Newspaper Support Group

“Digital Natives” I’ve seen this term pop up increasingly. And I don’t like it. Certainly part of my annoyance with the term is visceral, but a bigger part is that I think it does a disservice to those of us trying bring businesses stuck in the past into a place where they’re actually able to participate and thrive online. Perhaps it just feels inegalitarian. One never could really help where or when they were born. Coined by Marc Prensky in 2001 and popularized by Josh Spear about five years later (likely with the best intentions), it seems to be trickling down to people who might be early adopters for their industries, but are actually consistently late to the game. But really, it’s just being used as a catch-all demographic for young people, and a way for people who don’t actually understand technology to sling bullshit in sales meetings to those who know even less. They seem to be crying out “Reach Digital Natives, a group of people who never lacked for a cellphone in one hand and a Kindle in the other.” But when you use this term, what you’re really saying is “I’m not one of them”. Certainly no true Digital Native would ever refer to themselves like that. You’d be outing yourself as one of another obnoxious term, “Digital Immigrants”. Digital Immigrants are those who somehow drifted to the island of technology without having been born there (that they might have created this very technology is of little consequence!). Those of us who remember the days of the analog phone call and the VCR are somehow fundamentally different than Generation iMyTwixtbook. While broader divisions exist between people and their comfort with technology, the words Digital Native imply some innate insurmountable handicap for those born without the benefit of wi-fi networks, blogs, and LED televisions. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Sergey Brin are all Digital Immigrants. Yet my non-technical friends remain Digital Natives. We’d do better to discard the term entirely since it has no real practical achievement except to retard the change we wish to see and give those motivated by buzzword use another way to sound ignorant.

You should follow us on twitter here.