We of more senior years are digital immigrants, I'm told. Our grandchildren are digital natives. We see the world through very different screens. As a relatively new grandparent, I delight in watching my grandchildren explore their very young lives. Beyond the oral method of discovering textures, shapes, flavors, and proximity, they also explore the digital world, swiping here and poking there on screens of all sizes. Hand them an iPhone and they'll scroll through photo's, launch videos, and open ten or twenty applications in less than 30 seconds. Yes, even at ages well less than two.
What are the implications of being a digital native? What is the liability of being a digital immigrant? Watching the behavior of depression babies (my parents) and baby boomers (us), supposedly of the digital immigrant class, doesn't suggest much more than frustration as a consequence. A little slow on the take, perhaps, and unable to take advantage of all available features, but certainly capable of communicating with the world and scouring lots of new digital landscapes and destinations.
Digital natives, on the other hand, seem to reflect a significant change in culture, and in how relationships are created, maintained, and managed. Given my penchant for listening to podcasts of TED talks, a couple recently helped me interpret some of those changes and their potential impact.
Though the science has not caught up (and probably never will) with the effects and impact of screen time on children, some of the speakers conclusions give clues to what’s different for these natives. Focus, for example. The rapid sequencing and pacing used in contemporary media, especially movies and videos but including child education television, affects attention spans and the ability to focus. Some studies suggest these media pacing techniques change the brains response and can impair the ability to learn. On the other hand, other studies show that previous “educational television,” intent on engaging children with dialog meant to be interactive (think Mr. Rogers) in fact fostered no interaction, and left no lasting message or learned behaviors. Children need to feel they made something happen - that there was an individual response to their action. That’s why they delight in throwing food over the side of their highchair to the ground. It’s not the throwing of the food that amuses them and reinforces the act, it’s the reaction of the adult (or dog) that it elicited that’s rewarding. Apple has introduced a whole world of interactive screens that generate similar rewards, captivating young minds trying to experience their environment.
My take on these presentations is that the challenge comes when these interactions become interpreted as experience. In other words, that life through the screen represents experience that can be applied to social or workplace interaction. Because I saw or read or heard, therefore I know. And the assumption on the part of digital natives that this “knowledge” should be valued in an environment of human interaction (assuming the individual is capable of communicating or relating in that environment in the first place.) A great presentation by one of my favorite business consultants, Simon Sinek, articulates some of the impact of this phenomena in his views of the impact of social media on millennials in the workplace.
In my view, digital immigrants are not immune to the impact of living life through a screen. I’ve always been challenged in my ability to focus, no less than when I’m working in a digital environment, where I can access multiple screens at one time - jumping from an email to a website to a video to a spreadsheet, back to another email, to my notepad. Watching ten seconds of this video, jumping to twenty seconds of another video, moving to a digital newspaper, scanning the beginning sentence of three or four stories at once, choosing one story to expand through the first paragraph, moving back to Facebook to check on the latest, wondering if I’ve missed a text message, checking on my Visa account to see if there are any rouge charges…. Some might call that behavior schizophrenic. Others could suggest it’s just the reaction of a digital immigrant exacerbating his natural tendencies.
Similarly, digital immigrants seem to be vastly emboldened that their view of the world is “right” based on all that they’ve learned in the great sea of information now available to them. Again, substituting spectatorship for experience, dulling critical thinking with bias reinforcement (see my blog post on this subject - Technology Discourages Critical Thinking?).
Technology is having a dramatic impact on cultural and social behavior, of that there is no doubt. The question is: benefit or liability. Plenty of evidence suggests both. Fascinating to watch and learn through the eyes of both digital immigrants and, especially, through young digital natives.
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