It seems that everyone born with a computer in his or her crib (“digital natives” or DNs) differs from those of us who were not (“digital immigrants” or DIs). Their brains develop in a different way. The way they learn is different. The jury is still out as to whether this is good or bad.

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, cites numerous studies that show young DNs’ disaffection with reading. In one case, over 40 percent of college freshmen said they did not enjoy reading serious books and articles, doing so “only when I have to.” In another survey of high school graduates who went on to college, one quarter of them said they never read a word of literature, sports, travel, politics, or anything else for either enjoyment or illumination. A 2004 report indicated that 20 percent of entering college freshmen end up in remedial writing courses and even more in remedial reading courses.

But not everyone agrees that reading or writing is still pertinent. Bauerlein offers this from a digital native writing on a USA Today blog: “Today’s young people don’t suffer from illiteracy; they just suffer from e-literacy. We can’t spell and we don’t know synonyms because we don’t need to know. What smart young person would spend hours learning words that can be accessed at the click of a button? Spell-check can spell. Shift + F7 produces synonyms.” Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, asserts that digital youth create a new kind of literacy that goes beyond the traditions of reading and writing. Science writer Steven Johnson, appearing on the Colbert Report, touted the digital game Civilization IV because 12-year-olds who play it can “recreate the entire course of human economic and technological history.”

A 2005 Pew report praised teenagers as content creators. Other surveys cite the ability of the digital natives to “construct knowledge” and “create communities.” MacArthur Foundation’s Fanton in 2007 speculated: “Might it be that, for many, the richest environment for learning is no longer the classroom, it is outside the classroom — online and after school?” The foundation’s five-year, $50-million project, Digital Media and Learning, may help answer that provocative question.

Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital and its sequel, Grown Up Digital, gives his impression of the impact of the “rich, interactive media environment” on today’s youth. “This generation has been flooded with information, and learning to access, sort, categorize, and remember it all has enhanced their intelligence.”

While critics of today’s digital youth have characterized them as materialistic, impulsive, greedy, self-centered, intolerant, and concerned only with their own financial success and personal possessions, Tapscott classifies the younger generation in North America as open, tolerant, possessing strong values, and as the least prejudiced generation ever. But, he says, they do insist on independence of choice, and the ability to collaborate, scrutinize and customize. They expect entertainment and play in all aspects of their life, including work and education. They need to be connected around the clock to whomever they wish. As one of them put it, “My high school reunion happens on Facebook. All day. Everyday.”

Tapscott’s generous attribution of high intelligence and morals to the digital generation notwithstanding, he admits that many of them are careless about protecting their own privacy online. Also, they may determine their own rules with respect to others’ rights, even if contrary to law. For example, he cites estimates that 77 percent of them guiltlessly download music, software, games, or movies without paying for them.

Other doubters of the digital dream cite media hopping and multitasking as contributory to digital natives’ inability to focus on anything for very long. So they can’t reflect on “the vagaries, complexities, and caprices of life essential to the forming of conscience, empathy, and a sense of social justice,” as expressed by Timothy Dugdale, a professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy. In Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, she concludes that the advances in communications technology notwithstanding, the ability of the American public to connect with one another in a meaningful way is worsening.

Despite the burgeoning content of useful information available via the Internet, worriers suggest that student researchers often cannot or do not separate it from the dross. The richness of resources readily available, they say, makes it easy for the student to “cut and paste” reports that contain little original thinking, and the contents of which are usually cadged from the first page of the various sources they visit, with no attempt to vet questionable sources.

Gary Small, author of iBrain, concludes that multitasking allows digital natives to instantly gratify themselves and put off long-term goals. Dr. Small, Director of the Memory and Aging Center at UCLA, notes that the competing simultaneous tasks of multitasking often yield a superficial view of the information being presented, not in-depth comprehension.

Small goes on to cite MRI brain scan studies at University College in London that lead him to conclude that the obsession of teenagers with computer technology and video gaming may be stunting frontal lobe development, thus impairing the social and reasoning abilities of many of them. He warns that they may remain at an immature and self-absorbed emotional level throughout adulthood.

Sociologists also note concerns about the addictive nature of the Internet — the need of many digital natives to be always connected, the urge to spend hours daily playing video games, the passion to blog, and the need to receive and respond to e-mail messages at all hours of the day or night. Such habits impair the ability of DNs to relate well in face-to-face relationships with family and friends. The part of the brain that helps us empathize with the concerns of others and how decisions we make may impact them remain underdeveloped, it is reported. Some wonder whether this may also play a role in the prevalence of bullying in schools.

The Debate Goes On

In response to Bauerlein’s Dumbest Generation, Tapscott wrote “This is not a shallow, materialistic generation. On the contrary, this is a generation of community volunteers and activists. They actually want to make their world a little better.” When he asked twenty-somethings to respond to Bauerlein’s thesis, one wrote “I’d like to better understand exactly how having a vast repository of knowledge and information at my fingertips somehow makes me dumber, or how being able to communicate with anybody else on the planet instantaneously leaves me more ignorant of the world’s workings.” But proving that the debate simmers on, another responded: “Our generation is awash in the present but we may be underinformed about the past. We are perpetually connected to events across the planet as they occur in realtime, making us self-important and complacent. Rather than get up and do something, we convince ourselves that by blogging about events we somehow affect their outcome.”

In the end, of course, most digital immigrants will become digital citizens. They too will become dumber (or smarter). And like the digital natives, they will be early adopters, eagerly wanting to try out the next technical communications device.

This is good news for the engineering profession. Isn’t it?

Resources

Bauerlein, M., The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young
Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Penguin, 2008.

Tapscott, D., Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World,
McGraw-Hill, 2009.

Tapscott, D., Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, McGraw-Hill, 1997.

Jackson, M., Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Ages,
Prometheus Books, 2008.

Small, G., and G. Vorgan, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, Harper Collins, 2008.

Zittrain, J., The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Yale University Press, 2008.

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