Love your little Natives.

A while ago I read an article about the digital age we live in. We all live in it whether we like it or not. But, how did we get here was the idea. Are we Digital Immigrants, or Digital Natives. The basis of this is that people born before 1980 are all Digital Immigrants and people born 1980 and later are Digital Natives. People born after 1980 have never known an undigital world. There are some of us like my self, born in 1970, that even though I do not fall into the Native status I feel like a Native but I still know too much of the "old world" to truly be of the Native mind set. Even though the Natives have seen some of our primitive devices in a closet or out in the garage or in old pictures they have never experienced or used any of them. Here is an example, try to follow it may be confusing at first...

Tori: Hey mom we were at Sammy's grandma's house an we found this thing in the closet it was so cool.

Me: What was it?

Tori: It was like this box thingy, it had buttons, , but the box was like a key board, it plugged in but it did not have a screen so we could not see what it did.

Me: Tori did it have a black roller thing at the top, kinda in the box part?

Tori" Yea, how did you know?

Me: (now try to imagine the confusion and amazement all at the same time in my voice) Tori it was a typewriter.

Tori: What's that? (and she truly was not kidding)

So then I had to explain typewriters and answer all the questions that followed. "So you couldn't save anything? How do you back up and fix an error? how do you spell check? what if you need more than one copy? How did you add pictures?" I was not about to try to explain how we digital immigrants actually created the phrase "copy and paste" by actually copying and pasting.

Oh my gosh, this was such a wake up call for me. So, now when I see her texting away on the phone or Taylor typing 120 words a minute (he really does type that fast) all while listen to their ipods and answering 3 IM's and editing the digital movies they just made to up load to YouTube, I need to remind my self this is all normal in their world.

Just like my mom used holler across the room, "scoot back from the TV its bad for your eyes, or is that phone attached to your ear"? I find my self telling my kids they are going to have carpel tunnel from texting or rot their brains from to many video games.

It starts so young now. My 4 year old, Timmy, is definitely of the next, more advanced generation of digital natives. His generation will probably make fun of Taylor and Tori's devices just like we look back and laugh at how big cell phones used to be. He can almost out do Taylor(16) on most video games and can already get on and off the computer all by himself. He is smart in reference to what he thinks I want to hear too. The other day I walked in to the room and he must have sensed that I was going to tell him to turn off the games now. He quickly put up his hand and said "wait, wait, wait,... Mommy, this game is not bad for my brains". I gave him 10 more minutes and apparently his brains were tired. I came back and he was asleep mid game.




Well that's all for now. This may not be bad for my brains, but I only type about 20 words a minute so my fingers and brains are tired.