What's Wrong With Digital Nativity

Danah Boyd makes it clear that Presky's digital native/immigrant metaphor doesn't hold up to close examination. Her take is that though many youth are, in fact, knowledgable users of new technologies and social platforms, many are not. To continue in this vein, many native practitioners of a language are well-educated, well-read users of their mother tongue who have an explicit awareness of its mechanics and a passion for making the most of it, while there are many others who speak the same language that have only a superficial knowledge of how it works and they will never realize its fullest potential. (Not to mention all the in-betweens.)

After reading Boyd, I wouldn't feel comfortable with using the terms and ideas of this false dichotomy because they aren't accurate (for many more reasons than the one I mentioned) and they are incomplete. Academics and critiques have moved on from using these terms, but some journalists and school administrators still use them. The power of the metaphor is strong perhaps because the less metaphorical issue of immigrant vs. native is ever present and on everyone's mind. Speaking in this polarizing manner is also an uncomfortably convenient strategy of letting parents, teachers, and legislators (among others) off the hook, giving them license to think or say that youth will sort out their own digital literacy issues because it comes naturally to them.

And then of course, there is the problem of access and how it affects or is affected by the label of digital native. In Boyd's book, she quotes Henry Jenkins (seen here posing as the literal embodiment of a digital immigrant):

"Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us." (Boyd, 2014)

The digital divide rides the same rails as our nation's shameful economic divide. The underserved youth, who might only have full internet access at school or a public library, cannot be presumed to possess digital nativity, just as they cannot be presumed to have the means to go to college. The term digital native has been loaded down with untrue or exaggerated claims and connotations. Perhaps it's time we renounced its citizenship.