My neighbor and colleague Leslie Johnston writes:
... I have a slightly different spin and some different reasons, but I don't buy it either.
I often take part in discussions about services for faculty and students, and sometimes hear ageist comments about how older faculty are completely non-digital and all students are automatically all digital. Hah! Just like some folks have an interest or skill in languages or math or art and some folks don't, it's the same with whatever "digital" is. I have worked with faculty in 60s who saw something in being digital decades ago and have worked in that realm for years. I have worked with colleagues -- librarians and faculty -- in my own age group (I'm 44) who hate all technology with a passion and others who embrace it in all ways. I have worked with students at three different research universities who could not care less about being digital.
Being digital is not generational. At the core of what Jeff Gomez calls "Generation Download" and "Generation Upload" in his book Print is Dead, there is truly an ubiquitousness of digital media use that is changing media consumption and production paradigms and changing the media market. There is absolutely an increased level of acceptance that this is standard operating procedure. I'm still not willing to agree that an entire generation is digital and that the entirety of other generations are not. There's still predilection and interest and skill and, yes, issues of availability and affordability of technology that crosses all generations.
There are degrees of digital-ness. Different comfort levels. Different skill levels. Different levels of access. What do we have to apply such absolute labels?
Right on.
As Henry Jenkins writes, there is so much interesting stuff going one out there among age groups, among members of communities, and across oceans that flattening out everyone into "generations" or "natives" and "immigrants" is just false and useless.
It also has real-world implications. Once we assume that the kids out there love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that meet our presumptions. By doing so, we either pander to some marketing cliche or force an otherwise diverse group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might not meet their needs.
More precisely, we rush to digitize with an emphasis on speed and size rather and worry about quality and utility later. This is my problem with Paul Courant's argument, "We have a generation of students who will not find valuable scholarly works unless they can find them electronically." That's simply not true. Besides, it twists a policy debate by using a market-based version of that classic rhetorical fallacy, "appeal to authority." As educators, we are guides to the best ways to research, write, and argue. Pandering to an imaginary market force is doing no one any favors.
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Comments (3)
And yet, your argument against oversimplification is itself a massive oversimplification, and one of the things that makes academic debate so frequently useless. You and Jenkins and whoever else can happily condemn these generational classifications as gross generalizations that, like any generalizations, are sometimes wrong. What you're really doing is arguing about how often the "sometimes" is, and whether it's large enough to render useless the convenience these abstractions give us.
I maintain, obviously, that your objections are nitpicking. Yes, I know a story about someone's grandma who uses the internet. I also know, conservatively, nine times as many grandmas who don't, who are utterly baffled by it, and, more to the point, find the whole "thing" a bunch of nonsense. The fact that, in their minds, the entirety of digital culture constitutes a "thing" is the clearest evidence of the problem we're talking about.
Symmetrically, I know some neo-luddites ... well, I was going to say that I know some neo-luddites in their twenties, but the fact is that I don't. Still, I don't deny there are some. This doesn't change the fact that if I go to an Ashley Simpson concert, and throw a rock, I'd be pretty damn surprised if the person I hit didn't have a MySpace page.
So yes, point conceded: there are people who slip outside these labels, or any labels. There were, no doubt, tenderhearted Nazis, homophobes who love musicals, and all the rest. You can go to a monster truck rally and find people passionate about Proust. My point is that there aren't terribly many, so if somebody wants to say "People who like monster trucks don't read Proust" it's fine with me, and it should be fine with you.
Actually, the working poor constitute more than 40 million Americans. They don't have time for MySpace or Ashley Simpson. Too many journalistic generalizations focus on the wealthy as if they are everyone.
So this is not nitpicking. The idea of a "generation" has no stability or validity what so every. Period. No nits there. Done. It is both sociologically invalid and historically ridiculous.
As I wrote in a previous post, talking generations makes as much sense as talking about astrology. It can be a cute and fun diversion, but we learn nothing from it and it can be dangerous to make decisions based on it.
This is not about some sliver of society that rebels against the zeitgeist. It is about a false segment of analysis that means nothing and makes no sense upon scrutiny.
There is nothing "academic" about this discussion, except that Henry and I deal with young people every day at work. So we have some insight into how things have changed over the past decade or two.
Besides, having a MySpace page says nothing about one's digital dexterity or cultural preferences. If anything, people who use MySpace do so because they cannot or will not use digital media in a sophisticated way. MySpace is the Web with training wheels.
Actually, the working poor constitute more than 40 million Americans. They don't have time for MySpace or Ashley Simpson. Too many journalistic generalizations focus on the wealthy as if they are everyone.
Here's a thought experiment: what if we gathered up all the American "working poor" and put them in a room, and then segmented them by age, let's say: under 20, and then 20-40, and then several more, across whatever strata you prefer, and then we sat them down, one by one, in front of a computer with an internet connection, and said: what's on television tonight in Boston? And: what's Ashley Simpson's concert schedule? And: what's Kevin Garnett's scoring average? And any other question, at any other degree of sophistication, that requires technical competence, and particularly net savvy, to answer under these circumstances.
You contend, apparently, that there is no predictive power in the "age bucket" random variable. I contend that there is. If you have a reference to any actual science that shows otherwise, please share.
There is nothing "academic" about this discussion, except that Henry and I deal with young people every day at work. So we have some insight into how things have changed over the past decade or two.
With such a wealth of insight it should be simplicity itself to provide a reference to the sort of results mentioned above.