There’s an astonishingly bad article at Spiegel Online citing some research that has got a lot of discussion, arguing that notions like “digital natives“ and “the Net Generation” have been wrong because young people say that the Internet isn’t important to them.
But the evidence all seems to confirm the ideas behind the “digital native” metaphor:
Young people have now reached this turning point. The Internet is no longer something they are willing to waste time thinking about. It seems that the excitement about cyberspace was a phenomenon peculiar to their predecessors, the technology-obsessed first generation of Web users.
For a brief transition period, the Web seemed to be tremendously new and different, a kind of revolutionary power that could do and reshape everything. Young people don’t feel that way. They hardly even use the word “Internet,” talking about “Google”, “YouTube” and “Facebook” instead. And they certainly no longer understand it when older generations speak of “going online.”
Reminds me of this little parable, by way of David Foster Wallace:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning boys. How’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
Self-reports on all kinds of questions are notoriously untrustworthy. I don’t think high schoolers can assess the effects the Internet has on them any more than they can assess the effects of — well, anything. I hardly see how kids’ indifference about the Internet is a damning indictment of the “digital natives” argument. They’re indifferent about almost everything, except their friends (as Paul Sham noted on Twitter). Teens still love music, for example, but I don’t expect them to be any more enthusiastic about iTunes than previous generations were about HMV. What matters has always been the experience, the content, the relationships, and their own sense of self within all that…
In fact, I read these findings as verification.
My understanding is that this is exactly what being a digital native means. It isn’t that the Internet has gone out of style; they don’t waste time thinking about the Internet because using the Internet is normal to them.
Here’s more:
Occasionally the teacher will ask his students big-picture questions about the medium they take for granted. Questions like: Where did the Internet come from? “I’ll get replies like, ‘What do you mean? It’s just there!’” Scheppler says. “Unless they’re prompted to do so, they never address those sorts of questions. For them it’s like a car: All that matters is that it works.”
Exactly!
HT @rtraction
