Not just digital natives & immigrants!

It makes sense that news media reports about how youth use technology are both produced and consumed through adult lenses. Many news reporters grew up in a very different (mass media) environment, as did a lot of parents, educators, and other news consumers. So we're seeing and participating in a distorted picture of social media and how youth use them if we're viewing young people's use through the traditional news media and our own mass-media lenses. While our children are playing, learning, and socializing with what, to them, is like a new toy or convenience tool, we are slowly grasping the social, economic, policy, educational, etc. implications of a major media shift.

Still, even though there is a generational divide between those who grew up with mass media and those growing up with networked media (realtime, multidirectional, user-produced, etc.), a new paper in FirstMonday, "The digital melting pot: Bridging the digital native-immigrant divide," suggests that it's best not to take the metaphor too far. I agree. Digital immigrants/natives is a huge generalization: among other things, it fails to acknowledge how very individual media and tech use is for people of all ages. It also, by definition, says "the immigrant can never become a native, which may serve to excuse individuals without tech skills" from even trying to gain them and understand new media from the inside, according to the paper's author, Sharon Stoerger. She prefers the term "digital melting pot" because it "refers to the blending of individuals who speak with different technology tongues.... The focus of the melting pot is on the diverse set of technological capabilities individuals actually have, as well as the digital skills they might gain through experience." Two years ago, Prof. Henry Jenkins (then at MIT, now at USC) used the term "digital multi-culturalism," writing in his blog that "I worry that the [digital natives/immigrant] metaphor may be ... implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other."

India's digital natives

Nearly 10% of the world's under-25 population live in India, and they "are shifting their career aspirations and social life to the digital world," India's Economic Times reports. The study, by Tata Consultancy Services, surveyed 14,000 high school students in 12 cities and found that over 93% of respondents "were aware of social networking sites and used it in some way in their daily life. Bangalore students are "leading the pack, as 66% of them said they were active on blogs and social networking sites, compared with 39% nationally." Nine percent of them use Second Life and MySpace and do podcasting. "Among social networking sites, [Google's] Orkut was most preferred, followed by Facebook, while Google continued to be the most preferred source of information." Careers that top their list are the ever-popular IT and engineering, but "other fields like travel and tourism, media & entertainment are emerging as professional choices." The US and UK are the top picks for overseas university study (40% want to go to the US), but Singapore and Dubai "are preferred by one in five students in Chennai and Cochin, respectively, as top choice for overseas education."

Digital native-eye-view of parenting

Vanessa Van Petten is not a teenager, but she plays one to great effect on YouTube (she's also not all that long past the teen years, so her credibility is high). With a fun, breathlessly paced song to Mom from her loving daughter, see Vanessa's kid's response to Anita Renfroe's Mom Song - also to the William Tell Overture. See also her blog, OnTeensToday.com.

Everybody's 'digital dossiers'

Most people have no idea how many details of their lives are out there on the Net - copious detail, increasingly easy for anyone to find and put together. "These data points, some publicly accessible, others safeguarded to various degrees by companies and agencies that collect and store this data 'make' Andy's identity - as it forms, even before he himself begins to shape it," starting with the sonogram that goes into hospital records and the details behind a newborn's bar-coded bracelet. "Andy" is just a name pulled out of the air by the producers of a video on our "digital dossiers." The video is a project of the Digital Natives group at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "Andy's digital dossier will even grow after his death - photos or videos of the funeral, RIP messages on MSN Messenger, or as Facebook status posts. Andy probably never knew how large his dossier was. How aware are you of the digital tracks you leave behind?" the producers ask. At the end of it are some resources for further information about the digital tracks we leave just about everywhere we go, online or offline. Here's a description in the Digital Natives blog.

A case for critical thinking

This didn't come up when we were in school! Which is why it's important for us parents to know about it: Photoshopped news photos for propaganda and many other purposes. Nikki Leon at the Harvard Berkman Center's Digital Natives site recently blogged about a photo of missiles in Iran having been altered apparently for political purposes. "The picture, a view of three test missiles launching, was altered to include four (hiding one that failed)," she writes. After mentioning that the photo was used by prominent news outlets (e.g., the BBC, L.A. Times, etc.), she asked the good question of what this means for young Net users. She concludes that "incidents like this week’s explosive photoshoppery are a reminder that students need to be taught how to evaluate online material just as they are encouraged to assess historical print sources [because] ... it is likely that propaganda of this variety will be produced with greater skill and distributed with greater frequency. It is up to teachers, parents, and Digital Natives themselves to ensure that young people will be critical enough to demand the truth." In fact, a friend and teacher in Los Angeles recently told me, "our job is no longer to put information into kids' heads, since they already know more than we do. Our job is more to help them filter and manage it all."