Week 9, Q6, Threatening digital native/immigrant

Both of these descriptions in the previous two posts threaten the notion of digital natives/immigrants and criticise the flexibility of these definitions.

Both the older lady and my friend fit better into the opposite definition but because of Prensky’s ideas there can not be any reason for why this might be. Prensky just assumes that age will be the only characteristic in determining what definition you fit into. In my opinion there are other aspects influencing your ability to use technology. For example, like my examples beforehand I think how technologically capable your parent’s are does have an influence on how you use technology. You may be born into the ‘native’ category and use technology at school to a certain extent, but if you are not subjected to it at home, it’s going to have less of an influence on you than other natives. Prensky has assumed that technology is part of every young person’s life, through school and home, but is this really the case? My example is just one girl out of many who doesn’t ‘click’ with technology where Prensky assumes that she should because of her age, showing a major flaw in his definition.

This idea is also true for the example of the older lady who uses technology on a daily basis. There are characteristics influences her skills which Prensky has failed to mention in his definitions. The older lady probably uses all this technology in order to communicate with her family and to for entertainment purposes. This lady picked up her skills from society like it is understood a native would do, she has had no lessons or instructions. Proving that it does not necessarily matter what age you are, you can still follow technology and keep up to date with it. This criticises Prensky’s idea that immigrants will immediately use older means (books, radio etc) to find out information, before using technology.