How Digital Are You?

I recently finished reading Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. I had first heard about this book in my first library school class when some of my classmates did a presentation on it. It sounded interesting, so I finally picked it up. The book is really geared towards parents and teachers, discussing the "digital lifestyle" of digital natives, a group that encompasses anyone born after 1980 and therefore raised during the accelerated development of technology. While the book was very interesting and covered a lot of good, general points about things like piracy, copyright, and privacy, among other topics relevant to today's digital world, I did feel a bit strange reading it. I'm at the older end of this first digital native generation. My peers and I remember the time before the Internet, before DVD players, before iPods, cell phones, CDs, I don't write papers in text message format, and I actually try to use proper grammar in my e-mails. A lot of the tips for parents and teachers I felt were intended for dealing with younger teenagers and older elementary school children. This is not to say that I did not enjoy the book. I think reading it from the perspective of an older digital native was kind of cool, in a way, because while I did grow up mostly during the development of the aforementioned technologies, I, along with everyone else born in the early to mid 80s did get a little taste of the "analog world". It made me think about my students, who, when I tell them that when I was their age (I can't believe I'm using that phrase around children already!), there were no cell phones, or iPods, and *gasp!* I had to do research with books and encyclopedias and use the card catalog in the library, they look at me like I'm insane. It makes me laugh.

I like being at the older end of this spectrum.

I will admit, though, that I am one to mildly freak out when my Internet doesn't work or when my cell phone dies and I temporarily lose contact with the world...: )