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"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.
For years I’ve been trying to ask colleagues where this lack of digital literacy comes from, but to no avail. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because an unfortunate number of my colleagues have no idea what I’m talking about. One might argue that this is why we need people younger than their late forties working in higher education, but what can you do.
Anyway, I finally have an answer to my question of “Why can’t they just google it,” which is: A lot of people understand the idiomatic use of the expression “just google it” but literally don’t know how to access Google. Essentially, many children and teenagers only access the internet through apps on their phone, and typing “google.com” into a web browser would never occur to them.
But then there’s the obvious question of how someone could get all the way through high school, get into college, and still not know how to use Google.
Apparently, the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act bears a lot of the blame. By being forced to focus on standardized tests, many public schools were no longer able to offer once-a-week special elective classes on subjects like music, computers, home economics, and so on. This means that a lot of Gen Z kids never had an opportunity to sit down in a computer lab with a teacher telling them what a search engine is, for example. On top of that, there’s the ongoing education employment crisis in which, just like higher education, very few (relatively) young people have been able to get jobs in primary or secondary schools, while many of the older teachers have no idea what Google and Wikipedia are and how they work, only that they’re “bad.”
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.
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.
For years I’ve been trying to ask colleagues where this lack of digital literacy comes from, but to no avail. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because an unfortunate number of my colleagues have no idea what I’m talking about. One might argue that this is why we need people younger than their late forties working in higher education, but what can you do.
Anyway, I finally have an answer to my question of “Why can’t they just google it,” which is: A lot of people understand the idiomatic use of the expression “just google it” but literally don’t know how to access Google. Essentially, many children and teenagers only access the internet through apps on their phone, and typing “google.com” into a web browser would never occur to them.
But then there’s the obvious question of how someone could get all the way through high school, get into college, and still not know how to use Google.
Apparently, the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act bears a lot of the blame. By being forced to focus on standardized tests, many public schools were no longer able to offer once-a-week special elective classes on subjects like music, computers, home economics, and so on. This means that a lot of Gen Z kids never had an opportunity to sit down in a computer lab with a teacher telling them what a search engine is, for example. On top of that, there’s the ongoing education employment crisis in which, just like higher education, very few (relatively) young people have been able to get jobs in primary or secondary schools, while many of the older teachers have no idea what Google and Wikipedia are and how they work, only that they’re “bad.”
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.