The Civic, Social and Multi Modal Lives of Digital Natives

Social Networking

"...boredom and frustration has set in with social networking sites and applications, and while such sites are still used by the 15-20 year-old group, they are not used as heavily or with as much excitement and commitment as hype about them would suggest."

Much of what I'm reading about in Deconstructing Digital Natives brings my own children to mind, who are 18 and 19 years old.  The statement above, from Chapter 4, is also what I was thinking of, in some respects, when I created my meme.  My daughter was a big Facebook user when she was in middle school, and now rarely uses it.  The only thing she uses the site for now is to keep her relatives and older people in her life updated on what she's doing. Most of her aunts and uncles, and both of her grandmothers, are on Facebook, and use it regularly. It seems to me that she and my son are using a different app and/or SMS every time I turn around.

Neo-Digital Natives

"These social media give young people opportunities to communicate with a number of people who are outside school via mobile phones, and also to demonstrate their popularity among their friends...They are afraid of the isolation and estrangement that could result if they express their opinion too freely within a Japanese uchi that is constructed through people's online interaction on Mixi."

These are actually two separate quotes from Chapter 5, but I felt they went together, and what they said really impacted me, because they illustrate the peer pressure and social pressures that are associated with participation in certain SMSs.  I can imagine the same peer pressure that teens experience in school, in relationships, and in many other areas of life, also extended immediately to the use of social media sites when they became something used regularly.  Another aspect of that social pressure was, and is, the problem of cyberbullying.  It seems the internet and mobile media have opened up a whole new dimension to problems teens already experienced.

Creating Multi-modal Products

"There is a sense here perhaps of advancement on the one hand and of loss on the other."

This quote from Chapter 6 made me a bit sad, because I think it's true, to some extent, that as kids age they lose some of their tendency towards imaginative thinking and experimentation.  I'm not sure if that's a result of the way schools can sometimes try to standardize learning, thereby standardizing children, or if it's just the result of growing up and realizing what one should put his or her time and energy toward.  The description of the bright, colorful, confusing, mismatched gaudiness of the student's work when she was in Year 8 reminded me a lot of some of the Power Point projects my middle school students have done for me.  They do spend an inordinate amount of time experimenting with colors and fonts and animations, and much less time on the actual textual content and content development in these kinds of multi-modal projects.

Thomas, Michael. Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology, and the New            Literacies. New York: Routledge, 2011.   

The point of my meme is that technology tools like Facebook, while new and interesting to the young 5 years ago (or more) have shifted in use.  Now its a tool often used by parents, and even to older people, grandparents.  As this shift happens, it's noticed by the young, and they no longer see the tool as desirable.  They move on to other things.