Digital Native or Immigrant?

With the recent release of the new Ipad 3, I was caught of guard and realized how quickly the rate of technology is advancing. Even though it was a year ago, I feel like it was just yesterday when people were exited for the Ipad 2. With the only main difference between the first and second Ipad being a camera on the front, I realized this rate of advancement is frightening.

Earlier in the semester, for my Journalism and New Media class, we were assigned a reading by Marc Prensky called “ Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”. Prensky coined the term digital native as someone, who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technology, and thus is able to function with it. According to Marc Prensky’s definition of a digital native I would be considered a native, however I would disagree and say I am neither a native nor immigrant to technology. The speed in which technology advances has started to become difficult to keep up with for my liking, particularly for the simple life I choose to live. This whole hype about Ipads is uncanny to me. Being at LMU, where the majority of the students come from affluent backgrounds, it is common for me to see people walking around with all the newest gadgets. I personally have a friend on campus that is obsessed with having the newest Apple merchandise. When the last IPhone was released, he so badly wanted the newest one, that he spent over four hundred dollars to upgrade his one-year-old IPhone. The Ipad 2 was a must for him as well, for the reason that he said he didn’t like carrying his Macbook Pro everywhere. Have we all become obsessed? Perhaps this infatuation with technology is key to why it is only advancing faster and faster.

At times I consider myself a digital immigrant because even though I am surrounded by technology, I haven’t been exposed to it all my life. I feel like I am still not part of the generation of new digital natives who have been born into this rise of technology. The first computer my family purchased was when I was entering middle school, and my first cell phone was halfway through my freshman year in high school. This is a very different to lifestyle of what I see as the new generation, where homes contain computers in almost every room, or kids have cell phones even younger than ten years old. In addition to these differences, the capability of computers now do not compare to the first computer in my home, and the cell phones now have outdated the basic cell that was used for simply making phone calls. The typical cell phone now can do everything my first computer could and better. This shows how fast things have changed in just over ten year, so I have a hard time grasping the idea of how things will be in another ten.

The advances in technology are what have created the categories Marc Prensky describes as native or immigrant. It is made clear that we have to maintain knowledgeable of how to use technology because their s no indication that shows otherwise. Technology is only going to keep progressing, so it has almost become an obligation when functioning in society. Being a first generation American, I have learned to live simple, so the notion of technology has become somewhat of demanding in my opinion.

-Erik