Digital Natives (?)

“Does race ‘disappear’ in cyberspace? How is race visually represented in popular film and advertisement about cyberspace? Do narratives that depict racial and ethnic minorities in cyberspace simply recapitulate the old racist stereotypes, do they challenge them, do they use the medium to sketch out new virtual realities of race?” (Kolko & Nakamura 2000, Race in Cyberspace: An Introduction)

In my first year of SLAIS I was in a course where one of the topics we could select for our final project was examining the “digital native”

When I first began investigating this topic “Digital Natives” I asked around to my network of friends, colleagues and instructors for their thoughts and feedback. One of my colleagues said that she had always found the term to be problematic and was surprised that nobody else in the field did.

For me it was on. I was going to create a project to understand what I considered the “Myth” of the Digital Native. This idea is similar to Daniel Francis’s concept of the “Imaginary Indian” where the image of the Indian is mythologized. Similarly, we have the myth of the Digital Native play out for audiences and people gladly consumed this motif.

The Digital Native, a concept created by Marc Prensky ( 2001), has been critiqued largely due to it’s lack of scientific merit and research but little has been written about the problematic nature of the name and the authority and haste in which this name took steam within educational studies and in the information profession.

I found this perplexing to say the least. After years of studying in disciplines where “natives” were consumed, displaced, dissected and erased my back went up when I heard this term. Since I had never hear of it I began to explore it further and I found the way that people wrote about it extremely problematic. Sure we are talking about people who are born into a world that is digital and this is their comfort zone and what is familiar to them. I can understand this but some of the headlines and ways that authors wrote about it did so in a way that scratched at old wounds that I thought would not re-surface here in SLAIS.

In my search for Indigenous voices critiquing or writing about digital natives I began to realize that this was a new and underrepresented field. One of the few books I was able to locate was on reserve at VPL so I spent quite a bit of time there reading it. The book was Transference, Tradition, Technology Native New Media Exploring Visual & Digital Culture (2005). What I began to see was a connection to new media and even more specifically Indigenous New Media as a way to explore and unpack the idea of a digital native and perhaps in some way gain a bit more insight into ways that Indigenous communities were complicating the idea of cyberspace as being a neutral space.

 My searches for digital natives thankfully yielded a gem of a resource that became the inspiration for my final project in LIBR 500. The book Digital Natives (2011) explores and archives a Vancouver public art project called Digital Natives. This project was created by Lorna Brown, a local artist and curator who specializes in areas connected to public space and social phenomena’s and her colleague Clint Burnham, an Associate Professor of English Literature at SFU.

Digital Natives intervened in the physical, social and historical context of the site, the billboard and the city with a series of ten second text messages interrupting the rotation of advertisements. Taking the form of Twitter messages, invited contributors responded to the site’s charged history, the ten-second format and the 140-character limit of tweets. The sign itself became an artistic and literary space for exchange between native and non-native communities exploring how language is used in advertising, its tactical role in colonization, and as a complex vehicle of communication.

 

The more that I learned about this project the more I got excited about re-imagining and re-claiming the term digital native. As Kolko and Nakamura express in their examination of cyberspace it is important to recognize the complexity of digital spaces we share. These are not neutral spaces, colorblind spaces. These spaces do indeed have histories, territories within them and continue to serve the needs of some while misrepresenting the interests of “Others.”

I am hopeful though as I see new representations of the “digital native” continuing to emerge both by Indigenous and ally scholars, as well as young artists and youth who want to re-connect to their languages. Reflecting back to when I started the SLAIS program I am thankful to see that the whole concept of the digital native has expanded and morphed into a broader definition where Indigenous voices and communities are actively representing themselves and using social media to reclaim territories and speak back against popular discourses that once regarded them as invisible.