Blurring the Line Between Digital Native and Digital Immigrant

The idea of what a digital native truly is can be a heavily debated topic. A native in layman's terms is essentially someone who was the first to own or be a part of a place. So technically in that sense I myself can be considered a digital native. But when looking at various definitions on the internet, they believe that it is someone who has been brought up in this age without any prior knowledge which would therefore make me something known as a digital immigrant as I was born slightly before it and therefore "immigrated" into the world. Would you consider someone who is 40 to be a digital native? Of course not. Will the fact that kids nowadays have not lived in a time without digital technology become a problem in the future? What kind of effects will this have?
 
Take for instance the baby who doesn't know the difference between an iPad and a magazine. Although this may seem like an extreme example as they're only 1 year old, it's interesting to think that when that child gets to be a teenager magazines may not even exist. Something that seems so normal to someone like me would be an archaic piece of history to them in such a short span of time. With technology evolving faster and faster it's almost impossible for us to keep up, and like how someone born 50 years ago is having a hard time adjusting to the technology of today, my generation may have a hard time adjusting in less than half that time. Inventions since the 1950s have been extraordinary and that doesn't even show the incredible advancements we've made since 2004 like how computers have become so dominant in our everyday lives to the point where without them we are lost.

 

The idea of history repeating itself, as in slowing down our technological progress to a plateau for a while, seems to be highly unlikely at the rate we're currently going. Notions of an AORTA (Always On Real Time Access), a term coined by Mark Anderson make us believe that sooner or later we won't be able to escape this technology and it will always be a present factor in our every day lives. What this means for digital immigrants is constantly trying to keep up with things that are expanding at a pace faster than they can learn. And soon enough, digital natives may even find it difficult themselves despite being surrounded by it since birth. CNN's Oliver Joy writes in his article that there are still many places in the world, like India, which are ever expanding their technological boundaries but plenty of the younger generation would not be considered "digital natives" due to their limited access leading to digital hierarchies.
 
The effect this can have on the world could be seen as a positive as we make our way past these supposed "primitive" technologies of the past, but at what cost? By constantly expanding our technological boundaries we are at once making ourselves better and outcasting ourselves at the same time. One minute you know everything there is to know at the time and suddenly you fall behind. At this rate it looks like the only thing that's going to be able to keep up with this growth are the machines themselves, and I'm not willing to let Skynet take over while I'm still around.

The Death of Authorship on the Internet

With the internet being almost a necessity when it comes to our everyday lives, the notion of authorship becomes somewhat of a difficult term to define when it comes to the accessibility and free-reign of the web. How do we define what is ours and what is not if everything can be distributed and altered without interruption? Does this make anything truly original?

             
Authorship can be defined in its simplest form as the act of creating a piece of work. So in this sense, if someone takes something which has previously been creating and make any sort of alteration it can technically be considered their work as well. With redistribution, P2P and remixes being commonplace in an online sphere, it’s no wonder authorship becomes lost in the process.

            
To sum up Michel Foucault’s thoughts, he believes that the term of one’s “work” is hard to define and original ideas are non-existent. You cannot create something truly new because everything has been used at some point or another. This ties in to the internet because the work and the author must be connected, but if nothing is original then who’s to say that work isn’t theirs as well?

      
Mackenzie Wark brings up how intellectual property has caused information to be placed in chains in a world where information can be transferred easily and quickly. This means that authorship and the idea of individuality are stopping us from creating an informed world as intellectual laws hinder our knowledge and distribution of it at times.

             
A participatory culture is one we are in currently which allows anyone to openly participate via the internet either in a large or small scale way. This means that anyone can become an ‘author’ just by using available material and either changing it to your own or redistributing it.

             
Even major journalism chains have used other journalists writing  on their own sites bringing up the question of what is considered plagiarism and what is just reusing. Are there consequences for these actions? Does this mean even trusted news sources are no longer original either?

             
In our digital age, authorship is almost entirely dead despite intellectual laws which may say otherwise due to the ease of access of knowledge and through social media like Facebook or Twitter someone’s work can be redistributed quickly and effortlessly across the web causing the individual who may have originally conceived it to be lost in the process. At this point it is probably best for us as a society to drop the idea of authorship as it limits our access of knowledge and attempts to create an individualized society which goes against everything the internet has to offer us.