Found via NewsTrust.
It’s been and it still is a lot of talk about Internet demographics. Criteria like age, sex, ethnicity have all been mixed together in the sociological pot in order to identify throughout the cyberspace various populations of users with different behaviors and to monitor their mobility and evolution. Notions like “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” are not new anymore. The first one relates of course to the N (Net) or M (Media) Generation, otherwise mentioned as the “Millenials”, and many statistics and studies show us that the Baby Boomers are starting to catch up quickly with (the help of) their youngsters in that concern, setting their first and shy foot on the digital land, as immigrants.
L.A. Johnson couldn’t agree more with these phenomena, but with a few observations of his own. During all this hype, emphasizing the Millenials’ cyber-lead and the Baby Boomers’ digital intro, people seem to have forgotten the good old hacker, the pioneer, the geek, the visionary, generally a special type of Baby Boomer, spending big chunks of time with making and improving the computer and the Internet networks and applications, discovering and exploring the digital universe since before very few people knew it was somewhere out there, and finally building cyber-roads for the next generation. By volcanic tech revolutions, the both titanic and passionate work of the pioneers surfaced above the waters of the old Guttenbergian and analogic world the young, steaming, flexible, and ever expanding terrain of the digital era.
As a once smaller, more privileged and more silent world, the cyberspace rapidly gained population, speed, color and sound, flourishing into a rich and vivid digital jungle. The United States of the Cyberspace is now the noisiest amalgam of pioneer, native and immigrant accents coexisting together. Exactly because of this immense complexity, Johnson argues that the Internet demographic research should not embrace a binary point of view when it comes to digital populations and the relationship between them.
It’s true that the process of getting informed and learning was deeply changed by the new media and that definitely brought major shifts in everybody’s weltanschauung. It might be true even the fact that the brain’s neural pathways were redirected by the new digital environment. Still, this couldn’t have caused already structural modifications of the brain, as some claim; this couldn’t happen over just one or two generations. Also, the present doesn’t involve a total obliteration of the past, with its previous types of media and ways of learning.
On the contrary, the usual process of mutual assimilation works here too. In cyberspace, the first generation of natives can thank to the pioneering fathers and shake hands with the other immigrating Baby Boomers, while exchanging tech tips and sharing digital experiences… because “Cultural assimilation rarely entails a wholesale abandonment of previous customs or practices; rather, it typically involves a flexible process of negotiation and adaptation, wherein certain elements of both cultures are retained in a new combination with one another.” This is why, in response to anyone hyper-emphasizing the divide between Internet use and Internet generations, Johnson’s answer it that “We can breach any divide - digital or generational- with deeper understanding.“
Found via NewsTrust.
It’s been and it still is a lot of talk about Internet demographics. Criteria like age, sex, ethnicity have all been mixed together in the sociological pot in order to identify throughout the cyberspace various populations of users with different behaviors and to monitor their mobility and evolution. Notions like “digital natives” and [...]
