Digital Immigrant
Calvin posted this on Feb 7th 2008 at 15:48 under Children, Education, Evening Echo Column, Parenting, Technology, Writing
Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 06/02/2008
I’m a digital immigrant.
Yes I embrace technology: I have a mobile smart-phone with built in WiFi, I use a computer for long periods every day, I do much of my work from home via e-mail and the Internet, I use Skype, I recently set up a Facebook account, and when I need to look something up Google is my first port of call. I’d say that makes me pretty connected… but in an increasingly wired world I’ll never quite fit in.
I’m a hybrid – spanning the divide between generations – understanding both of them, but never truly belonging to either.
In the ’70s, when I was a child, computers were hulking great things that occupied entire wings of universities and needed their own power stations. Today they’re a small, self contained hub for communication, productivity and entertainment. Computers are everywhere: in your car, in your fridge, in your toaster, in your music player and in your wristwatch. Pretty soon they’ll even be able to put computers in your clothes!
I remember when the pinnacle of home entertainment was a machine you plugged in to the back of your telly. You twiddled a knob that moved a white bar up and down so that it knocked a white square backwards and forwards across the screen. Today we have Halo 2 on the Xbox360. The contrast is simply staggering.
I remember the the good old ZX81, the Commodore 64 and the BBC Microcomputer. This was when using a cassette recorder to load and save data was cutting edge. You could buy books full of “games” where you had to physically type the lines of code into the machine before you could play them. Halcyon days.
When I think how far we’ve come in such a short space of time the mind boggles. I find myself exhilarated, disoriented and, in truth, a little troubled by the pace of it all. You see when people move this quickly things get overlooked, forgotten… or worse, left behind. And if anything the pace of technological change continues to accelerate.
There’s a whole generation of people out there today who have no concept of a world without access to the internet and mobile phones. They’re multi-tasking information junkies who want access to what they want, when they want it, in the way that they want it… and that’s what networked technology is delivering.
These digital natives seamlessly integrate technology into every facet of their lives. That technology, and just as importantly the ways in which they choose to use it, is changing the way they think, develop and learn. Your children and mine are members of this new technically aware human cohort… and if we think the changes we’ve seen over the last thirty years or so have been spectacular, I can’t help but wonder what’s in store for them.
The girls are growing up in a wired world, and if early indications are anything to go by their taking to it like the proverbial ducks to water. They’re already a dab hand with the mouse, can navigate the Children’s BBC and RTE’s The Den websites and think nothing of speaking with their cousins in France on a supervised internet video call. In the very near future I’m sure they’ll be using technology to communicate with their peers in ways that we can’t conceive today.
My children are natives in this increasingly networked world. While I understand the lingo, I’ll always be an interloper from another era, and it won’t be long before they leave me behind.
