"Digital Natives" in Scare Quotes

Danah Boyd, “Literacy: Are Today’s Youth Digital Natives?” from It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (2014)

This is a chapter from a longer book that I found a link to on Tumblr, of all places. I’m not sure I want to read an entire ethnographic study about “networked teens,” but this chapter was illuminating. Every year I get a surprising number of students who have close to zero digital literacy, and it goes without saying that I encounter a lot of people like this online as well.

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I feel like a lot of kids manage to pick up some degree of digital literacy purely by osmosis, but what Boyd is arguing is that we shouldn’t take this osmosis for granted. If nothing else, this chapter presents some of the absolutely buck-wild stupid shit that people apparently believed back in the early 2010s, and it’s horrible to say this, but I was amused and entertained.

By the way, (this is the link) to the PDF of the book chapter if you’re interested.

On "Empathy" Games

Teddy Pozo, “Queer Games After Empathy: Feminism and Haptic Game Design Aesthetics from Consent to Cuteness to the Radically Soft,” in Games Studies (2018)

Bonnie Ruberg, “Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of ‘Empathy’ in Video Games,” in Communication, Culture & Critique (2020)

Neither of these articles is easy to read due to decontextualized citations and poorly defined terminology, but this is what I think their authors are arguing:

(a) It’s not cool for corporations to commodify queer experiences branded as “empathy,”
(b) it’s not the job of indie game designers to sell their personal work as educational content, and
(c) we shouldn’t assume that the default identity of a “gamer” is a straight cisgender male anyway.

In order to protest being discursively commodified for an audience of straight men, a small handful of super-indie game developers have created “games” that push back against the idea that their job is to teach a mainstream audience how to empathize with minorities. I’m putting “games” in scare quotes here because these most of these works are deliberately inaccessible, while some only exist in the form of gallery performance art.

This is my take on the conversation:

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