“Digital natives, digital immigrants,” how do I loathe ye?

One challenge to this existing narrative is the emerging image of the geek or creative-class parent who is gaming with their kids, is tech-savvy, and provides a meaningful mentorship that values an empowered identity in relation to new media. This alternative orientation is defining a new digital learning elite characterized by particular kinds of social and cultural capital.

If we are going to make meaningful interventions here, we have to go well beyond the myth of the digital native, which tends to flatten diversity and mask inequality. We need to engage more closely with the very different ways that young people encounter new media in the contexts of lives that are defined around different kinds of expectations and norms, different resources and constraints, from those encountered by youth raised under more privileged circumstances.

We’ve seen a fragmentation of tools being used

Teenagers need opportunities to learn how to interact in a healthy way in public and with strangers. They need to learn to take measured risks and face the consequences of their decisions.

For some adults, the phrase “digital immigrant” functions as a kind of learned helplessness: “I shouldn’t be expected to learn how to use this new technology because I wasn’t born in the right generation.”

They use song lyrics, pronouns, and in-jokes to have conversations that can technically be accessed but whose meaning is rendered invisible.

When surveyed, youth consistently report that bullying happens more frequently at school, with greater intensity, and with more social and emotional costs. Parents, on the other hand, focus on the digital realm.

Through social media, people have the ability to see – and interact with – people who are radically different than them. This means that youth can be exposed to new ideas and new people, not just in the abstract but through direct interaction.

Today’s social and mobile media are part of this longer trajectory of media and technology, giving young people tools to access and participate in adult worlds and having adult-like autonomy and privacy.

it’s important to shine a light on how adults often unreasonably curtail young people’s freedom and voice.

Technology was a way to gain unprecedented kinds of access to adult worlds and power.

Whether comic books were morally corruptive or video games made kids violent mattered less than the ability to drive fear through the heart of parents by suggesting that any new media would ruin their children.

By positioning youth as “other,” adults fail to recognize or appreciate the ways in which youth use technology to connect with others, learn, and participate in public life.