Digital natives have more and more been shown to be digital illiterates. And I say this with compassion as a STEM teacher who thinks kids are great and smart in many, many ways, just not digitally.
Besides the much-talked about problems with kids growing up in the age of iPads and Chromebooks, which prevent any actual interactions with computers, kids are even bad at the internet.
I remember this as far back as 2011, when Osama bin Laden was killed. One of the highest trending questions on both Twitter and on Yahoo Answers was "who was Osama bin Laden?" A shocking number of people's first instinct when trying to find out information was not Google searching, but lazy-web asking complete strangers on message boards, and needing to wait around to find out someone's answer.
Since then I've noticed this kind of thing with my students more and more. They can do actual research if told to, but it's never their first instinct.
> Digital natives have more and more been shown to be digital illiterates.
Very interesting.
Your observation might be a generality.
I keep thinking of Marshall McLuhan, Neal Postman, and other media critics. How were they so prescient and clear-eyed about the sociology of broadcast and cable television? While the following generation was so oblivious once that those mediums were established?
Ditto the early critics of social media, like Clay Shirky.
The best folk theory that I've come up with is that a fish doesn't know anything about water.
I'm also among those who contest the whole digital native thing. I think that growing up in the information age is not really correlated with being good with tech and computers, those skills, if you can call it that even, can be picked up any time. It's just that people don't bother - young people don't bother with icky old people things, old people don't bother with the strange new things, everyone has got their excuse to not expend energy on change.
I also don't agree with the digital native premise.
However I believe that those who grew up with or experienced the 8 bit home computer and it's evolution to what we have now, they have a much better understanding of how computers work.
Digital Native to me means you grew up when 'digital' was both everywhere and all encompassing. You don't have to understand it any more than you have to understand how hot water comes out of your shower or why a light turns on when you flip a switch.
Those of us grew up in the 'before times' had to understand how computers worked just to make them, well work. Much like someone who had to dig their own well, run their own pipes and heat their own water probably has a much better understanding as to how and why hot water comes out of their shower.
I wonder how much of that belief is true, and even more specifically, how much of that translates to real-life skills. In my experience, people picked up "digital" skills casually over some years, are indistinguishable from people who "grew up" with half of their lives being lived digitally. And neither of these understand how computers work, at most, what they are familiar with are the happy path of how they achieve some goals using the computer / smartphone, and maybe basic troubleshooting.
Part of why I don't think people understand the digital world is because it's changing fast. Both the systems themselves on a lower levels like hardware, and on top in regards to UX. Typing into a Commodore 64 is vastly different than a mouse-driven traditional desktop, which again is very different than a material design smartphone app. It's a lot of work to know these systems, and so, I think people don't know them that well, and that they overestimate their, and others' familiarity with them, in a similar way to how the Dunning-Kruger effect works.
Digital native doesn't mean good with tech, it just means that you default to expecting things to be on a website or app and are usually more comfortable interacting with it in that form. They have simply never experienced a world where constant global connectivity was not a thing. They've never had to go to the library to find out what Timor-Leste is, and never had to go on a long journey without a phone to entertain them.
It's not really a good or bad thing, just a difference. I think you'd usually find most younger people are quicker at acquiring information than average old people due to their familiarity with the tools, though not necessarily any better at turning that information into anything actionable. Most young people are just as useless outside their comfort zone as old people are.
Huh, what do you mean? Will Wright was born in 1960, so he amounts to a “boomer” as the term is used these days, as do most of the great game designers and programmers of the 90s, who obviously couldn’t have been “digital natives”. But one can become fluent, even an expert, in a non-native language… most people just never do!
FWIW, the idea of digital natives is problematic for other reasons, primarily the fact that it’s being applied to today’s kids who mostly are not any sort of native experts in general computing. If any generation is worthy of the term, it’s the millennials/Xennials who were there in the era when the use of personal computers involved more than just endlessly scrolling TikTok.
I guess some educational policy wonks must've got in bed with big tech and appropriated the digital natives term as defined in the Wiki article, as a means of creating a fomo, allowing big tech to reach into elementary schools and steal childhood.
Did Will have exposure to computing before this time? If not, it kinda blows the whole digital natives thing away.