“Now we know what a digital native is…”

Speedchange.at.medium

“... thinking about these kids leading the nation .. what that means ... they are demonstrating the kind of learning that few teachers value or teach ... born into informal learning with tech know how ... we now know what a digital native is and can do…”

Pam Moran sent me that message the other night and it hit home, especially in a week in which I’ve thought a lot — too much — about what we fail to see in people.”

Now we know…

I’ve hated the term “digital natives" since last century. It implied two problematic things for me: first, that we need not help kids learn about their world or their devices because they naturally knew it all — and that was simply the adult way of avoiding necessary work. Second, it sure sounded like “othering" to me — the word “native" — when applied to humans — has a long and very ugly history that is about not bothering to understand.

But we do understand that the world that surrounds any generation changes how that generation views that world. I know, for example, that despite my specific birth year, that I belong in Generation X. I was a latchkey kid. Both my parents worked. I graduated from high school into an economic disaster. That, along with many TV channels, Pong, Watergate, the fall of Saigon, good stereos, and the ability to make mix tapes, creates my frame of reference.

The post millenials — ”Generation Z" — has a very different frame. They have grown up in another era of extreme adult dysfunction — marked by an over-reaction to almost every event, wild random shifts in national policies and beliefs, an adult world unable to agree on any facts, pervasive fear, and ubiquitous global connectivity. They don’t need to wonder if their teachers are lying to them — they can take their phone out of their pocket and prove it.

They also have grown up with more than touchscreens — they have grown up with a profoundly different understanding of both cognitive authority —see Irreconcilable Authority if you will— and what citizen action means.

And we have seen now just what that means. The kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — the survivors of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — aren’t born understanding technology. That’s absurd. But they have grown up in an environment in which the landscape of social media and the landscape of contemporary cognitive authority are the only ground they have known, and so they have learned that ground well.

So these kids don’t necessarily know the best way to text a boss, or the best way to choose a browser — that’s for us to teach — but they do seem to know how to determine truth, and they seem to know the levers of power in today’s world, and they know these levers in ways no one from their school principals to the current US President could only wish they knew.

How did a few Florida high school kids get the President‘s wife to break from the administration? How did they become more powerful to Delta and United Airlines than the NRA? The same way the President of Michigan State University was brought down despite her posse of political supporters. The same way politicians and corporate leaders have been felled recently. The same way Papa John‘s Pizza‘s founder was ousted by his own company — the power of the great #hashtag combined with the language of soundbites. #metoo #neveragain #kaepernick

“Soundbites" sometimes sound cheap and unimportant to adults who were raised with The New York Times as their standard of information, and we are flooded with complaints that kids “these days" don’t read enough and don’t write enough. As if reading and writing were measurable commodities where more pages have more value, so that, say, Norman MacLean‘s brilliant novella, A River Runs Through It, or Stephen King‘s The Body are automatically less valuable as communications than, perhaps, Danielle Steele ‘s Fall from Grace, which is more than three times as long (the traditional high school English teacher paradigm).

But, see, in the world these kids live in communications are communications. The question is only if they tell the intended story. Thus it is ok that Seamus Heaney needed fewer words to tell the story of Derry‘s Bloody Sunday than a historian with a PhD might. It also might be more true — at least that’s arguable. Maybe if you add in U2 ‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday and the 2002 Paul Greengrass film, you end up with a real truth. One built of very few pages, and very few dissertations behind it, but a real truth.

And now, my last paragraph doesn’t touch yet on these kids conscious lifespans.

But while length has its value — you can offer details — length has often been a serious impediment to full engagement. When I was a child, The New York Times wrote long, but the New York Daily News had the readership. Of all the headlines I saw over the years, only two are really remembered. “Ford to City: Drop Dead" from the News, and the Times largest ever headline, “Men Walk on Moon.”

#metoo #neveragain #kaepernick #Charlottesville #blacklivesmatter

Leveraging shorthand communication to move the intransigent is not new, 1930s Louisiana Governor/Senator Huey Long could have trafficked in hashtags with his #soaktherich and #everymanaking slogans, and New York City Mayor John Lindsey made #giveadamn a thing at the end of the 1960s. And moving the intransigent with simple, short video is not new either. What is still considered the single most effective political ad ever was made in 1964 and shown — as a paid ad — just once.

We rarely teach these skills, preferring minimum lengths and big words to effectiveness.

In the end this is another story about the kids being alright. The kids are alright.

So the question is this, now that we know what a digital native is, how do we meet them on their turf, treat them as fellow humans, and support them as they grow and gather what they need?

Look differently at the kids you see today. See them in a new light, with new respect, with new understanding. The chaotic world we are handing to them is of our making. The way they will fix that will have to be of theirs.

• Ira Socol