Here is an article and interview with Don Tapscott, the author of Growing Up Digital, and now the author of the sequel, Grown Up Digital. He wrote the first in 1997, after observing how his children took to tech like ducks to water. He researched this idea of digital natives, and is following up his earlier book with a look at how the generation is doing. He cites some of the accusations facing the Digital Generation, "they have no shame", and "they never go outside". He rebuts the cynicism and looks again at how the Digital Generation is changing the way we all interact.
These concepts make me think about a linguistics principle I learned in college. A pidgin language has no native speakers; if you put a French, Chinese, Swahili, and Urdu speaker on an island, they would come up with a way to communicate. That would be a pidgin language; without set structure, or consistent grammatical rules. As soon as one of those folks has a baby, and the baby learns to talk, you have a Creole. A Creole language comes from a combination of languages, but once the pidgin goes through the filter of the developing mind of a native speaker, it comes out structured. The mind of the child imposes consistent grammatical structure, and the first generation of native speakers refines the language without even realizing it. So it's not just that native speakers speak a language better than non-native speaker. It's that a native speaker can make a mush of ideas into a language. I belong to the early wave of digital natives (1982), but in many ways feel non-native. I didn't have a computer until late elementary school, and no internet until middle. College was really my first exposure to unlimited, high speed internet. I wonder how we will continue to see the digital world grow and be refined as the current crop of college students and high schoolers, from my perspective the first true native speakers, grows up speaking this newly refined creole.
Do you feel like a digital native? Our class includes a spread of ages, the youngest end of which might be much more digitally native than me, even though we may only be four years apart... What do you guys feel about yourselves?
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This is SO interesting. I don't think I do feel like a digital native. I was born in 1980, and remember playing "Oregon Trail" on an Apple IIE starting around first or second grade. We had to "ground" ourselves by grabbing something metal before we were allowed to touch the computers.
Do I speak the language of a digital native? I don't think so, at least not fluently.
Maybe we on-the-border generationers are digitally bi-cultural and/or bilingual? According to my rudimentary knowledge of linguistics, this would mean we can shift more easily between the two kinds of language.
But will the digitally bicultural generation die out?
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