Into this (digital) world we're thrown

Hearing Voices

By Greg Adams, Auckland | Friday, 14 October 2011
The year I was born, humans hadn’t yet set foot on the moon. The Vietnam War was in full swing. Elvis married Priscilla. Sweden changed to driving on the right — overnight. The Graduate was released in movie theatres and the Beatles gave us the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album. It was the year of the world’s first heart transplant. The late Kurt Kobain and former All Black Ian Jones were also born.

In New Zealand, Keith Holyoake was PM and the free daily half-pint provision of milk for each primary school pupil was stopped. The currency was decimalised, with the New Zealand dollar replacing the New Zealand pound, at a rate of two dollars to a pound.

All great stuff. But one thing you’ll notice is a distinct lack of computing technology getting a mention — which is hardly surprising. There wasn’t much, and certainly not in daily life. BASIC was the cutting edge of programming. The world’s first supercomputer — the CDC 6600 (a veritable speedster at 1 megaflop) – had only just been switched on. Even Unix and ARPANET were still ideas on someone’s drawing board, and floppy disks and MS-DOS were mere twinkles in their makers’ eyes.

This was a time before what we now call the “digital age”, which makes me a “digital immigrant”, as opposed to a “digital native”, according to today’s vernacular. I’ve been called a lot of things but this is a term that I can’t quite fathom. What does it mean?

The inference seems to be that there is a group of people who were born already adept at using ICT in all its shapes and forms, and a group that have had to learn the hard way to “use” technology.

Cobblers!

We might have an innate instinct for survival but a natural ability to text, surf and play Angry Birds? Hardly.

I see this line of thinking as having two dangerous consequences. Firstly, there’s the pressure on younger people to “perform” with technology. The expectation is that they know everything there is to know about computers and the online world. Clearly, that’s wrong. A child is born today in much the same way as a century ago. For sure, they may be surrounded by machines but that does not translate to a sixth sense about technology. They have to learn — and be given time to explore and experiment and make mistakes — the same as the rest of us.

The other danger is for people to hide behind the “immigrant” tag — or even an “incompetent” tag. It is like saying: “I can’t do this simply because I’m old”. That’s nonsense. Like with all things in life, we can learn. Some things we can learn to do better than others but the onus is on the individual. I know of grandmas who are perfectly capable of finding their way around a keyboard and desktop, and friends who can’t set a password on a computer. It is almost as if the pressure’s on the older, “immigrant” generations to not perform.

We should all be seeking to use the tools at our disposal to the best of our ability — not to the perception of our ability. We all learn our digital skills — we’re all digital-made.