Cliche watch: "digital native"

In a professional meeting recently, I heard someone lament that she was not a "digital native" and referred to herself as an "immigrant" in digital culture.

Maybe this has some usefulness as a metaphor in education circles. Maybe it has achieved some status because of the current fashion in literary studies for metaphors of cosmopolitanism, immigration, transnationalism, migrations, etc.

Mostly, though, as used in conversation, the "digital native" idea creates a false distinction. It assumes that there is a fundamental inability to understand a technology if you haven't grown up with it, which is an assumption or belief and not a fact. It also assumes that various technologies cannot become naturalized or do not seem natural to those who haven't grown up with them.

The concept of "digital native" seems to come from the touching belief of each generation that its technologies are so transformative, so life-changing, that no one over the age of seven can grasp their full impact except as an outsider. My students might like to say (in their favorite cliche) that this has been true since the dawn of time, but let's just take the twentieth century:

1920s: "These kids today and their automobiles! They don't have to harness up Bessie to the wagon to go into town anymore. They're so mobile! How will we ever understand the ways they think? We are not automobile natives and can never, ever catch up. "

1950s: "Why, this new generation can actually SEE Jack Benny on television instead of just hearing him on the radio! This will totally transform the way we teach. Teachers will become obsolete, since everyone will just listen to a master teacher on television. We are not television natives and can never understand the ways in which their brains are wired." (If you don't think this is accurate, check out an old Life or Time magazine from the era.)

2000s: "These kids today are digital natives, and we, poor sods, are always going to be digital immigrants. They think in completely new ways, and we can never, ever catch up!"

I don't know why this metaphor annoys me so. To be honest, it's no more annoying than the Boomer/Gen X/Gen Y cliches that lazy magazine writers bring out when they have a big chunk o' space to fill with feel-good or feel-bad anecdotes. ("Boomer Files" in Newsweek, anyone?) When I hear people use "digital native," though, a lot of times they're flapping their hands about how they'll just never get the whole concept of these internet tubes in the ways that the young folks do, which seems to me both (1) lazy and (2) a fundamental evasion of the problem, which is their unwillingness to engage with digital culture.

Well, guess what? This divide isn't generational. I know 70-year-olds who can reinstall hard drives, reset a computer's BIOS (or whatever it is), and use Photoshop in ways that would put the rest of us to shame and supposed "digital natives" who can't send an attachment.

So do I think that the digital revolution (to be pretentious about it) has changed the ways in which people, and especially our students, think, read, and access information? Of course it has. But the "digital native" idea? Ultimately, that's a stereotype that, like most of them, tells less about the people being categorized than about those who seek to categorize them.

[Update 12/5/07: There's a good (and more serious) essay about this, including additional links, at Confessions of an Aca/Fan.]
[Edited to add: There's also just the slightest possibility that corporations and advertisers have found a way to make a buck by preying on our insecurities and anxieties about teaching "digital natives," just as they've managed to do when selling us mouthwash and deodorant. Nah, that couldn't happen.]

Cliche watch (again)

I've already written about how cliches like "we take this very seriously" don't mean much except in the bizarro world sense of meaning the opposite of what they say.

Now two of my other favorite political cliches are in the news.

One is the profession that one is doing something "in good faith," which if you look at the outcomes associated with such words is almost never the case.

Example from the New York Times:

Mr. Sampson’s e-mail message, sent to the White House and Justice Department colleagues, suggested he was hoping to stall efforts by the state’s two Democratic senators to pick their own candidates as permanent successors for Mr. Cummins.

“I think we should gum this to death,” Mr. Sampson wrote. “Ask the senators to give Tim a chance, meet with him, give him some time in office to see how he performs, etc. If they ultimately say ‘no never’ (and the longer we can forestall that the better), then we can tell them we’ll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All this should be done in ‘good faith’ of course.”

That set of quotation marks says it all about the level of cynicism with which this phrase is too often employed.

The other is the perennial favorite of passive voice construction "mistakes were made." Again from the New York Times:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales fell back on a classic Washington linguistic construct on Tuesday when he acknowledged that “mistakes were made” in the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors last year.

The phrase sounds like a confession of error or even contrition, but in fact, it is not quite either one. The speaker is not accepting personal responsibility or pointing the finger at anyone else. It is a construction that other officials, from Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary to Ronald Reagan to John H. Sununu and Bill Clinton, have used when someone’s hand was caught in the federal cookie jar.

It is similar to a form of apology often heard here and in Hollywood, perhaps most memorably by Justin Timberlake’s press agent after the 2004 Super Bowl halftime incident involving Janet Jackson. “I am sorry if anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance,” the agent said.

In 1991, Mr. Sununu, then the chief of staff to President George Bush, was caught violating various White House travel rules. He retreated behind the language of obfuscation. “Clearly, no one regrets more than I do the appearance of impropriety,” he said. “Obviously, some mistakes were made.”

I teach this when I teach passive voice, not merely as an example of the construction but as an example of how language can be used in powerfully corrupt ways, and by powerful people, to distort and destroy meaning.

Examples like this can show students that we're not just saying that language matters because we're English teachers with a vested interest in abstruse subjects like voice and mode.

We're saying it because we understand that language is power, and the sooner students understand that, the better.