I read a fair amount of new media & literacy scholarship, which is a depressing field in the best of times, but Andrey Mir’s article over at City Journal was a captivating, well-argued bummer. Everybody knows what social media is doing to our attention spans now; but we are only beginning to consider what bringing up entire generations of actual digital natives will entail.
Digital natives are fit for their new environment but not for the old one. Coaches complain that teenagers are unable to hold a hockey stick or do pull-ups. Digital natives’ peripheral vision—required for safety in physical space—is deteriorating. With these deficits come advantages in the digital realm. The eye is adjusting to tunnel vision—a digital native can see on-screen details that a digital immigrant can’t see. When playing video games, digital immigrants still instinctively dodge bullets or blows, but digital natives do not. Their bodies don’t perceive an imaginary digital threat as a real one, which is only logical. Their sensorium has readjusted to ignore fake digital threats that simulate physical ones. No need for an instinctive fear of heights or trauma: in the digital world, even death can be overcome by re-spawning. Yet what will happen when millions of young people with poor grip strength, peripheral blindness, and no instinctive fear of collision start, say, driving cars? Will media evolution be there in time to replace drivers with autopilots in self-driving vehicles?
Incidentally, I always found the “digital natives” label uncomfortable. I have friends ranging in age from their early twenties to their mid-forties and I work every day with teenagers. What I’ve consistently noticed is that people whose formative computer experiences happened before Web 2.0-style social media and the sudden, body-snatchers-like replacement of “programs” with “apps” is that they are noticeably better at operating and managing computers.
Software used to break down more often, glitches were more common, and it took a certain amount of finessing to get any two devices to talk to each other. We learned to cope, look up answers on forums, teach ourselves basics. My brother taught himself rudimentary computer assembly in middle school, while I learned how to peak into file structures and make edits to make games work on my computer. (And, of course, to cheat and modify. Only fools played Morrowind without mods.)
To be fair, I come from a tech-savvy background (many of those friends I mentioned are programmers). I’m sure many of my neighbors and classmates couldn’t find the Troubleshoot command or open the Program Manager, but that’s because they didn’t use computers very much. Now everybody uses computers for everything, though this is obscured by our weird, skeuomorphic habit of calling the tiny, networked computers in our pockets “phones.” But we have far less facility with these tiny computers and their inner workings than we did with our clunky desktop towers and kludgy programs.
My students are more native to the digital world than I ever was by orders of magnitude. Many of them can’t remember a time before their family had smartphones or tablet computers. They grew up with tactile devices powered by unbreakable, tamper-proof apps that never require troubleshooting or even a basic understanding of how they work.
This a good thing on balance, but it does mean that young people often have a shockingly bad grasp of what used to be essential computer practices. Most of my students can’t type more than 15-20 WPM, a result of the wrong-headed assumption that children who grow up with iPads will somehow learn touch-typing on their own. University professors are already revising their lessons to accommodate students who don’t know how to save and organize files in a directory. I overheard a group of my students last year arguing over cables: they had split the whole world of cables into two kinds: Android and iPhone.
I’m not trying to yell at young people here. I still organize my files, but more often than not I access them by search. Plugging in new routers or keyboards that just work, instantly, still feels magical to me. (God bless the developers of automated driver management.) I have a smartphone. I use Google Maps.
My point is that youth today are truer digital natives than me and my cohort ever were. If we were any better at using computers, it was because we used them as computers. It was a lot harder—physically and socially—to live your life digitally. Now, the very air around us hums and throbs with high-speed internet, and we trade in devices long before planned obsolescence kicks in to remind us that these machines we increasingly mediate our lives through are only so much glass, plastic, and silicon.
Anyway: