Was Prensky right about Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants?
Maddison A. Morello
I have wonderfully vivid memories of the summer of 2005. I was seven and my parents just bought me my first iPod shuffle. I remember walking over to my friends house and we would dance to Gwen Stefani, P!nk and Fergie. I remember all the fashion forward girls at the pool having their hot pink iPod shuffles that matched their Razr flip phones. As I grew older, technology grew with me. I wanted to start getting into cinematography so my friends and I began making music videos to the songs we loved and uploading them to YouTube (which at that time was only a few years old). When I went to middle school, that’s when everyone started acquiring iPhones and Facebook profiles. In high school, I started using my knowledge of technology to gain a spot as a Yearbook Editor and I also became very obsessed with photography and Instagram. Some friends and I would create outfits from thrift shops, find some beautifully forested areas in Wisconsin and do photoshoots every week or so. One of those friends did my senior photos and ended up moving to New York City to become a photo journalist — she started her career with an Instagram portfolio. In college, technology became a necessary medium to understand fluently in order to be successful. in 2001, Pensky would have argued that my age group should all be technology masters, innately proficient due to our early immersion into such a technology-rich world; we would be referred to as Digital Natives, and those before us would be considered Digital Immigrants.
A few years later Pensky went back on his assertion about Digital Natives and Immigrants— but why? Well it was a bit too overgeneralized. Pensky didn’t account for how widely individual’s use of technology varied. David White explains how a Visitors and Residents model is gives us a more accurate picture of engagement with technology. Visitors and Residents model is a simple continuum of modes of engagement that can be used to review what services/programs we use online and how (and why) we use them. Pensky’s Digital Natives and Immigrants model placed age as the predominant factor for engagement while, the Visitors and Residents model focuses in on one’s motivation to engage. On the horizontal axis you have visitor modes and resident modes — on the vertical axis you have institutional modes and personal modes. White explains how must people are in the middle of this continuum and, personally, that makes a lot of sense to me. This aligns with the Social Construction of Technology perspective that was brought up in Gustavo S. Mesch’s 2009 article, The Internet and Youth Culture.
“Technology generates new patterns of expression, communication, and motivation” (Mesch, 2009)
The Social Construction of Technology perspective views technology as an inherent part and product of society. Instead of homogenizing one age group of people, it acknowledges the various social groups that are distinguished y their access to technology, the meanings that associate with technology and their skill set. We are able to connect with people based on our specific interests regardless of geographic boundaries, social roles, and offline personalities. When we look at the internet as a culture we can see how involved it is in our social interactions, consumption, expression and identity formation.
It seems, although Pensky was right about technology having a strong role in our society, he may have been a bit to shallow in his initial investigations. Technology is a virtual space where anyone can spark conversations about anything and create a community. This societal asset has had, and will continue to have, unprecedented effects on our definition of social interactions, human connection and digital engagement. Just as it feels like I have grown immensely in the past 15 years, technology has grown even faster. Who knows what engaging with technologies will look like 15 years from now.
