Essay

Marc Prensky's "Emerging online life of the digital native" and Dave Weinberger's "A New World" both present different views of contemporary internet users. In light of your own experiences with new technologies do you think they are accurate portrayals? Discuss why or why not with specific examples.


New Communication Technologies changed and is still changing the life of contemporary internet users.
The conclusion of the ‘NetDay’ survey of 200,000 U.S. students in the year 2004 is that ‘Students are not just using technology differently today, but are approaching their life and their daily activities differently because of the technology.’ (www.netday.org)
Using the internet or the computer today is totally different from earlier years. In the text ‘Emerging online life of the digital native’, Marc Prensky shows why this is the case and what exactly the differences are. He developed the two groups ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’. He writes about what they are doing differently by using technology and how they are doing this.
Digital Natives or ‘native speakers’ of the digital language are the todays students and the younger children. They represent the first generation who grow up with all the new technologies. They spent their entire life surrounded by computers, internet, mp3 players, video games and cell phones. And these ‘different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures’ (Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Baylor College of Medicine).
The Digital Immigrants on the other side were not born into the digital world. Mostly they are elderly people who later become fascinated by the new technology and use the computer and the internet for emailing and researching, but in a totally different way than the Digital Natives.
The online possibilities for Digital Natives are growing every day and their online life is much bigger than just the internet. For the Digital Natives the online world tells them how to live, to react, to survive and how to manage the daily activities. The cyberspace is a part of themselves and their everyday life. This is a big difference between the two groups. Of course often the Digital Natives and the Digital Immigrants are using the exact same technology such as email, blogs and eBay. But mostly there is a very big dissonance between the two groups.
When you observe Digital Immigrants, you can often see, that they are only using the internet for working or informing about important things and they mostly have a specific reason why they are using it. And often they prefer the traditional way like writing a letter, searching for a word in a dictionary or reading the newspaper in the morning instead of doing all these things on the internet because they are too used to it and they are still faster doing it the traditional way. For younger people using the computer and the internet is like brushing the teeth in the morning. Sometimes it is the most important thing in their life and they are checking their emails, or the social networking sides multiple times a day, sometimes even every few minutes. Digital Natives love to communicate via internet by sending emails, using IM (Instant Messaging), blogging or chatting. They have their own ‘language’, because writing is still slower than talking. Sometimes they are just using a few letters to say a whole sentence. For example ‘k’ for ‘OK’, ‘cu’ for ‘see you’ or even ‘H4T5TNT’ for ‘home for tea at five tonight’.
But the bad result of this is, that often especially the younger children have lots of problems with a normal conversation. It’s tough for them to write an essay in class or just speaking correct sentences.
Another big difference that Prensky mentions in his text is that Digital Natives are sharing really intimate details and knowledge they get from a specific source. On their blogs they write about their personal experiences, their problems and their emotional life. Earlier the people had the motto ‘Knowledge is power’ and they kept information as a secret. Today the young people love to share what they know as soon as they receive it. They exchange everything like songs, videos, even school- papers or exams, pictures and websites that express their personality. Digital Immigrants in comparison mostly doing intellectual blogging and only speaking about general themes in chat rooms for example. For them the online world is not an emotional thing, it is more informative.
In the text ‘A New World’, by David Weinberger the story about Michael Ian Campbell is a perfect example for the emotional involvement.
The 18- year old Campbell was known as a polite, kind man in his hometown. He was interested in new technology and used the internet for communicating with other people. But he was too much into the online world. On the internet he didn’t act like he would do in normal life and so it happened that he wrote a message to a girl he only knew from the internet where he said that he wants to go into her school the next day and massacre people. The result was that the girl informed the police and Campbell had to go to prison. When he was asked why he did this he answered, that he wants to become an actor and therefore he was trying on a role. He wanted to be like his favourite actor, John Malkovich. Probably if he had met the girl in normal life nothing had happened. Maybe he had told her about his idol, but he never had tried to act like him. Here you can see that the internet let Campbell became someone that he wasn’t. Of course and fortunately this is not the normal behaviour of all internet users, but it’s not at all unusual on the web to ‘try on’ a different personality or to switch personalities from chat room to chat room.
As a conclusion of all these points, it can be said, that both texts are accurate portrayals of the contemporary internet users. Prensky’s dividing of internet user into the two groups ‘Digital Native’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’ is very suitable. It shows the differences between the using of technology today and earlier. In these days older people are afraid of the new technology or may question its value, but although technology is growing and growing and with it also the Digital Natives. Technology has changed the behaviour of an entire generation in a short time and it will go on and influence all people whose daily life involves interaction with it, whether they are native internet users, new inspired users or just parents or friends of these people.



References:

- Prensky, Marc. 'Emerging Online Life of the Digital Narrative' 2004. 12 Oct. 2009
- Weinberger, David. 'A New World' 2002. 12 Oct. 2009
- Livingstone, Sonia. 'Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and selfexpression' 2008. 23 Oct. 2009
- ‘Prensky’s Digital Native Versus Digital Immigrants’ 2008, Jim Rich, pp. 1-13. Retrieved September 24, 2009, from ProQuest Database.

- www.marcprensky.com
- www.marcprensky.com/writing/PrenskyThe_Emerging_Online_Life_of_the_Digital_Native-03.pdf
- www.smallpieces.com/content/chapter1.html
- http://depd.wisc.edu/html/TSarticles/Digital%20Natives.htm