Dear All,
I had written earlier around the question of Digital Natives as a preparation to the Mobility Shifts summit earlier this month. It was a pleasure to present at the Summit and present some of the research that we have been doing the last couple of years. Continuing with the argumentation, I am sharing this new blog that I have written for the Digital Media and Learning blog at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/search-other-decoding-digital-natives
I am replicating the text for people who don't want to click on the link. Given how many people are working around these issues on this list, I hope that this leads to an interesting discussion. I look forward to the conversations.
Warmly
Nishant
In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives
This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways
in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in
the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of
‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current
engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to
look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the
otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is
changing the world. In this first post, I chart the trajectories of our
research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built.
The Digital Native has many different imaginations. From the short
hand understanding of ‘anybody who is born after the 1980s’ (Prensky,
2001) to more nuanced definitions of populations who are ‘born digital’
(Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), the digital native has firmly been
ensconced in our visions of technology futures. From DIY decentralized
learning environments to viral and networked forms of engagements that
span from the Arab Spring to Occupy Together, the Digital Native –
somebody who has grown up with digital technologies (and the skills to
negotiate with them) as the default mode of being – has become central
to how we see usage and proliferation of new digital tools and
technologies.
Three years ago, when the identity Digital Native was already in
currency but before the overwhelming examples that are now so easily
available in the post MENA (Middle East-North Africa) world, we asked
ourselves the question: “What does a Digital Native look like?” When we
started sifting through the literature (published and grey),
practice-based discourse and policy, we started spotting certain
patterns: Digital Natives were almost always young, white, (largely
male) middle class, affluent, English speaking populations who could
afford education and were located in developed Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) contexts of ubiquitous connectivity.
These users of technology were treated as the proto-type around which
digital natives in the ‘rest of the world’ were imagined. The ‘rest of
the world’ was not necessarily an exotic geography elsewhere, but often
was a person whose relationships with the digital were impeded by class,
education, gender, sexuality, literacy etc.
Moreover, we found that the accounts of Digital Natives that were
being discussed across the board were accounts of super stars. They
either heralded the digital native as the young messiah who is
drastically changing the world, overthrowing governments and building
collaborative and participatory structures of openness. Or they feared
the digital native as an unthinking, self contained, dysfunctional
person who pirates and plagiarizes and needs to be rehabilitated into
becoming a civic individual. Very little was said about Everyday Digital
Natives – users who, through the presence of digital technologies, were
changing their lives on an everyday basis.
Other Digital Natives
Based on this, we began the quest for the Other Digital Natives –
people who did not necessarily fit the existing models of being digital
but who often had to strive to ‘Become Digital’ and in the process
produce possibilities and potentials for social change and political
participation in their immediate environments. This was the first step
to discover what being a digital native would be in emerging ICT
contexts, where connectivity, access, usage, affordability,
geo-political regulation, and questions of the biological and of living
would give us new understandings of what a digital native is. This quest
for the Other inspired us to work across Asia, Africa and Latin
America, to talk to some of the most strident voices in the region who
claimed to be digital natives, expressed discomfort with being called
digital natives, refused to be called digital natives, and sought to
provide critique of the existing expectations of digital nativity. The
proceedings from these conversations in the Global South have been
consolidated in the book Digital AlterNatives With a Cause? available for free download.
For this post, I want to look at some of the presumptions in existing
understanding of Digital Natives and how we can contest them to build
Digital AlterNative identities.
Presumption 1: Digital Natives are always young.
Even if we go by Mark Prensky’s problematic definition that everybody
born after the 1980s is a digital native, we must realize that there is
a large chunk of digital native users who are now in their thirties.
They are in universities, work forces, governments and offices. They
have not only grown older with technologies but they have also radically
changed the technologies and tech platforms that they inhabit.
It is time to let go of the Peter-Pan imagination of a Digital Native
as always perpetually young. Moreover, we must realize that digital
natives existed even before the name ‘Digital Native’ came into
existence. There were people who built internets, who might not have
been young but were still native to the digital environments that they
were a part of.
Instead of looking at a youth-centric, age-based exclusive definition
of a digital native, it is more fruitful to say that people who
natively interact with digital technologies – people who are able to
inhabit the remix, reuse, share cultures that digitality produces, might
be marked as digital AlterNatives.
Presumption 2: Digital Natives are born digital.
It does sound nice – the idea that there were people who were born as
preconfigured cyborgs, interacting with interfaces from the minute they
were born. And yet, we know that people are taught to interact with
technologies. True, technologies often define our own conceptions of who
we are and how we perceive the world around us, but there is still a
learning curve that is endemic to human technology relationships.
Because of the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of certain kinds of
technology mediated interaction, it is sometimes difficult to look at
our habits of technology as learned interactions. Recognizing that there
is a thrust, an effort and an incentive produced for people to Become
Digital, is also to recognize that there are different actors, players,
promoters and teachers who help young people enter into relationships
with technologies, which can often be greater than the first
interactions.
Presumption 3: Digital Natives live digital lives.
This is a concern voiced by many people who talk about digital
natives. They are posited as slacktivists – removed from their material
realities and apathetic to the physical world around them. They are
painted as dysfunctional screenagers who are unable to sustain the
fabric of social interaction and community formation outside of social
networking systems. They are discussed as a teenage mutant nightmare
that unfolds almost entirely in the domains of the digital.
But these kinds of imaginations forget that a digital native is not
primarily a digital native, or at least, not exclusively digital. Being a
digital native is one of many identities these users appropriate. The
digital often serves as a lens that informs all their other
socio-cultural and political interactions, but it is not an
all-containing system. The bodies that click on ‘Like’ buttons on
Facebook are also often the bodies that fill up the streets to fight for
their rights. The division between Physical Reality and Virtual Reality
needs to be dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital
native practices.
Presumption 4: Connectivity is digitality.
This is often an easy conflation. It is presumed that once one has
constant connectivity, one will automatically become a digital native.
Especially in policy and development based approaches, connectivity and
access have become the buzzwords by which the digital divide can be
breached. However, we have now learned that this one-size, fits-all
solution actually fits nobody. Being connected – by building
infrastructure and affording gadgets – does not make somebody a digital
native.
The digital native identity needs to be more than mere access to the
digital. It involves agency, choice, critical literacy and fluency with
the digital media that we live with. So instead of thinking of anybody
who is connected as a digital native, we are looking at people who are
strategically able to harness the powers of the digital to produce a
change in their immediate environments. These changes can range from
making personal collections of media to mobilising large numbers of
people for political protests. To be digital is to be intimately
connected with the technologies so that they can augment and amplify the
ways in which we respond to the world around us.
I offer these as the building blocks of looking at the ‘Other’ of the
Digital Natives as we have discursively produced them. From hereon, in
my subsequent posts, I hope to drill deeper to locate nuances and
differences, concepts and frameworks that we need to map in order to
build a digital native model that is inclusive, differential and context
based.
--
Nishant Shah
Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,(
www.cis-india.org )
Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09
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http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shahhttp://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah
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