Digital Immigrants

In my latest Seminary class (OT501 - the Pentateuch), the students went through the obligatory self-introductions in the class discussion board. Normally, being essentially anti-social at the core, I do this part only grudgingly. But this time I actually read people's bios with some desire to understand. Remarkable! Personal growth at this advanced age. ;)

Sure enough, there was something to learn. :) One lady about my age shared an analogy about dealing with web-based knowledge delivery systems and acquiring the related technological skills needed to function well in this environment. She suggested that it's much like emigrating to a new country where you don't speak the language. It depends on how old you are, and how motivated you are to learn, as to how well you pick it up and fit in.

People of my generation are like digital immigrants, who moved here as young adults. We can pick up the language and the cultural subtleties of interacting online, but we have to work at it and pay attention. Even after years and years of living here, we still speak digital with an accent that betrays our analog childhood. (one that was lived sans computers, absent digital music (remember vinyl?), without Microsoft Word, only black & white TVs with rabbit ear antennas, NO pocket calculators ... not even an LED alarm clock.) We entered the digital age young enough to adapt, but not young enough to be digital natives.

Generation Y and later, though... or say, maybe anyone born in 1982 or later (the year the first mass-market personal computer, the Commodore 64, was released)... have grown up speaking the language from birth. They're digital natives, need no cultural orientation, speak digital fluently with no trace of an accent. They see analog technology (like vinyl records or a slide-rule or a tube amplifier) as a curiosity, an artifact of the past. It's interesting to a point, maybe a bit cool in a retro sort of way, but... excuse me, I'm getting a video message on my smart phone, wait a sec, BRB.

The whole business is complicated even more for people of my parents' generation (God rest their souls - I suppose I should use my in-laws as an example, since they're still alive and trying to figure out Facebook and anti-virus software.) They are the ones who emigrated to the digital world late in life, and have very little chance of the internet making real sense to them. Like older immigrant folks who need their kids to translate for them at the market or the doctor's office, they need help to reset their passwords or upload a pic from their digital camera and attach it to an email. And of course I can do that for them. I can translate.

Because I still speak analog. Fluently. :)