This digital native/immigrant thing

On Wednesday night someone in the chat channel of the FOE2007 conference made a comment that caught my attention. The speaker was talking about digital natives, and the concept had the chat channel buzzing. Is it relevant? Valid? Will people who were born into the era of the computer be noticeably different from those who had to "migrate" to the technology?

Then someone said, by way of a metaphor, that we have all had TV all our lives. You know what? That's not true. TV only arrived in South Africa when I was in high school. 1975 I think it was. The National Party government fought hard to keep TV out for as long as possible - in fact, it was referred to as "the devil's box". When TV first arrived, it was heavily censored. So, if I am a digital immigrant, then I am a TV immigrant, too. Yet no-one uses that term. No-one thinks in those terms.

In 1982, the kids starting school in South Africa were the first intake ever to have been exposed to TV since birth. There was a flurry of interested speculation - how different would these kids be? Within a very short space of time, it became evident that they were not somehow magically more able to use the TV or interact with the content presented than those who were not born to the technology.

Is there anything at all about me that tells even the most diligent observer that I was born into a TV-less world, whereas my younger cousins were not? That they are natives, while I am an immigrant? I very much doubt it - our usage of TV is indistinguishable.

So I don't think the flurry of speculation about the divide between the so-called digital natives and immigrants will carry much weight either.

There is another analogy to draw from South Africa's late adoption of TV. They didn't start with the old black and white valve powered sets of the first world's yesteryear and follow the path taken by the trailblazers. They jumped straight in with state of the art technology and (for one thing) their sports coverage was recognised as being world class, pretty much from the off.

I see no reason for things to be any different in respect of web 2.0 technologies either. Why should late adopters have to start where the innovators and early adopters did? They'll jump straight in at the point that these leaders have reached, and pretty soon be indistinguishable from them!

Why not?