The Digital Divide – are you a native or an immigrant?

Which side of the Digital Divide would you place yourself? Are you a digital native, or an immigrant, or do you find yourself straddling both sides, suspecting this divide is as arbitrary as daylight savings time, and as meaningless as The Pepsi Generation?

I have been asking myself that very question since a couple new books have recently been published this past year that discuss this apparent discontinuity between the generations.

Both use terms coined back in 2001 by Marc Presnky, “digital native” and “digital immigrant”. Prensky’s work itself is worth the read for educators, parents, or anyone else straddling the gap between these generations. He raises important questions and sheds quite a bit of light upon this gap.

Digital natives, he explains, are those who “have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age.”

Digital immigrants are on the other side of the digital divide, and are those who have come from a time in history before these devices existed. As well-adapted as you may be to the digital age, you will, he says, always have some degree of an accent. Educators with a heavy accent will find it difficult to communicate with digital natives, he says.

Language Barrier or Generation Gap?
For those of us who remember a life before the internet or even CD players, this gives us an opportunity to question how immersed we are in the digital landscape. If you prefer to print articles from the internet to read them, or phone people to see if they received an email you sent, then ­ to use Prensky’s terms – you probably have a thick accent, and would be considered by digital natives to be a foreigner. This can raise some interesting and important questions, because we are not simply discussing a generation gap, or the digital divide. We are discussing a different way of thinking, and for this reason, I believe Prensky was on the right track when he made the analogies to language. A university professor who insists on reading from typed papers for forty-five minutes is unlikely to get his message across very effectively to students who are used to browsing and streaming and quickly accessing information with a few clicks of a mouse. Likewise, a high-school teacher who is still uncomfortable using a computer is unlikely to be able to always communicate with her children when she consistently misinterprets LOL as “lots of luck”.

While Prensky brings this to our attention, and looks at the implications of this digital divide, there are one important factor he does not delve into, and which subsequent authors are now habitually refusing to consider. There is much written about, discussed, and debated when it comes to how this will gap between natives and immigrants should be addressed, and whether or not this change we are seeing between generations is a good thing or a bad thing.

However, an important element that seems to be missing in all of these discussions since Prensky’s exploration of the digital divide is that:

This is Nothing New
What neuro-scientists will tell you is that the human brain adapts itself to the technology we use. It is not just that technology alters our behaviour and habits, it actually changes the way our mind works, and alters the physical structure of our brain. Connections between neurons are created, strengthened, or diminished and severed based on our interactions with the world. If you want an example of this, put someone in the passenger seat of your car and watch their right leg tense up as you quickly approach a stop sign. Or talk to a teenager who is used to sending text messages all day, and watch her fingers subtly twitch as you ask her what she thinks or how she feels, or blurt out an “L-O-L” instead of actually laughing when she is amused.

But again, this is nothing new. In fact, back in the 1950′s another thoughtful educator, Marshall McLuhan, began studying and analyzing the effects of technology on society, and stated that there were going to be some tumultuous changes in store for us as each generation progressed from a literate to a post-literate society. The first phase of this, he explained long before the digital age had been formed, was the effect of television on the first generation of this upcoming trend.

Children raised on television in their formative years, who were getting information beamed to them immediately, and without interpretation, were being trained to feel that they were participants in the information they received. They would, McLuhan explained, have a very difficult time when they were taken from that environment and placed in a classroom, where they would be told to sit in rows, and to listen as an audience to a teacher reading from a book.

Indeed, they did have that difficulty. As a result, we saw the very structure of classrooms begin to evolve in the 1960′s and 1970′s to accommodate these differences. Circles instead of rows in primary classes. Open concept classroom structures. Videos instead of books.

Today, these changes are continuing to evolve. Computers are now often replacing the videos, for example. Most importantly, however, the most senior of teachers in our schools today, are actually the pioneers of this evolution McLuhan described back in the 1950′s.

Today, the internet and the ipod are the same sources of concern that television and radios were more than fifty years ago, but they are part of the same evolution.

What is most interesting to me are the various ways people are responding to these changes, and that they mirror, almost word for word, the concerns, fears, and optimism that were expressed fifty and sixty years ago.

Education: An Interactive Process
To the educators who seem to have forgotten this, we might hope to remind them that education is a process, which is not supposed to end. A teacher can learn as much from a child ­ and sometimes more ­ than the child can learn from the teacher.

Likewise, for those who believe that the older generations should completely bend themselves backwards to try to cross the digital divide and to pander to the trends and tastes of the younger generation, we should remind ourselves that the society our children create will be based on the lessons and mistakes that we make today.

From both extremes there is a healthy middle ground. The accessibility of calculators should not mean that children should not memorize their multiplication tables, but neither does it mean that calculators should be completely banned.

As Prensky pointed out, “there is no reason that a generation that can memorize over 100 Pokemon characters (remember he wrote this in 2001)… can’t learn the names, populations, capitals and relationships of all the 101 nations in the world.”

If there is a digital divide, it exists between individuals: those who are unwilling or unable to adapt themselves to change, and those who are unwilling to accept that what is new is not necessarily best. The digital divide can be best traversed by two outstretched hands: the teacher willing to learn from the student, and the student willing to learn from the student. Fortunately for all of us who wish to teach, the students hand is usually more than half-way there.

Click here for Prensky’s pdf on the digital divide.

Tagged as: digital divide, education, Prensky