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?)

First Article

“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” On the Horizon 9.5 (Oct. 2001)
“Do They Really Think Differently?” On the Horizon 9.6 (Dec. 2001)
by Marc Prensky

A number of other authors credit Marc Prensky with coining the widely used term “digital native” and, slightly less well-known, “digital immigrant.” Prensky is a speaker, writer, consultant, teacher, and designer of “software games for learning, including the world’s first fast-action videogame-based training tools and world-wide, multi-player, multi-team on-line competitions” (www.marcprensky.com). In this two-part article, he argues that “our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” (1). Not only does he claim that today’s students “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” but that their digital upbringing may have physically changed their brains. As “native” speakers of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet, they require entirely new teaching methods from their “immigrant” teachers; in fact, he suggests, the two can barely communicate with each other until the immigrants learn the language. Natives are “used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to ‘serious’ work” (2).

Some of these characteristics certainly resonate with our readings: Weinberger described how random access has revolutionized not only the ways we order knowledge but the ways we create knowledge and the knowledge that gets created. Benkler and Chun emphasized the fundamental shifts—in the market, our understanding and enacting of freedom, etc.—caused by networking. Gee, Bogost, McGonigal, and others wrote about learning through games (Prensky calls this “edutainment”).

The ideas in these articles are pretty old hat by now (7 years later), due in part to this and other work by Prensky, but his conviction that “natives” are essentially and radically different and his zeal for educational reform are still notable: “It’s just dumb (and lazy) of educators – not to mention ineffective – to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, and that the Digital Natives’ ‘language’ is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea” (6). See next article for a response and troubling of some of Prensky’s convictions.

There was a particular paragraph in the second article that caught my attention and inspired my project. In the section entitled “What Have We Lost?" Prensky writes:

One key area that appears to have been affected is reflection. Reflection is what enables us, according to many theorists, to generalize, as we create “mental models” from our experience. It is, in many ways, the process of “learning from experience.” In our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people. One of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in teaching Digital Natives is to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical thinking in the learning (either built into the instruction or through a process of instructor-led debriefing) but still do it in the Digital Native language. We can and must do more in this area. (11)

While I don’t completely agree with Prensky, I have seen (in classes and the Writing Center) what a hard time many 101 and 102 students have with the reflective writing we ask them to do. So for my project, I’m building a website that is itself a reflective writing assignment (designed to replace either the 101 reflective essay assignment or the 102 inquiry analysis essay assignment, or both).

Photo credit: Marc Prensky, from www.marcprensky.com, by Jim Allen

But it's so "natural"...

Has anyone seen the new AT&T commercial where the phones and other technological devices are integrated seamlessly into and among beautiful blossoming flowers (doesn't appear to be on youtube yet)? Really interesting tactic for making technology appear "natural" and healthy and beautiful and living. Just as movies like "Minority Report" (Nakamura) and books like Rainbows End (Vinge) and theories of cyborgs (Haraway) work to break down the separation between human and machine, so does this commercial attempt to meld technology and nature together. This also reminds me of the Verizon "chocolate phone" commercials.

More Words

If you identified with the sentiment underlying my video, you should check out this song by a friend of Justin Moody's. Click here, scroll to the bottom of the songs list, and click on the last song. It's very funny.

(By the way, I feel like I need to clarify that I feel very honored to work with all of my 102 students and I respect their writing very much. I genuinely enjoy reading the portfolios and having conversations with the authors. I also genuinely enjoy reading and discussing [almost] all of the books shown in the video. Obviously, I thrive on words and have/am trying to make a living out of them. But you know how it is at the end of the semester....)

Words, words, words

By the time tomorrow is over, I will have spent about 45 hours in 4 days working with English 102 students and their portfolios.  I love my students, but I'm sick of words.  That's where this idea came from, as I lay in bed late Sunday night (Monday morning...) after reading the first batch of papers.  And obviously, it was also inspired by last week's discussion of Chun.

Cinematography by me
Music by Kaki King ("Bari Improv" from the August Rush soundtrack)

Holding class in SL...

Well, no one else was there, but "Mikey08 Market" and I had a lovely chat while sitting on our free bikes (mine was a gift from Mike). Since it was just the two of us, it felt a lot like your basic IM chat, except that we could see and hear when the other was typing, which was helpful, and it felt like I was actually talking with someone who was paying attention. Obviously, he could have been doing anything, but it felt like we were both more "present" for the conversation.

I saved the chat log, but it's five pages long with no spaces or line breaks, so I don't think I'll post it. Suffice it to say, we talked about surveillance, labor, self-determination, code, ethnography, and other stuff. And we wondered where Anne (and everyone else) was. Here we are!

P.S. Anne, I heard this evening that you were there on Sunday (with others?). I wonder why you didn't show up when Mike searched your name? I guess we should have looked around more...sorry! So just like in real life/first life/"meet space," we can miss each other by being in slightly different locations.

Attention Mac Users!

If you're a Mac user and you've been having problems with Second Life crashing, go to this link: Guide for Improving Mac Performance. After making a few small recommended changes to my SL preferences, I went from crashing within seconds of every log-on to a full session with no crashes or other problems!

Questions and thoughts on Heverly and Lessig

A few questions and thoughts in preparation for our Second Life discussion of Heverly ("Growing Up Digital: Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life") and Lessig (Code v.2):

- Heverly, Lessig, and Chun are all preoccupied with "control."  In what ways do their notions of "control" converge and in what ways do they diverge?  (Sheesh.  Is that a 101 question, or what?!)

- How might Nakamura's discussions of subjectivity/objectivity be used to complicate Heverly's "active creation"/"passive object"?  Heverly talks about some of the unintended ramifications of young people who "embed themselves in digital media...by choice" and who are embedded by others against their will or without their knowledge (204), but he doesn't theorize this dichotomy too deeply.

- For me, this was Heverly's most interesting point:  "[W]e risk a future where the bullied remain bullied throughout their whole lives, where the space that children need to grow is wiped out by the permanence of the digital artifacts that are created when they err..." (216). We tend to emphasize the ephemerality of digitality (Wikipedia entries constantly changing, for example) and the ability to construct our own identities on the internet, but Heverly reminds us of both the potential permanence and uncontrollable nature of identity on the web. What does this mean for "digitizing race"?

- Lessig suggests that surveillance might be, in my words, a self-fulfilling prophecy:  "[P]rofiles will begin to normalize the population from which the norm is drawn.  The observing will affect the observed.  The system watches what you do; it fits you into a pattern; the pattern is then fed back to you in the form of options set by the pattern; the options reinforce the pattern; the cycle begins again" (220).  This reminded me of a point made by Robert McChesney in Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (from Dennis' class): In response to the notion that entertainment media "give the people what they want," he writes, "When people consume from options provided, the media giants then state that they are satisfying audience demand.  If some find the offerings imbecilic, the argument goes, that is because the people are morons who demand such tripe.  But this is a circular argument, since there is no proof that this range of choices conforms to something innate to the audience" (51).  We could perhaps say this about any digital medium: We are so accustomed to working within the constraints of Word, or Blogger, or Web 2.0 — in other words, any code — that we assume it's "what we want" ... the constraints become invisible as constraints ... they seem "innate" (to us and to the medium). The ability to produce code on the web does trouble this, although the vast majority of us don't produce actual code (certainly not binary machine code, at least), so we have to work through translating programs that, again, provide us with a particular set of options.

- I was very interested in Lessig's suggestion that social hierarchies, which were diminished due to increased mobility, are being reinstated through digital profiling: "An efficient and effective system for monitoring makes it possible once again to make these subtle distinctions of rank. Collecting data cheaply and efficiently will take us back to the past" (221).  Can/should we do anything about this, or is it a necessary evil?

Are video game makers squandering their cultural clout?

Just heard a short NPR bit on video games as entertaining diversion vs. art/cultural critique. Ian Bogost was one of the interviewees. Among other things, Bogost says that the politically motivated game BlackSite is "giving the industry the finger."

"Inextricably Fused"

While I have found great value in the blogging we have done this semester, this statement from Steve Anderson and Anne Balsamo really resonated with me:

"The uneasy hybridization seen in Web cast lectures and audience-response clickers demonstrates what is, in our view, a limited approach to integrating technology into education.  Even some of the most promising contemporary technologies that merge the advantages of networked communities with social software, such as blogs and wikis, may in some cases simply function as high-tech updates of timeworn practices, such as classroom journaling and shared notetaking.  Instead, we advocate a model that is genuinely organic in conception, centered on the development of pedagogical strategies that are inextricably fused with the technologies and social practices familiar to students of the born digital generation" (255).