Second Article

“Questioning the Generational Divide: Technological Exoticism and Adult Constructions of Online Youth Identity”
by Susan C. Herring
From Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 71–92. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262524834.071

Read about Prenksy’s article (below) first.

This chapter does an excellent job of troubling and balancing out voices like Marc Prensky’s, which remind us that we need to be paying attention to the ways digitality has changed youth and should change the way we teach them but which run the risk of over-reacting. Susan Herring argues here that adults—Prensky’s “digital immigrants”—exoticize and rampantly speculate about the effects of digitality on youth, and “mainstream media commentators interpret new technologies and youth practices in normative, moral terms, a process that reinscribes youth as ‘other’” (71). In turn, these youth have been socialized into adult and media constructions of them. She suggests that we focus less on the technologies, which in today’s rhetoric are seen as deterministic of youth, and more on the young people themselves, and she includes some of their voices in her chapter. While I don’t think Herring cancels out Prensky’s observations about today’s students, I appreciate her cautions about adult discourses that over-react to and over-determine the relationship between technology and youth. In this area and others, I often worry about the ways “we” talk and write about “them.” Another article called “The Myth of the Digital Native,” written by M. Owen in 2004, further questions unproductive “sloganizing” with statistics showing how many youth spend very little time on the internet, playing video games, etc., and showing that the largest demographic for games and online activity are 20-35 and 35-44 year-olds, respectively.

A few points of interest from Herring in relation to my project:

- In addition to fulfilling the 101/102 goals, I hope my web-based reflective writing assignment will help address the “transparency problem” of technology, that is, the “challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world” (88).

- Herring suggests that today’s students are not the true “Internet Generation” but rather a transitional generation. Perhaps this project can “take advantage of the present transitional moment to reflect across generations about technology and social change” (72).

- Perhaps it might also involve young people in reflecting on the generational digital divide, in order to move beyond adults’ “exoticization” of youth media practices: “Any serious attempt to avoid cooptation of young people’s experiences must therefore consider the more radical possibility of collaborating with youth in an attempt to break down those hierarchies...” (87). How might I involve my students not only in the use of and interaction with this website but also in its creation/production/design? (Not possible this semester, but in the future?)