Laura @ CET

Search for “digital native’ online and you will have 101 000 possible web sites to peruse, demonstrating how pervasive the term is. Without having analysed all these sites, I would bet that most of the uses are either positive or unproblematic, although there is a growing chorus of dissent and concern to which Cheryl B and I are adding our  voices. I am really curious about the “stickiness” of this term. What is it about it that attracts? Does it roll off the tongue? Does it suggest something easy or comfortable?

Does it promise membership of a club? According to wikipedia the term merely means someone who was born into a world where digital technologies exist. That is clearly not it, or all of it - all sorts of other things exist in the world and we don’t all want to be members of those clubs. The concept is often used in a deterministic fashion, especially when it comes to students coming into and studying in higher education…because they have been born into a digital milieu we in educational institutions are supposed to assume that they are online producers, have digital skills and multiple forms of access, don’t need training as they use informal networks etc etc. The problem is that our data does not bear out these assumptions out- in fact our findings across several higher education institutions pointed to a small digital elite and on the other end of the spectrum, a group one might call digital strangers if we applied the criteria used so often regarding access to both technologies and networks, experience and computer-mediated practices.

In fact, with broadband growing we are seeing a form of digital apartheid based on connectivity. These issues feed into and form part of our research project on student experiences (which we are musing about at http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/researching-students-voices). And we have been writing about these matters for a Special Issue of JCaL interrogating the concept of the net generation. These gloomy observations are countered by our findings and those of others about the use and possibilities of cell phones, something we have also started writing about (eg in the latest issue of AlT-J) and which we are currently researching.

But back to this sticky term. In the process of reviewing the literature and the critiques, we have been pleased to notice those which object to the dichotomies being created by the terminology (such as by Sian Bayne and jen Ross who urge against dangerous oppositions at http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/natives_final.pdf) but have yet to find voiced the concerns we feel about the term itself. In the South African context, and indeed in many post colonial contexts, the term is loaded with baggage and problematic connotations. There exists another whole set of discourses to do with natives and settlers, native laws etc to which we do not wish to be party. And indeed, while the term has been reclaimed in some instances (such as The Native Club), there seems to be no sense of irony in the present use of the term digital native.