WEEK 9. 7c

A person known to you (could be you, but you don't need to admit it!) who most threatens the notion of native/immigrant in digital culture.

I think the phrase ‘digital immigrant’ is much more subjective/flexible than it initially seems, depending on the technologies in question. Although by most definitions I am a digital native, certain occasions would suggest otherwise. When babysitting a 6 and 10 year old, I found that I had little idea about how to use the programmes they were using on the computer, and despite them teaching me I failed to pick it up very well. They then found games online which they had never played before yet still went on to beat me. As they had never played before, it suggests that their nativism to technologies which I am unfamiliar with means their brains have learnt to work in ways which mine simple doesn’t. By 11.00am (I’m usually quite a good babysitter, but I didn’t want to be outsmarted by a 6year old) I admitted defeat and realised that the game was not something I could just ‘learn’ in a few hours but that my brain just didn’t work like theirs.
This leads me to argue that while I class myself as a native for some technologies, I am an immigrant when it comes to others and just don’t possess what is required to learn them. 7 years younger than the supposed cut off for digital nativism, I feel that in these circumstances I am a young digital immigrant. As more technologies come about which I may not learn to use, I feel this might be the case more often in the future as a generation of new digital natives comes about.