Digital natives??

“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born” – Alan Kay

Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants is back in fashion.
It was already stupid in 2001, but oh well, it has turned out to be a persistent meme. Cultural garbage, on the same level as astrology or numerology. Pure social pseudoscience.

On this subject I suggest reading The myth of the digital natives, by Adolfo Estalella, from which I pull a few paragraphs that seem very relevant to me.

The essence of the argument is the following: digital immigrants have a kind of 'innate quality' for developing practices through digital technology, while adults display a kind of 'innate incapacity' for developing practices through technology. Well. In my opinion, the concept is a fallacy and lacks descriptive and analytical power. That is, it tells us nothing about the reality out there; worse still, it misleads us about what is happening.

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The most worrying thing about the concept is that it reifies, constructs, a gap that perhaps does not exist. A generational gap between people who have no such distance between them. Rather than bringing together, the concept separates. Using age as the differentiating criterion, two categories are built to separate people who in many cases engage in the same practices: teachers and students who blog and read each other, wikipedians aged between 16 and 96, parents and children who share photos on the Internet... Is age really a fundamental element in the kind of digital practices?

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Applied to the matter of digital natives/immigrants, the argument is that those newly born into the digital age encounter a society completely different from the one the immigrants knew, and therefore their relationship with technology is different. It is a redoubled technological determinism, because it also tells us that we do not all suffer the same 'impact' of technology: our age matters. No account seems to be taken, however, of the kind of technology (Internet, video games, mobile, etc.), the context (school, home, work), the aims of the practices (play, work, etc.), etc. to explain the kind of practices; that is, it seems the fundamental thing is the year in which one was born, rather than the local contexts of the practices. There is another branch of knowledge out there that also takes age as the fundamental element for explaining a person’s relationship with the world. Can you guess?: astrology.

Please, throw out this digital natives/immigrants meme.

Many adults are holding themselves back because of theories like these. They feel they are “condemned” (determined) not to understand technology because they were born a few decades earlier.
The impact on teachers is even more serious.

Says Anibal de la Torre (also quoted by Estalella), in his article The Mark Prensky complex:

the non-rational, and in some cases even fallacious, use

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of this concept is producing in teachers a feeling of guilt, or a technological complex, that makes us see our students as superior beings when it comes to facing the new technological procedures.

We have plenty of intellectual and technological gaps already without introducing yet another one, which in any case is nothing more than a reincarnation of the generation gap, in more modern packaging but just as fallacious. It’s just another meme used to justify the older generation’s lack of effort and dedication in understanding the young.

No, my friends, our young people are not more intelligent because they use wikipedia, or communicate through messenger and SMS. Whoever believes that is only demonstrating their own limitations in understanding technology, and its impact on society. They’d do better to take up palm reading.