Fleep's Deep Thoughts Explore the Metaverse

Perpetually behind on my blog reading, but today I caught up with Intellagirl’s Ubernoggin and got sucked into her Response to Jenkins, Prenskey Regarding Digital Natives post.

Intellagirl’s analysis points to two key phenomena that differentiates the Digital Native from the Digital Immigrant – exigency (need) and medial hauntings (previous experience with earlier technologies that lingers on). Now “medial hauntings” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue and until I read further, evoked images of severed limbs screaming BOO! from dark closets (oh MEDIAL not MEDICAL), but I think she’s onto something there. Certainly she addresses the kind of fear that I’ve seen in so-called digital immigrants, who already have a community of people to share thoughts with at church or the bowling league or whatever, and who are afraid to press a button in case it breaks or click a link in case there’s no way to go back, that sort of thing. And it brings to mind my own complete aversion to all things web based for years – my command line BBS works just fine thanks, I don’t need any of this newfangled blog crap! I BBSed from 1994 to 2006 and largely ignored blogs and blog culture because I had an interface that I was comfortable with and a community to share my thoughts with and what _need_ was there to change? So in that example, Intellagirl’s analysis hits it right on the head – I had no need and the few attempts I’d made at blogging were painful because I didn’t know what the heck I was doing and I kept saying to myself, “Pushing the spacebar to get new content is so much easier!”

This Digital Native/Immigrant dichotomy has been sticking in my craw because it doesn’t quite explain ME. By age demographic, I should be an immigrant. By socio-economic background and access to technology and gadgets, I should be an immigrant. By all sorts of measures and characteristics used to describe the two groups, it seems as if I should fit squarely in the immigrant category, but clearly I do not. Intellagirl’s post is the first I’ve seen that begins to get at an explanation that makes sense, not just on a macro level, but on a personal level. My adoption and wholesale immersion into the BBS/MUD community in the mid 90s was born out of great need, I was away from home, poor as a church mouse, out of my social element, and desperately seeking to connect with other people, and that technology provided something that my limited social and financial circumstances could not – COMMUNITY. I was moving constantly, like a bag lady, from apartment to apartment and state to state, but with the magic of the intarnets, my friends traveled with me wherever I went. Further, limited experience with previous technologies left me with no old habits to break, at the time I discovered email and UNIX talk and telnet, I was a fairly clean slate and picked it up quickly.

OK, so finally an explanation that begins to make sense.. Hm.

But there’s something else about my own personal experience that has been ricocheting around in my head and always comes to the forefront when I listen to one of Philip Rosedale’s speeches about how navigating 3D virtual worlds is innately more intuitive than navigating word-laden webpages. I think there’s truth to that and it seems to me that we’re entering a new .. phase, era, whatever word you prefer. But let me go back for a moment to the ricocheting thought, which is that I think my digital native behavior was/is extremely influenced by my lifelong addiction to reading. I was the kind of kid that would rather read a book than do just about anything else. If I was in the middle of a good story, nothing short of prolonged shouting could break the spell, to the annoyance of friends and parents alike. Somehow I transcended mere “literacy” and I’m sure there’s some academic term for those of us who become immersed in the written word and visualize it with such clarity that the “real world” ceases to exist while we’re in it. (I bet Henry Jenkins knows that word.)

So, being such a reader, the world of BBSs and MUDs and entirely text based virtual worlds wasn’t just an easy transition to make, it was like the holy grail – an interactive story that I was part of, that I wrote and changed and played a role and wow, what a dream come true. Webpages didn’t interest me quite as much, except as an information source, because they were like magazine stories, way too short and eventually full of too many pictures, when what I prefer is a nice big meaty novel that will take at least two or three days to read. And so I stayed in my text based virtual worlds for a very long time. Long after other BBS friends adopted LiveJournal and Blogger and reveled in posting pictures and links and video clips that could never appear in the old telnet window.

Until EverQuest, that is. MMO + RPG + 3D = love at first sight. I still remember the thrill of it: the beautiful scenery, the long walks across unexplored territory, the adrenaline rushes, the late nights, the empty Mt. Dew cans. Then DAoC and WoW and various single player games in-between (NWN, Deus Ex, Sims, etc.). And somehow, between 1994 and 2006, I transformed into a Native butterfly, an advocate for technology in education, a creator of digital content, a camera, mp3-player, cell phone carrying junkie, a 1337 translator with some old skool credibility, tivo equipped and subscribed to so many blogs, and now tweeting my life away for all to see. Indistinguishable from a so-called Native, except that my text messaging thumb dexterity is woefully inadequate.

I hate these terms, Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, because they imply all sorts of connotations that do more harm than good, and because my Women’s Studies 101 classes taught me to _always_ be suspicious of false dichotomies. It is not an either/or choice, rather there are continuums of related skill-sets and proclivities and if you look deeper under the skin of a Digital Native, you will find more complexity than a single word can possibly describe. Sure the 17 year old chained to his cell phone can text message while eating, driving, and talking, and sure his ipod seems to have grown fully formed out of his skull, but can he use a search engine effectively? Can he write a coherent paragraph with correct spelling and grammar to save his life? Increasingly, I think that answer is NO and that is worrisome.

Jenkins writes:

At one time, the digital immigrant metaphor might have been helpful if it forced at least some adults to acknowledge their uncertainties, step out of their comfort zone, and adjust their thinking to respond to a generation growing up in a very different context than the realm of their own childhood. As Prensky concludes, “if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives – i.e. all their students – they will have to change.” Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now — implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

So, what would digital multi-culturalism look like? Can we come up with a different set of metaphors to talk about these issues?

I say we MUST come up with a different set of metaphors, because to circle back to Philip Rosedale’s point about the intuitive navigability of 3D virtual spaces, if we don’t figure out a better way to talk about these concepts, the so-called natives will run so far ahead into the virtual world, that the wisdom of the text-based and physical world might be lost altogether. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this chilling report from the National Endowment for the Arts about current literacy rates. It strikes fear into the heart of this digital [whatever], because the power of all of this technology is tremendous, and while those who have accepted the term “digital immigrant” feel cut off or dismissive or frightened or too old or whatever it is are sitting around reading newspapers and drinking coffee at church and thinking that things like Second Life is just a game, the world is going to change around them, so fast it will make their heads spin if they’re still around to see it, and the certainty that this is coming fills me with such urgency, I just can’t shake it.

It keeps me burning the candle at both ends, and now we’re at the end of 2007 and my resolution in 2006 to figure out this blog crap, to bring Second Life to my campus, to work even harder to be the translator between the “immigrant” and “native” camps has been one of the most exhausting and stressful, yet wonderfully fulfilling years of my life. I’ll save the reminiscing for a different long rambly disorganized thinking-out-loud post, but at the end of all of this, I’m thinking we have a lot of work to do and we can’t do it fast enough. I don’t know if Digital Multi-Culturalism will cut the mustard, either, because that implies some acceptance of the status-quo that I don’t want to accept. I want to be intolerant of intolerance in the digital sense. I don’t want to just talk about it, I want to smack the hand that reaches for the phone book instead of a search engine. As I reach the ripe old age of my early 30s, I finally have come to understand that not all old people are wise, but there is wisdom in age and experience, and frankly, I fear we’ll lose that wisdom when the “natives” put down their video games and start harnessing this technology to change the world around them.

I think, moving forward, that we need to challenge those words wherever we see or hear them, because they are perpetuating a concept that we can’t afford to continue.