Digital Sapiens: from digital immigrants to digital natives

By , 20 September 2016 at 17:30
Digital Sapiens: from digital immigrants to digital natives
Digital

Digital Sapiens: from digital immigrants to digital natives

By , 20 September 2016 at 17:30

Today’s youth doesn’t learn like the youth of the past, they don’t have the same customs, and they don’t have the same skills or attitudes. The way things are done has changed. I’m not talking about aesthetics, lingo, or clothing; I’m talking about a digital transformation. New technologies have radically changed our lifestyles

In his famous article that travelled around the world in 2011, well-known videogame creator and ICT and education guru Marc Prensky postulated that there was a “digital gap” between two generations: the one raised with all the technology we have today and the one that has adapted most of their lives’ aspects to this technology. Digital natives interact in a multi-screen society and consider new technologies as natural elements. These new generations have grown up surrounded by computers, tablets, videogames, smartphones, and many other tools from the digital era.

A changing way of thinking

Those who aren’t part of this category of natives belong to a community that will soon become extinct: digital immigrants; in other words, those who still need to read an instruction manual for technological devices. What differentiates these two groups of individuals is not their knowledge or skills, but their ways of thinking. Imagine asking an eighty-year old man to write something on a computer: he would probably try to do so by using a physical pencil on the screen. Something like this, however, would never even cross the minds of digital natives. And it will be even more different for your children. Whenever they see an electronic sheet all they see is an electronic sheet, never comparing it to a sheet made from conventional paper. The same way that you would never consider a physical pencil, they would never think of a sheet of paper.

Digital consumption habits

The true native tongue of digital natives is the language of the network. Young people today are learning a set of technical access and manipulation skills for new technologies informally, on their own, and away from their homes. A circumstance that many of their parents ignore.

Young people chat for hours using apps such as WhatsApp, and post everything on social networks such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, or Twitter. They participate in online forums such as Mundoforo or Foroswebgratis, they listen to music and watch movies on electronic devices, and clear up any doubts on Google o Yahoo. These digital natives have grown up surrounded by screens, smartphones, tablets, and several computers at home, and began using mobile phones from the time they made their first communions.

Adults, on the other hand, continue performing the same analogue activities of their entire lives: they read books they purchased at book stores, they write in paper notebooks, and they write down telephone numbers on post-its. They scan newspapers in coffee shops and clear up any doubts in large volumes of encyclopaedias. And digital immigrants watch television shows on their television sets and not on computers like natives.

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Digital life: technology and adaptation

Immigrants had analogue childhoods without touch screens or smartphones. Their cultural devices where, and continue to be, books, libraries, and real-time television shows. Specifically, their way of learning is completely linked to conventional education that takes place in classrooms.

The approximation of the digital era is similar to when expatriates arrive to a new territory. They don’t know the life or the culture, and they speak with heavy accents mixing in words from their native tongues. The same thing happens to digital immigrants: they make phone calls to verify if they have received emails, or they buy a Word and Office manual instead of using a free Youtube tutorial. These generations enrol in classroom courses with a teacher and a fixed schedule because they feel incapable of learning online and on their own. And under the best of circumstances many of them spend several minutes typing a response to an SMS. Yes, those short messages that we’ve all left buried in the past.

Digital processing

Digital natives, the new generations of young people, have developed great skills to manage several tasks at the same time and simultaneously. They chat with four, five, or more different people on WhatsApp, they answer emails while consulting Wikipedia, or they have conversations on Skype while looking at the latest publications on Instagram. They are quick and efficient.

The flip-side of the coin are those that still need an instruction manual to know how a device works, those that are used to serial processing, to doing one thing after another in a series. In this way they use their cognitive resources to solve a single digital problem.

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Connection and learning

As I was saying, young people prefer to be connected 24 hours a day. Throughout the day they receive hundreds of messages and have conversations for hours with apps such as WhatsApp, Line, or Skype. Their answers are quick, brief, and efficient. In summary, they are used to brief packages of information, to short exchanges, and to real time answers. Their learning takes place through simulation or fun, and without any effort. They learn from one another, socializing their knowledge on social networks, asking questions and answering them online. In fact, up to 65% of these young people could give lessons about some part of technology.

Immigrants, on the other hand, are used to isolated and individual activities. They are patient when waiting for an answer and don’t get tired with long messages. They are used to learning with a teacher, without any fun, and their electronic devices are much less sophisticated than those of natives.

A digital gap between two generations

The fascinating science fiction film The Matrix narrated the fight between the real world of people and the virtual world of machines. Its plot was based on this “emigration” from one place to the other. The main character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, appealed to what was recent, to the unknown, and to what was new. The challenge was to fight against the “smart machines” in order to re-establish the order between the real and the virtual.

A nice metaphor that reflects, dear reader, the digital transformation that these two generations are living. Young people are pushing hard and living online more than offline.

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