I think that the first real generations of digital natives are just coming into being. Palfrey and Gasser talk about digital natives as those who were born in the 80s and grew up using computers throughout their formative years. Although this generation grew up when computers were beginning to become commonplace in homes they are only mildly on the cusp of what a digital lifestyle has and is becoming.
While I was reading Born Digital and particularly the chapter on digital dossiers I could not help but think about my children and how many digital documents must exist on them already. They are only 5, 4 and 19 months and I myself have already posted about them on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. My daughter's pre-K class has a web site and the teacher posts regular pictures of the kids doing activities for parents and family to see. We recently switched doctors and I noticed that the new office has digitized all of our previous physicians records and keeps everything digitally they do digitally rather than using pen and paper. I don't have a problem with these methods because I myself am comfortable in this environment but my children are unaware and out of control of the information that is being pushed into the world about them.
The text has really made me think about what I, myself post and how I present it. I'm not sure I will change what I am doing because I don't feel a few images are not that harmful but with sites like the wayback machine in existence my children are clearly living a life as a digital native whether they like it or not and have minimal control over the impression that others have of them based on this information.
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6 years ago
What might homes of the future look like if they include more automation? Seems to me that digital natives in the future, when they start buying homes, or people like us who are in fact native-speaking update our homes, what might they look like? Right now, for instance, I'm really wanting securing cameras everyone so that I can observe different things without being there. I'm a webcam generation guy.
ReplyDeleteAmazing how much inforamtion is on your children already. There are big benefits to that, but also one wonders how that information will be bought and sold in the future.
I used to find the web an incredibly freeing space, and I used to put everything up. I was documenting life for a number of years, in fact. Regular blogger for 5 years, daily. But, then, my home was burglarized. For some reason the home invasion also invaded my energy for putting my life online as well. Not exactly sure why, but probably a lot of had to do with the time and money vested in the environment I used to have at home, but have never been able to replace. That changes in a world where easy of posting is as simple as talking or tapping.