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants: Too Simple A Metaphor? - December 19, 2007 @ 6:02 pm
[…] that’s a good point right there. Jesse has opened the discussion at the Digital Natives blog: What do you think of the Digital Natives vs Immigrants metaphor? What does it explain, what does […]
Comment by DK - December 19, 2007 @ 6:10 pm
The metaphor is accessible for those who are starting to understand the discourse – I throw it around all the time in my talks with teachers, youth workers, strategy peeps etc – because of its accessibility… Henry is right in terms of we must not rely on it as a panacea for all discussions, but it’s a great start 🙂
Comment by Mihaela V - December 20, 2007 @ 12:51 am
Yes, it is too simple a metaphor… but it’s so catchy and it stands in for a topic worth exploring.
However, I think it assumes a number of things I take issue with: that digital natives know more about new technologies than: 1) they actually do; and 2) than digital immigrants.
1) I’m most often surprised at how little, not how much the digital natives in my classrooms know. It’s easy for them to learn the technology, but it’s hard for them to get accustomed to the culture of blogging, for example. The pressure of public discourse silences them. Many of them argue against social media, they claim they’re sick and tired of too much technology and they crave direct, f2f human connection. If we assume they know, we’ll never teach them…
2) the metaphor places digital immigrants in a position of inferiority (as an immigrant myself – born in Romania, living in the U.S. I can comment a lot on the connotations of “immigrant”). But being conversant in two cultures can be a position of strength (see the “outsider within” concept).
It’s a metaphor of division and separation – there are probably more constructive ways of looking at things.
So of course, this metaphor blinds us to certain aspects of the world, and packs within assumptions we need to think about. But at the same time, as a catchy phrase, it has the power to start a conversation, and that’s very valuable.
Comment by native son « small dots - December 29, 2007 @ 5:42 pm
[…] I follow Jesse Baer on Twitter, the idea of a Digital Native is never far from my brain. A recent post on the Digital Natives blog got me thinking again about what my citizenship status is in this hypothetical […]
Comment by Shava Nerad - January 4, 2008 @ 4:35 pm
I started on punch cards and manual typewriters and handwriting at about the same time in 1964. I was writing and reading English and FORTRAN in Kindergarden. I was the girl geek with the computer geeks in high school in the early 70’s, and was a Chief Software Engineer (and writing on USENET — when do I get my “USENET was my blog” t-shirt?) in 1982.
By that time, nearly all my friends were working on computers and mostly on the Net at DEC, the AI Lab, LCS, various startups around Cambridge, all the companies on 128…oh, and hundreds of places that were also on USENET, BITNET, or whatever.
I felt a little alienated from even some of geek culture of the time. I spent most of the 80’s and early 90’s trying over and over again to get my parents (both born in the early 20’s) to understand what it was that I *did* for a living.
Saying that my friends and I were the vanguard of digital natives is kind of like saying that people in the 20’s were the vanguard of non-participatory music, or that youth in the 50’s were the vanguard of the TV generation.
It’s all true, but it’s only meaningful in very specific contexts, perhaps. EVERY generation changes. We haven’t invented change with the Internet. The changes with the advent of TV, or the advent of recorded/broadcast music, or the “invention of childhood” are all also significant periods of change in social interaction, even globally.
That said, what is the Digital Natives project doing to study my generation of 40-50-somethings who may predict some of their ideas of what comes next for this critical mass of millenials? Do folks like me even come onto your radar?
Comment by Greta Kelly - January 7, 2008 @ 1:03 am
My issue with the metaphor ‘Digital Native’ is that it assumes that young people have IT skills inately – it blinds us to the fact that they did actually learn them. Of course they learnt their skills at a younger age but they weren’t born with them. The danger of assuming that all young people have IT skills (and that all our users belong to this age group) is that we become lazy in providing help, FAQs and an intuiatve interface. As an Instructional Designer at the University of Queensland it makes my job and the job of course coordinators a lot easier if we assume our users are digital natives. However, we run the risk of increasing the cognitive load on all our uses (young and old) if we don’t give clear instructions, user-guides and also teach some of the more advanced IT skills.
Comment by Den digitala revolutionen » Blog Archive » Digitala infödingar och digitala immigranter som lever digitala liv - January 8, 2008 @ 9:39 am
[…] samma population eller behöver begreppen nyanseras? Flera forskare har på senare tid har börjat ifrågasätta metaforerna inföding/invandrare. Man anser bl.a. att det finns en risk att verkligheten uppfattas som svart/vit och att […]
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