SIVACRACY.NET

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.