The Myths of the Digital Native (2015)
geeklawblog.com
geeklawblog.com
In many ways I have deeper IT skills than many digital natives in terms of understanding what is going behind the screen although I'd be the first to admit that as my reflexes (and mind?) have aged I'm slower at navigating or discovering interfaces than I used to be.
But when the 'digital native' thing comes up I prefer to think of myself as a 'digital pioneer'. I was there on the electronic frontier, sort of, when it was still a sparsely populated wilderness. We could explore and in some cases create our own digital worlds. Now the big walled gardens are there instead, populated with the digital natives, many of whom are creatives and power users even if the majority are happy to consume. They will find or create aspects of the technology that I could probably never conceive of. But some of us remember being out in that digital wilderness, looking at the clear skies and snow covered peaks on the distant horizons, and wondering what we could achieve in this brave new world.
It's a mindset, and in my experience not one which is related to year of birth. My granny is in her mid nineties and loves computers - she plays around in photoshop, produces newsletters, uses the computer to do digital art, writes emails. She's always been that way - an early adopter of technology. Every time I see her she has a new kitchen gadget.
Contrast that to my grandparents on the other side - similar age, but completely different mindset. They both died basically having never used a computer. One real standout moment was when I was trying to teach my granddad to use a DVD player. The conceptual understanding required to equate pressing a button on the remote control and the moving selection box on the menu was missing - so even just saying "go down to 'play movie' and select it" was out of his understanding.
I see it amongst my generation as well - I'm in my early thirties and have always been a computer person - tinkering, installing new things, writing software, reinstalling my OS just because I can. But not all my "digital native" friends are like that. Some love computers, some tolerate them. Pretty much everyone can use an iphone, but not everyone is interested in exploring its settings to see what else it can do.
So our generation may be "digital natives" in the sense that I doubt there's anyone my age who can't use a phone (or understand that button presses equate to menu selections - although that may not be the case with touchscreens). But we're not a generation of techies. Most people don't care. Human nature doesn't change that much in a generation.
Knowing to look it up though, does.
The whole point of the article is that "digital native" and "digital immigrant" is silly. There's no huge skills gap between people who learnt to use computers when they were young, and people who learnt when they were older (especially once you account for the amount of practice older people have). Lots of older people know to "ask Google", and lots of young people lack the problem solving skills to do so.
The big mistake in "digital native" thinking is to assume that all IT tasks are part of one general skillset that needs to be learn while you are young, and that therefore 'young people are good with all that IT stuff'.
If anything, I'd say younger people are worse at IT. It used to be the case that a lot of older people didn't know how the basic skills of computer use (typing, clicking on a GUI, having some idea of what a file system was, etc). A 60 year old used to panic over how to do basic computer things and ask their 20 year old coworker who did a few hours of computer class in school. Now the 20 year old coworker is more likely to need to ask the 60 year old for help.
Using a desktop computer is not all that much like using a cellphone, and desktop computers are quickly becoming specialized devices.
I've heard stories from more than one person from that era about how they'd write their own cracks as kids so that they could distribute pirated software in the school playground.
At best, this test measures the ability of someone editing a word document, and poorly at that.
Formatting can cover properly numbered paragraphs, with a hierarchy so that you always know which subsection you are referring to. So that when you have to insert new paragraphs in the middle of 50, 500, 1000 paragraphs, the numbering flows naturally.
It can include styling, making sure consistent headers are used, so that the navigation pane is actually useful. Consistent application of styles between team members also means copy-paste between documents works exactly as intended, with the pasted content automatically and correctly adopting the header, numbering, and font styles of the document.
Correct cross referencing can make it such that word automatically updates references to paragraph numbers when they change.
Hyperlinking can be a godsend when you are working in a long document with multiple defined terms and interlinked sections.
All of these "mere" formatting features are a godsend when a team of 5 is working on one giant document.
Just setting up a phone is something they rather have me do or at least be present since as soon as there is any paragraph of text on the screen that is more than five words long their eyes just glaze over.
People somehow confuse social media usage as being able to use the Internet and knowing how technology works, which is just plain silly. With mobile apps it might give you a tiny edge, but even there almost no one browses through options and sees what things do - to me THAT is what separates diginative from general populace. To willingly go into unknown digital places to explore and then bring out the good parts while avoiding the bad parts. It is more a mindset than anything else.
I mean when I asked my grandad a while ago why he wasnt just getting the internet he told me when he was my age, horses were used to pick trashes up. For him, all that floats above his head.
He s not a digital native. I probably am not either because I remember a time when there was no internet and PCs were a luxury.
What you re describing is more the difference between digital savvyness and lack of it. They still are born in it and cant probably live without a phone.
On the other hand I regard myself as a digital native for precisely that reason: I and computers grew up together. I'm 67 and I was around to see and use early versions of computers, media players (portable cassette players), etc., and all the version between then and now. I'm quite confident that I am as well equipped to use any of the current technology as my children.
That is not true. Native is associated with place not time. It is only associated with date in this very specific context.
The author is a lawyer, and legal work requires you to work extensively with word documents and word processing, so proficiency with word is a good anecdote to illustrate his point.
I looked at the task list he uses and they are critical basic skills for legal work, I don't think they are poor measures at all.
When your document is 400 pages long and being worked on by multiple people, it really helps if everyone knows how to maintain proper styling for navigation, auto update cross-references to paragraphs, hyperlink to definitions and named sections, and then strip it of identifying information so that it can be presented clean to the client. If even one person can't do this, it mangles the document.
The empirical evidence is undeniable: basic competence with core tools remains poor.
This is a solvable problem. We have all manner of opportunities to integrate foundational tech training into our educational curriculum.
I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone might have.
People said "look at the youth of today - they understand technology. Follow the youth of today, they will show you the future."
I thought that was right till I met other young people who had no idea.
The real answer is follow the software literate. Follow those skilled, trained and working with / on software each day.
If think we can extend this a little - my son is trying to make his own videos - at some point he or his peers will use digital cameras, sound, editing and probably the new "dynamic production" things like fortnites engine. This will transform tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of people from just consumers to producers in the same way blogs (and foss) did for newspapers.
It's hard to draw a distinct line, because someone skilled in video production might not write software - but I would say it is safer to draw the line at "writes code" and be fuzzy than anything else.
I'd say even as a software programmer you can be just a consumer. Most developers are.
> most of what Digital Natives did with technology was related to consumption, not application.
Watching from the sidelines I can attest the fact that nearly none of her fellow students know how to efficiently use search engines, digital knowledge repositories or stuff like pubmed.
They also have a hard time working collaboratively in a digital fashion with tools like MS Office 365 or Google Docs.
Her neice is the same. She is 18,still in school and has no ability to create a thesis in Word. TOC, headlines, footnotes, citations, footers, nothing. Either they never were taught this in school or neither her neice nor nearly all my SO's fellow students thought this to be a relevant skill.
But. And here is the catch. Together with her there also started few other students around her age. They also never learned the skills necessary to efficiently navigate digital research and usage of Office tools.
My SO learned these skills because of her former job as well as genuine interest in these things.
So from anecdata I would not differentiate by date of birth. I would make the differentiation with the question if people used devices for producing stuff or "just" consuming stuff.
People who don't care about learning this end up with a bag of shortcuts in their head and have to remember things like how to add a table of contents. And of course that can change with new versions, plus new programs are just a whole new course they need.
Tools are made for people who understand how to use them. We complain that stuff needs intuitive design but it's only intuitive for someone who understands the job.
If somebody explained stuff to me it helped jump start stuff. But experimentation was often my go to mode of operation.
It seemed to really catch the public's imagination though as a catchphrase.
Notably, the original educational usage was basically wrong too (in a nutshell it was saying that we had to totally rebuild all education because new kids can use computers natively, which is right for the wrong reasons).
I think the popular usage is because for older people (outside the older people who created the hardware and software that powers the modern world) the world has radically changed and they have little idea what's going on. The young people they know probably are, on average, much better at tech than them.
But humans don't deal with averages very well. They prefer to stereotype: "woman are short, men are tall" Vs the complex reality that the average tries to capture in a single number (age, ethnicity, nutrition, health).
There's also the weird fact that many natives are "worse" at their own language than immigrants since they grew up with slang, dialects, accents etc. Again averages covering up a complex reality.
http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...
Sorry, took me a few days to find the right keywords to unearth it.
> the Word module
I have used Word between 1994 and the late 2000s, and then I stuck with my copy of Word 97 (or 2000), and it didn't yet have the changes/comments function yet (afaik, or I never used it). So by adopting too early and writing my stuff in latex I failed this arbitrary test. Great ;)
More seriously though, this shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who is of that age. While some of us learned the ins and outs of computers in the late 90s, the bulk of our classmates could write an email and that's that. Maybe my generation where I live (in the VERY narrow sense, of being +/- 3 years old) was especially lucky as somehow the web just came to prominence when we were in our teens and it was so new and everyone was excited that you at least got an email address and used computers at school for a bit. But real knowledge was rare, so I can imagine even 5 years later there was less incentive and it's already been some kind of commodity...
I think the real takeaway from today's kids being digital natives is that you no longer have to "win them over" with bloated GUI applications that are designed to emulate old-fashioned desk work with the leaky abstractions that entails. They already take for granted that computers are the future. It's a golden opportunity to embrace higher power systems systems where the formatting is all abstracted away by standardised macros and all they're left with is a lawyering DSL.
Learning a text editor and a small DSL should even be easier than learning Word (or even LaTeX) in-and-out, and digital natives should be less biased against it than previous generations, having never done paper desk work before in their lives.
Should they have to?
I still think Apple had it right with the original Mac keyboard. No function keys, no CNTL key, no command line. Everything had to be graphical. Then they went to UNIX.
I suppose the assumption was that "they use computers all the time", which wrongly was equated to "they use computers in a meaningful way all the time". However, at best, despite their often use of computers, that computer use has been superficial. Otherwise, I would have expected they would have encountered things like CONTROL+F and discovered the convention that you can use that shortcut to search in almost every program. However, somehow, these conventions and underlying concepts of desktops, GUIs, computers, and what not, stayed hidden somehow for most computer users.
Given the huge amounts of time spend using computers, I too expected people to have developed a deeper insight in how to use them. But, as others in this discussion have suggested, I suppose most people use computers only as a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is just a tool, like an oven, a mop, a car, and so on. They spend huge amounts of time using those tools as well without "mastering" them or developing a deeper understanding of them either. For example, unless you're interested in cooking you might cook almost every day without coming to understand cooking at a deeper level too.
ie. Less drink driving accidents (Uber), they commit less sex crimes (Access to Adult material), access to heath information.
What is interesting is they are kinda the first generation with IQ's less than their parents in a hundred years. This would not be expected given they are living more abstracted lives.
This is where the article fails. Digital native should have more abstract minds and learn abstract things quicker. Not automatically know them. That's a curriculum fail. If they are failing to learn abstract ideas at the speed of digital immigrants (their parents) then there's a problem. That's what the IQ drop implies but the article doesn't seem to indicate either way.
Most of Digital Native's apps are very primitive, you can even look at technology sites like HN and see the fear of change in current messenger apps.
"Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures" - was in the original Digital Natives article, it was a very low level concept.
And the evidence around brain structures or ways of thinking is not in the positive direction so far.