Just as Ozymandias pursued the god-like quality of immortality through his words, deeds, and creations, modern society seeks to pursue the god-like quality of omniscience through the world it has created. The earliest clay tokens represented the need to catch ephemeral information and keep it forever in the present, and while information has proliferated exponentially since the Bronze Age, the need to catch, keep, and store this information – contrary to preliterate ancestors steeped in orality – continues to jab at the psyche of the human race.
The consequences for this obsession of storing information are as far reaching as they are divisive, yet as we transition into the digital age, two things become clear. The first is that there will undoubtedly be casualties in the transfer of knowledge into the digital domain. Just as written history has always favoured the victor, and oral traditions inevitably succumb to the inconsistencies of triumphalism (Ong, 1982), the current endeavour to usher all written knowledge into the cyber-realm will certainly fail to include all written knowledge worth saving. While the largest entities like Google lead the charge (for purely philanthropic reasons or not) to digitize the world’s books, Anthony Grafton notes that “materials from the poorest societies may not attract companies that rely on subscriptions or on advertising for cash flow” (Grafton, 2017). The result could be that not only do the world’s most under-represented and poorest societies NOT have their potential contributions immortalized in the universal library, but only those countries and cultures that are advanced and rich enough to access the internet are permitted such a benefit. I have no doubt projects like Google Book Search, Project Gutenberg, or the Million Book Project aim to bring egalitarianism to access of world knowledge, but in the midst of such a monumental shift in technology for storing text– not nearly as reliable as parchment and paper, according to O’Donnell – it is naïve to think that some cultures and histories won’t be forgotten.
The second truth is that digital immigrants have a more romanticized ideal of the pursuit and possession of knowledge that digital natives do. As such, digital immigrants like Grafton tout the sensual pleasures of book and text: the musty smell of the ancient tomes, the quests down dark halls of silent libraries, the satisfying friction of quill scraped across paper. In contrast, digital natives of the Net generation are already becoming accustomed to this new version of the pursuit: a sterile blue glow from an electronic screen. Rhodes scholar Joe O’Shea from The Great Library 2.0 podcast is an example of this.
Digital natives and Net Gens are becoming more reliant on communication beyond the written word, and as storage of text and information becomes near infinite, demands on literate fluency may decrease, thereby reconfiguring our relationship with writing. As O’Donnell notes, “forms of organization of knowledge in electronic media sharply disresemble those of the traditional codex book”(1998), and as learners continue to utilize multi-media formats of expression and learning, no longer may the written word be the preferred form for storing information.
Sources:
Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen
Kennedy, Paul. “The great library – 2.0.” Prod. Sean Prpick. CBC: IDEAS. 28 Feb. 2011. CBC Radio Broadcast. https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/4290/pages/forking-path-link-to-digital-age?module_item_id=202524
O’Donnell, James J. Avatars of the Word. From Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. 44-49.
Brand, S. (1999). Escaping the digital dark age. Library Journal, 124(2), 46.
Grafton, A. (2017, June 18). Future Reading. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/05/future-reading
joanna cassie
June 5, 2018 — 3:02 pm
Thank you for this Scott, I hadn’t thought about digital natives vs digital immigrants in any romanticized terms before (but I should have!). I actually had to look it up: your post led me to an article which described how the main difference between the two is actually not one of technology but one of values – the former sees a more egalitarian landscape and is distrustful of centralization, and the latter is always looking for the competitive edge and tends to be more goal-oriented. I literally just had a conversation with my (tech-appreciative, but digital immigrant none the less) uncle in his eighties in which he insisted that “someone must own” Linux and Blockchain. He could not grasp the concept of how the open, non-ownership that digital natives embrace could possible work.
Like you, I am concerned by what gets in and what gets out of any Virtual Library. When O’Donnell (my new favorite speaker by the way) said in his article of 1998, “one of the most valuable functions of the traditional library has been not its inclusivity but its exclusivity, its discerning judgment that keeps out as many things as it keeps in.” I had to wonder the same as you – whose judgment? What are the terms that deem it discerning? With the ever-elusive idea of the Virtual Library, who decides our fate? Because certainly it will be decided if distant, faceless charges determine exactly in our history what will be valuable vs omit-able. One might think… but before I digress, I must give a nod to this week’s discussion of the value in creating dichotomies intended for social analysis because of the loss of context. Chandler reminds us that “binary accounts have been referred to as ‘Great Divide’ theories” and this may be one of them because of course it is possible to use a medium and be influenced by it. For example, my uncle, who has the largest, most immaculately-organized, digital collection of family photos of anyone in our family.
References
Chandler, Daniel (1994). Biases of the Ear and Eye: “Great Divide” Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism &Logocentrism. Retrieved from http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/litoral
/litoral1.html
DeGraff, J. (2014). Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants. THE BLOG. Retrieved from
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-degraff/digital-natives-vs-digita_b_5499606.html
O’Donnell, J. (1998). “The Virtual Library: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed”. University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20070204034556/http://ccat.sas
.upenn.edu/jod/virtual.html
mackenzie moyer
June 7, 2018 — 6:35 pm
Hi Scott,
It’s a great point to think on what is or isn’t transferred over into IT from text or oral sources, and I hadn’t thought of it myself. I have (randomly) thought of how interesting it would be to “save” (pun intended) endangered languages through electronic mediums. Specifically, there’s a very special linguistic group known as the Yeniseian Languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeniseian_languages) which share much in common with languages in the Americas. It’s thought that these people may have migrated from the Bering land bridge that once connected Russia and Alaska as their relatives migrated the opposite direction into the Americas. I digress: the language group is very much endangered with very few speakers left. A major loss for humanity in the event it does happen. But perhaps technology could not only preserve the language but safeguard its transmission to future Yeniseian speakers?
Listening to Reclaimed on CBC radio 2 last week, the host mentioned how a musician from one First Nation recovered the recordings of another First Nation on some anachronistic material (not vinyl, but something that acted in a similar fashion). This musician was able to revive these lost songs.
Coming back to what you’ve said, Scott, it certainly is important to keep these efforts in mind rather than solely the standard narrative about what’s important.
***
I feel uncomfortable with the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant” myself, they remind me of astrological signs. It probably has something to do with not believing it from experience, perhaps thinking back to my grandfather easily programming a very tricky VCR player with ease, or my other grandfather struggling with a (more modern) iPhone. One of these was built by engineers for engineers and specialists, while the other was designed with an eye to making it easy for people to use. Me? I’m comfortable with both, but I’m very certain my VCR-master grandfather would feel at ease with iPhones.
My own mother navigates the net with ease, and, frankly, I do too, although I grew up with dial-up internet only in the middle of highschool. My younger sister is great with Instagram…but she’s easily frustrated by minor computer issues.
I’ve become very much impacted by working in healthcare: what is the evidence? Some evidence points away from digital “natives” versus “immigrants”: http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/digital-natives-do-not-exist-claims-new-paper.
benson chang
June 8, 2018 — 11:58 pm
Great thoughts Scott. Your statement of it being “naïve to think that some cultures and histories won’t be forgotten” resonated with me as I am seeing the dissolution of the culture of respect for actually knowing rather than resorting to assisted knowledge. To be fair, I do teach in alternative education right now, but there is a disturbing trend in students’ attitude towards basic math (additions, multiplication, long division etc.), or rather the reluctance to spend the time and effort on it since they all “carry calculators with them everywhere”. This change definitely did not just occur in recent years, as my college math teacher had once disparaged the fact that we did not know how to use slide rules anymore and relied on the calculator for all things logarithmic. So the change is not new, but it is accelerating and the fact of matter is that when I ask them to do research on a topic, forget books, they are skipping even the webpages and Wikipedia, and going straight to pictures and videos as their primary resource. This is definitely worrisome.
One of my concerns is that when something becomes ubiquitous, it also becomes less valued. As knowledge and information becomes prevalent and easily accessible, I fear we lose respect and the sense of regard we ought to hold in said knowledge. But is this something I/we should really even worry about? I don’t think I’ll ever understand why students choose to write messages on Snapchat accompanied by random photos of the ceiling. To me that serves no purpose and is an absolute waste of data, yet to the students they give no thought to the transference of data. Data is a norm in their life. They will never understand the art of optimization that occurred when data moved at 56k speeds, nor the world of meet ups without the use of cellphones. But is that an issue? I feel like it is. Upon reflection though, in very much the same way, I do not understand or value communication the same way my grandparents did, as anyone was just a phone call away. So from my grandparents to me, the technology has changed significantly enough for the culture to have changed, yet here I am perfectly content and none worse for it. So yes, culture and histories might change, and as much as I may feel that my experience is the most important and right, perhaps it really doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does.