Digital Natives Ctd.

Here are some more thoughts we've received in response to my posts on the haziness surrounding the terms Digital Native and Digital Immigrant. It seems people don't like to be defined by such simple labels.

A reader writes:

I've often found that defining a person as a member of a particular generation is the easy way to describe someone, not the accurate way. Previously we talked about baby boomers and Generations X and Y and now the focus is on Internet Natives and Immigrants. However, like all generalizations, it doesn't really capture who that person is, what his or her history is or what motivates him or her. Sure there are similarities between people born during a certain time and in a similar place, but often these boxes are created either by marketers or the media without much consideration beyond the superficial. Therefore, how accurate can they really be?

I, like many others I know, am caught yet again between definitions determined by outsiders. In a previous discussion I might have been between Generation X and Generation Y and now I am again between what some might consider the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. These definitions can guide a discussion only so far before they become cumbersome and irrelevant.

Another reader adds:

I'm 21, and I consider myself to be in that gray area; I love to read and vacation away from technology, but I certainly am more "digitized" than my parents. But at the same time still, I am so far separated from my youngest two siblings (14 and 15), who in my mind, truly ARE digital natives.

I look at them- texting without looking or breaking stride in a conversation, answering their cell phones at all hours of the day and night (I don't think their friends even know our house phone number), using online dictionaries instead of the "old" fat one on my mom's desk, and typing absolutely every homework assignment that comes there way- and I truly see the ridiculous speed technology is moving. Part of it is disconcerting even for me who is not too far removed from my younger siblings, and then I think about my parents and my 85-year-old grandmother and can't even begin to think what they're going through.

-Jeff