I'm Not a Digital Native, and Neither Are You

May 14, 2021

Personal

The term digital native describes a young person who has grown up in the digital age, in close contact with computers, the Internet, and video game consoles, and later mobile phones, social media, and tablets. The term is often used to refer to millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha; the latter two are sometimes described as distinct “neo-digital natives”, “true” digital natives, or “digital integrators”.

‘Digital Native’ on Wikipedia

You know how every headline about Millennials or Gen Z is “Gen ___ has killed ___” and it makes everyone from those generations want collectively bang their heads into a desk? To me, reading literally anything about “Digital Natives” is way worse.

I, being born in ‘98, am right in that awkward gap that people don’t really know if should be called Millennial or Gen Z. Growing up my family was relatively poor, but did actually prioritize having a computer as my mom worked her way though college. I remember playing games on Windows ‘98 on an old Gateway.

So I’m a digital native right?

I grew up witch technology keeping pace. Right as I wanted social media, there it was. Right as cell phones were ubiquitous, I was getting one. Right as I had figured it out, I could get a smart phone. Tech and my development were linked. That’s what being a Digital Native is right?

The full picture has the arm of the chair as a very convenient censor bar, but I thought some reading may appreciate not trying to explain that on their screen

Yeah, No.

I had to go back and learn why so much of what we use is so horribly fucked, without the context of really watching it come into being. Digital complexity is additive. Rarely does anyone start from scratch, instead opting to use as many existing abstractions as they can get away with. So now, when I want to understand how email works I need to look up umpteen different protocols (IMAP, SMTP, POP3, MIME, PGP) and why they’re all broken. If I want to write a program and display text on the console, I still need to go learn what the VT100 was. Anything I do I need to try to grasp a huge amount of historical context. Meanwhile, because I’m young and a ‘digital native’ I’m expected to just magically know how to use Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, as if people my age didn’t have to learn at some point either from being taught in a class, Googling it, or watching a tutorial on YouTube.

This is really the biggest reason the term Digital Native pisses me off- the older generations use it as an excuse for not learning and not knowing how to use their tech, then expect the younger generation to just magically know and fix it, meanwhile, unless we go back to try and learn sixty years of context we really don’t know either. Yes, we’ll know how to install an App. No, I don’t even mind showing you that. But I do mind showing you how to over and over and over again because you expect to use me as some infinite tech support resource instead of actually trying to understand. When I start explaining either your eyes glaze over or you just keep repeating “I could never understand this.”

So, I’ve always more or less felt this way, then I read The digital natives are not who you think it is by Tor Håkon and I realized that as much as it bothers me that people my age are called digital natives, people that are older claiming to be digital natives makes me just as angry. Now, some of that might be because that post has an impressive level of elitism baked in and feels like I’m reading the authors masturbation material- regardless, he’s still wrong. Because for as much as I am not a digital native, the older generation sure as hell isn’t either. His entire argument boils down to “I used older tech therefore I know more”.

Which, yeah, but you still didn’t use punch cards. You didn’t pull a bug out of a relay computer. You didn’t sew together rope memory. You didn’t use diode logic.

I’m not gate keeping.

I’m trying to express that there is no garden for which a gate can exist to hold you out of. There are no digital natives.

Even for those that did do those things (if they’re still alive), they specialized. Nobody knows how everything about digital electronics works. Nobody knows every programming language. Nobody knows how to use all the popular apps and tools for every industry. Nobody is an expert on Windows, OSX, iOS, Linux, and ChromeOS.

The First Computer Bug
By Courtesy of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, VA., 1988. - U.S. Naval Historical Center Online Library Photograph NH 96566-KN, The image available here. Public Domain.

Sure, some things may be slightly more obvious to someone who grew up with the tech like I have. Maybe we’d know that ‘☰’ is called the hamburger menu on most sites and have a better idea of what it might contain, but that’s pattern recognition from usage, not some innate skill that comes with being under the age of thirty. Knowing ‘CTRL+S’ is save or being able to program in C has nothing to do with my age.

Hell, a ton of people my age have never seen a terminal and never typed a command. Similarly, a lot of people of the older generations have never use Snapchat or TikTok(1) or Tinder(2). This plays into stereotypes too. Not every young person sits on social media, spends their time at coffee shops swiping right endlessly, and religiously plays video games, and people over the age of thirty don’t exclusively communicate via email. Having a different list of apps we use doesn’t make us any more or less competent than you. Having used older tech doesn’t make you more knowledgeable, especially if you haven’t kept up to date.

I was extraordinarily fortunate that my family bought a PC. How many kids now will grow up with only a small-screened Android device? Will future natives need to have been brought up with VR? Being a “digital native” is as much a class thing as anything else then.

The term is stupid, claiming it for yourself is stupid, and assigning it to a generation is stupid.

There. Are. No. Digital. Natives.