Blog #1

Marc Prensky and Danah Boyd talk about the term "digital native" from opposite sides. Before reading Danah Boyd's chapter, I was agreeing with Marc Prensky's theories. I agreed with his theory because I believe that I am an example of a digital native and understood how he described it. I related to the way he talked about the differences that were between the digital immigrant versus the digital native. I resonated a lot when we talked about digital natives being able to parallel process things instead of linear processing. Oftentimes, I find myself doing a bunch of things at once, such as watching a show, on Facetime and doing homework. For me, this is normal and easy to do but to my mom, this comes off as distracted and she questions how I manage to do it. I have always been the "tech-savvy" person in my family but now looking back I believe it was because I knew how to read English. I was raised by two Spanish-only-speaking parents. I was their little personal translator since I started going to school. There was always a computer in my house, which was the only computer that all my family used.  When I say all I mean, ALL my cousins would come over to do their homework and save it on their floppy discs, check their Myspace, or even just play games. During my downtime, I was found playing games on the computer or changing the layout of my Myspace page. 

I loved Danah Boyd’s chapter way more because it just made more sense. I liked how she canceled the narrative that society has when it comes to digital natives. She states that everyone has to develop these technological skills and that it requires hard work no matter the age group. Boyd says that teens have just a basic understanding of how computer systems work on a day-to-day basis. She talked about how Myspace and its layouts and backgrounds came about and how it was a glitch that teens discovered. This blew my mind because I remember that I would sit for hours changing my background at the age of eight. I went back on Myspace a little over a year ago to see how different it was from the social media I currently use. I was shocked that I still remembered my login information but I had no idea how I used to change the background and music. I was part of that “learning through clicking” group, where I would just click to see where it would lead me and most of the time it would lead straight to viruses. Over time, I have seen computers become smaller and smaller. I have seen the iPhone go through all its phases from 0 to 14. We went from paying the internet per minute used on our phones to having unlimited data. Most of us now have access to the internet through the touch of our fingertips. And instead of having to carry the huge computer that Lesley was talking about we carry the mini-computers in our pockets which are our phones.