Earlier today I attended a talk sponsored by Microsoft Research by John Palfrey the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law. The talk focused primarily on the Digital Natives Project, which is a joint project between the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. It was a fairly general, meandering talk, driven more by questions than an agenda, which in and of itself may have been a lesson by John on engaging the Digital Native crowd.
I personally am quite interested in the subject for a variety of reasons. One, I have two daughters (nearly 18 and 15), who are clearly Digital Natives and they make it clear to me daily that something new is going on. Two, the Ruby world is largely driven by a Digital Native community, which I enjoy immensely, but again, see that there is something new going on. Three, I am a recovering World of Warcraft addict and in that world I interacted with many, many Digital Natives (I *think* you would call them that), and, for me, it was the first time I had ever encountered avatar based relationships and experiences that are comparable to real life equivalents. I am not a Digital Native. At 47 I grew up with 3 TV stations and cartoons only on Saturday. I have migrated to the digital world and feel like I have been here long enough that to many I look and talk like a native (or at least my avatar does) however in Digital Native speak I am a Digital Immigrant. When I speak to my daughters, and many of the twenty-somethings that are so enthusiastic about Ruby there is a depth to their experience .. a new reality, that it is hard for those of us not born to it to understand, they are Digital Natives.
The main audience of John’s book, Born Digital, Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, are educators and parents however there is very useful insights for all of us, Digital Immigrants, Digital Foreigners, and Digital Natives. Some key points I took away.
- Not everyone born after 1980 is a Digital Native – Digital Natives are a population not a generation. There are 6 billion people in the world and only 1 billion have computer access. These concepts don’t apply to an entire generation.
- There are gaps even within the Digital Natives - There is a significant gap between savvy Digital Natives and more naive Digital Natives. John mentioned an anecdote about a scenario given to Digital Native’s to find out about the Spanish American war. Not surprisingly they all said they would go to their favorite search engine, look through the results, and likely end up at Wikipedia. However, there was another level of differentiation. The “savvy” group (he didn’t use a name that is my term) recognized that Wikipedia is potentially unreliable source, use it as *a* source but not *the* source, scroll down to the list of references, and compare across multiple sources. The “naive” group just cut and paste. As an aside, my girls, are extremely skeptical of Wikipedia and have been taught not to use it at all (by someone, not me), which was a surprise to me.
- Kids are not *more endangered* with Digital Access - That is not to say there isn’t danger in the digital world it is just that there is not data to show that kids are any more endangered than we were with the activities that we did on a day to day basis as kids.
- This generation is not the “dumbest generation” – I had not heard of the book The Dumbest Generation (and John stated that he hadn’t read it) but John makes multiple points about this mindset. First, practically every generation has issues with the following generation. Perhaps more importantly, we make value judgements on the method of learning we are most familiar with (and benefited from), but different, is not necessarily worse (or better). Yes, kids seem less likely than ever to read a book from beginning to end, however there are many other things that they are excelling at, using digital mediums, that could not have been conceived of in pre-digital times (see this video I talk about below as an example). That is not to say there are not issues, but, on the whole the Digital Native milieu is not dumber. As a coincidence I listened to a great podcast today Catching up with Charles Petzold, where he and the hosts were lamenting that the software development community has gotten away from reading books from beginning to end, and the consequent risk (or assumption of risk) that this leads to software developers not knowing the underlying fundamentals. The Digital Native/Digital Immigrant divide is absolutely applicable to the software development community.
An absolutely cool video was shown that was created by an high school intern, Kanupriay Tewari, given the Born Digital book and the assignment to make a video on some aspect of the book. The video is amazing, even more so that she was not particularly technical savvy person but both the sophistication of the content and the quality of the video are remarkable. It is worth looking at: (http://www.digitalnative.org/MediaProjects/DigitalDossier/)
As I wrote this blog it became more and more clear to me that the Digital Native and the Digital Immigrant divide problem is alive and well in the software development community. At a high level you see it between the Web 2.0 folks and the more traditional enterprise folks. Perhaps we are a few years ahead of the corporate world as a whole since many of the more early Digital Natives (Digital Homo-Habilis? *got that from Wikipedia 
, straight copy*) likely tended towards a technical field like software development. Companies providing developer software and developer experience need to pay attention here. There is a new generation that works differently, learns differently, plays differently – and writes software differently. If you don’t know what I mean look to the Ruby community. Witness the success of Peepcode, GIT, Textmate, and the Mac in general just to name a few things in the Ruby community that align with the insights of Born Digital.
The game is changing, the new citizens in our world, grow up in a profoundly different set of circumstances with significantly different perspectives. For those of us that are Digital Immigrants, our population will dwindle. Resistance and intolerance can be short term strategies at best. In my view, better to understand and dance with the Natives …
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