Siva Vaidhyanathan
The invocation of a digital generation, the tools, how we act...these assumptions are bad for us.
Print is Dead a book by Jeff Gomez. He asserts that people now Google vs. going to the library. No evidence. Siva's classes are filled with 18 year old's who don't do digital well. 4 or 5 do. 120 don't and are lost. Most live in extremes. Even though they do it, they don't fully understand it. Like driving a car, but not being able to fix it. Makes us users/consumers vs. experts. Using a computer vs. engaging in open-source software or write for Wikipedia, for example. Print is Dead is a fallacy. Students tell him they prefer a bound book to a Kindle.
This kind of talk willfully ignores the vast difference in skills, those that are not socially or economically privileged, ethnic differences, availability of broadband (nonexistent in rural America) etc.
The very idea of generations has no sociological or historical precedent.
Experiences are so diverse that we all experience things very differently. Generation X is arbitrary. The baby boom was a demographic event. What do they share in identity? Medicare, that's it. We're too diverse. Attitudes change gradually.
Henry Jenkins "Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us."
Exoticizing people is deeply troubling. We're all immersed in digital tools. What matters is what we do with them. Playing with Facebook vs. building something. Making a prepackaged PowerPoint presentation.
We start to market to these assumptions, young people adapt to this. We shift to work on speed and size vs quality and utility. Article about this here.
History is not static; it is worth studying youth. We are connected with everyone in the world now. Real time contact and information around the world. Identity is changing.
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