‘Digital natives’?: Assessing the digital generation gap

Canadian business consultant Don Tapscott was an early proponent of the ‘digital generation gap’ thesis. For Tapscott, young people on the cusp of the new millennium were set apart from their parents. Dubbing them the ‘Net Generation’, Tapscott argued that contemporary youngsters thought and learned differently as a consequence of their immersion, since birth, in digital technologies. ‘For many kids, using the new technology' is as natural as breathing’, Tapscott enthused (1998: 4). ‘Boomers, stand back’, he cautioned, ‘these kids are already playing, communicating, working, and creating communities very differently' than their parents’ (1998: 2).

Marc Prensky (2001) advanced similar arguments. For Prensky, young people born roughly between 1980 and 1994 were ‘digital natives’. They were, he argued, indigenous to the world of digital technologies and had lived their whole lives ‘surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age’ (2001: 1). As a consequence, Prensky argued, young people were distinguished by their high levels of technological literacy and confident engagement with digital media. In contrast, Prensky' deemed older groups ‘digital immigrants’. Gast as lacking the technological fluency of the new generation, the older ‘immigrants’ were presented as often being bewildered by the dexterous skills of the young. And, for some theorists, the shift demanded fundamental educational changes to accommodate the new skillsets of ‘digital natives’ who, it was held, were experiential learners, proficient in multi-tasking and reliant on communications technologies for accessing information.¹¹¹ Such ideas won considerable interest among journalists, politicians, and policy-makers but, for critics, they were open to question.

Writers like Tapscott and Prensky (like Strauss and Howe) were criticised for providing little in the way of empirical evidence to substantiate their case. Instead, it was argued, they had relied on anecdotes, conjecture, and speculation. Moreover, some critics pointed to the way their arguments were underpinned by a high measure of ‘technological determinism’. That is to say, they tended to see technology as an autonomous force that develops somehow independently from human society. Or, as David Buckingham puts it, ‘technology is seen to emerge from a neutral process of scientific research and development, rather than from the interplay of complex social, economic, and political forces. It is then seen to have effects - to bring about social psychological, and political changes - irrespective of the ways in which it is used, and of the social contexts into which it enters’ (Buckingham, 2006: 9). In contrast, influential media scholars such as Raymond Williams (1974) have long challenged the reductionist!! of such an approach and its tendency to neglect the way technologies are, themselves, shaped by human activity in a pre-existing social context. Certainly, technologies possess their own, inherent qualities. But the ‘digital natives’ thesis tended to ignore the way the rise of technologies is indebted to an interplay of social, economic, and political factors. Moreover, it disregarded the way the uses of technology are largely shaped by those who control its production and distribution.

The ideas of writers such as Tapscott and Prensky also side-lined the continuity and interdependency that existed between ‘new’ (digital) media and ‘old’ (analogue) media (for example, TV, films, or radio). Their approach exemplified what Gabriele Balbi and Paolo Magaudda (2018) see as a ‘newness ideology’ common in much writing about the media, which sees the newest media as the most evolved and best outcome of a historically linear process of development. In reality, however, media development is often incremental and full of conflicting pathways. ‘The most recent medium’, Balbi and Magaudda explain, ‘is not always the best one and media histories are often a process of trial and error, forms of metabolization and rejection by potential users’ (20). Furthermore, there is rarely any sudden leap from an ‘old’ media epoch into a dazzlingly new one. Rather, Balbi and Magaudda argue:

... it is almost impossible to distinguish between old and new media because the latter often imitate or are, at least, inspired by older forms and these are then in turn subjected to a process of remediation and meaning transfer prompted by new technologies ... In any specific historical period, in other words, the various media are all interrelated and reciprocal according to an intermedia logic.

(Balbi and Magaudda, 2018: 20)

Notions of a new generation of ‘digital natives’ were also flawed by their tendencies to overstate and homogenise young people’s relationship with new technologies. Tapscott and Prensky, for instance, both overlooked the relatively pedestrian character of much digital media usage by young people. Indeed, empirical studies suggest that young people’s use of the Internet is hardly spectacular, but is characterised by fairly mundane forms of information retrieval — visiting websites, listening to music, messaging friends, watching YouTube videos and so on." Moreover, writing in 2008, the Australian educationalist Sue Bennett and her associates criticised ideas of a new ‘digital’ generation’ for being woefully over-generalised (Bennett, Marton and Kervin, 2008). Supporting their case, Bennett et al. cited empirical research in the US which had found that, while ownership and use of digital technologies was widespread among young people, the degree of technical skill they possessed was variable, with only a small minority (21 per cent) actively engaging with the creation of multimedia content (Kvavik, Caruso and Morgan, 2004). This was supported by studies of Australian university students undertaken by Beverley Oliver and Veronica Goerke (2007), and Gregor Kennedy et al. (2008). Both studies found that digital media may have been widely used by young people, but their degree of skill and expertise was variable. As Kennedy and his associates put it, ‘there are clearly areas where the use of and familiarity with technology-based tools is far from universal or uniform’ (2008: 115). And similar findings have been produced by studies of students from Britain, China, and South Africa.^1-

Overall, then, empirical research finds little evidence that young people have adopted learning styles radically different to those of adults. Moreover, while studies show that young people certainly use a wide range of digital technologies for education and entertainment, their degree of technical expertise is variable, and is significantly affected by issues such as gender, ethnicity, and class. So, as Bennett and her associates astutely concluded, ‘It may be that there is as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations’ (Bennett, Marton and Kervin, 2008: 779).

Such variations become especially stark when seen in the context of the global ‘digital divide’. The term ‘digital divide’ denotes forms of inequality of access to digital media, communication technologies and, in particular, the Internet. Such inequalities can take a variety of forms - between different social groups, for example, or between different geographical regions. But particular concern has focused on the ‘digital divide’ between rich nations (generally with high Internet coverage) and poor nations (with more limited access). As Balbi and Magaudda argue, global institutions such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have long promoted economic policies to combat this digital divide in the belief that the spread of the Internet will ‘naturally’ lead to progressive social démocratisation, while private firms such as Facebook have also made significant investments designed to extend worldwide Internet access (Balbi and Magaudda, 2018: 108). But, while these initiatives have met with a measure of success, the digital divide remains pronounced. For example, data suggests that by the end of 2017 nearly half the world’s population did not use the Internet. And, while 95 per cent of people in North America had access to the Web, this compared to just 32 per cent of people in Africa (Balbi and Magaudda, 2018: 109).

The global digital divide, moreover, is particularly pronounced among the young. In 2017 the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that young people aged between 15 and 24 were the world’s ‘most connected age group’ — with 71 per cent online, compared to 48 per cent of the world’s general population (UNICEF, 2017: 1). But this still left about 29 per cent of youth worldwide — around 346 million youngsters - who were not online, and nearly 9 out of 10 of these lived in Africa or Asia and the Pacific (UNICEF, 2017: 45). Additionally, there was a pronounced gender gap — with, globally, 12 per cent more men than women using the Internet, while in India less than one-third of Internet users were female (UNICEF, 2017: 1).

Digital divides, furthermore, do not simply result from different levels of physical access. Inequalities in terms of technical skills and experience are also important. In her (2014) study of young people in Sri Lanka, for example, Dinuka Wijetunga found that, even though economically underprivileged youngsters often had access to mobile phones with sophisticated communication capabilities, their ability to use these features was much less than their economically advantaged peers. For the most part, she found, the poorer youngsters relied on the phones’ talk and text features, and made little use of any Internet capabilities (despite being keen to access them). This, Wijetunga argued, was a consequence of social and cultural inequalities. The poorer youngsters, she explained, may have had access to phones with advanced features, but the instructions to use them (as well as the services themselves) were only available in English — which the youngsters could not understand. Furthermore, the more economically advantaged groups had prior experience of using services like Facebook on computers at home and at school, and could transfer this familiarity to their use of mobile phones. Poorer youngsters, however, had no comparable experience, so struggled to use such features on their phones. Rather than simply inequalities of access, then, Wijetunga concluded that it was ‘certain design characteristics of the phone [that] prevented underprivileged youth from using many of the features that their privileged counterparts routinely make use of in their daily communication activity’ (Wijetunga, 2014: 713).