Raised in The Print Shop

I approached this material with a specific perspective: as a woman in my late 40s, I was awake and alert for the digital revolution. My father worked for a computer firm and I, too, had the Apple IIe that my sister and I would spend hours in front of, making banners and cards for our friends in The Print Shop program, printed on the perforated paper bordered by punched printer-feeder holes. That is, when we weren't playing Pitfall on our Atari 2600. That's right, kids, I played the ORIGINAL Zelda. On the ORIGINAL Nintendo. I like to tell my own teenaged children that I joined gmail so early that my address is simply my name--no need for extra numbers or special characters. Take THAT, all you younger Sarah Kristiansens out there!

What Prensky describes when he talks about "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" is simplistic and inaccurate. What he seems to be describing is this concept that there is this singular unit of information, and "natives" access that information through technology while the "immigrants" would reach for paper tools. Need a phone number? Natives will look it up on their phone, while immigrants will reach for the white pages. In this way, technology is only a different tool to access the same information. A faster tool, for sure, but a tool nonetheless. In 2001, this might have been the case; my phone in 2001 made calls, and the most exciting thing about it was that the cover could be switched out to a fancier one. In this way, Prensky may have been correct in that there was a generation who would not have to stretch a phone cord to its limit, knowing only the convenience of a cordless or possibly a cell phone. Technology in everyday life was still mainly a tool for accessing information.

Boyd challenges the ideas of Prensky and those who came before him who made assumptions that children born into the digital age would be fluent in that language, but by the time she writes her book, the digital world had evolved so much that it became the driver of content, not simply a tool to access it. Her critique of Prensky would feel more valid if he had not made those comments fifteen years earlier. The difference in the digital space between 2001 and 2014 might as well be a millennium.  

As a teacher of rhetoric, however, I could not be more in agreement with her assessment of the assumptions that terms like "digital native" come with. Aside from the connotation of the words themselves, it is the assumptions about todays youth that are fraught with bias and inequity. To start, if we consider the idea of a "native" in linguistic terms, this would have to mean that digital natives are surrounded by speakers of this technological language in order for it to be acquired. We know that this is not the case, and assumes that technological fluency is achieved passively, simply by being around it. 

More importantly, it disregards the reality of access to technology for young folks. Just like there is no uniform preparation for literacy and math--I know first hand that ninth graders do not come to my classroom with the same skills--not because they are incapable, but because they may not have had access to it the way their peers did. Boyd noted this "assumed level of privilege required to be 'native'." Not only is media literacy necessary in schools, but teachers must be savvy enough to differentiate that learning as well, because we can not conflate being born in this technological era as having some kind of innate knowledge of its workings. 

The many hours that my sister and I sat in front of our little Macintosh was an example of the privilege from which we benefitted. We may not be part of the group Prensky would consider "native," we certainly had a head start learning that new language.