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August 2008
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Blinding a-ha moments in the digital citizenship debate

Published by Helen | Filed under New Media, Social Media

There’s a metaphor percolating about with regard to digital immigrants and digital natives that quite honestly chafes me to the core, because I feel like I’m a first-generation native and my child is a second-generation native, but no one seems to give credence to that analogy because, well, the first generation natives are gen-x and no one really cares about us anyway. </obwhine>

Tonight I was brainstorming ideas for a community based around my high school. 20-year reunions really are the devil for those of us ENFP types who kick out grand ideas every five minutes and then scramble to get _any_ detail right, because, well, I’m inspired. Reconnecting with high school friends left and right and realizing I’m a natural at sleuthing out missed connections (everything from missing classmates to 30-year-old earworms) made me also realize that I would like a reunion to help me connect with my friends from the classes of 1986 to 1990, with a few fringers from years beyond even that.

So I started to create a group that, once I decide whether it’s viable or not, opens the floor to members of all those classes, and I was trying to figure out what classes to invite. My dates are kind of arbitrary, to be honest, but I felt like there was a period of time in there that my peers and I experienced something that would allow us to be more proficient with this technology once it became available to us.

I chose the classes of 1985 through 1994. Intuitively, this felt right, but i couldn’t put my fingers on exactly why until I thought about a significant even in my own life that transpired in 1994: I got online.

And I wasn’t sure why 1985 felt right either; certainly it wasn’t that they were the seniors when I was a freshman. But then I realized that they were born in 1966, which by some markers is the beginning of generation X.

Other markers pin the beginning of gen X as 1961, but, as I continued to mull this over, I realized that being born in the five-year stretch before or after this 10-year window put folks on a cusp with overlaps to the previous or succeeding generation, respectively.

And a funny thing about this subgroup of our generation, no matter how you define it: we are the pre-internet segment of generation-x. As I was bantering with one of my 20-year reunion organizers recently, I didn’t become an extrovert until I got on to the Internet. That’s ok, he replied. Computers didn’t become extroverted until they got on the Internet either. It’s funny, but it’s also a good point: we might not have been connected by technology to the greater, wider world as we were growing up, but we had computers, VCRs, cable, and a host of other technology that gave us the language and the culture that would allow us to adapt seamlessly to the new media horizon, some of us faster than others. But not as immigrants.

Nope. We’re your first generation natives–the PRE-INTERNET DIGITAL NATIVES, and we are your translators, no matter which side of us you happen to fall.

August 12th, 2008


One Response to “Blinding a-ha moments in the digital citizenship debate”

  1. Doodlemaier Says:
    August 13th, 2008 at 9:39 am

    Digital natives who hunt and gather information. What’s next: information farming, Agri-mation?

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