Web Users: Immigrants and Natives or Visitors and Residents?

Prensky’s concept of ‘Natives’ and ‘Immigrants’ on the surface appeared to make absolute sense to me.

I considered my 80 year-old grandma’s struggle to send an email, compared with my 13 year-old sister and her seemingly instinctive knowledge of laptops and iPhones.

Indeed, one can easily claim that younger people have a sort of inherent confidence with technology. As with a language, when exposed to it from a young age, it comes naturally, while, by contrast, when introduced later in life, it presents more of a struggle (Prensky, 2001).

BUT, then I reflected more carefully.

I thought, hold on. My middle-aged dad, who according to Prensky’s theory should be an ‘Immigrant’, spends most of his working life communicating and expanding his company through the Web.

He performs online tasks that my sister, whose web usage is confined mainly to Facebook and social media, would have no idea how to administer.

 

In this day in age, when we consider all the different Web users, Prensky’s theory appears flawed. As White states:

“[It] presents inflexibility of types, as well as the tendency to box individuals into one type or another, overlooking contradictory evidence (White, 2011).

This is where White’s concept of “Visitors” and “Residents” comes into play. Prensky’s underlying metaphor of language and second language learning is transformed into a metaphor of ‘place’.

While Prensky’s ‘Immigrants’ and ‘Natives’ represent a binary opposition, White explains that ‘Visitors’ and ‘Residents’ are two sides of a continuum, meaning that web users can move between the two, depending on their motivation and purpose.

As in real life we are all members of multiple communities and have to negotiate our roles and identities as we navigate the various communities we belong to, an individual’s usage of the Web is likely to change dependent on context.

I experience this in my personal Web use: the way I communicate and present myself on LinkedIn is not the same as my digital identity on Facebook, and the skills I apply when doing Internet research is altogether different from the digital skills I use when on social media.

This typology spans all ages. My sister is at a life-stage in which she is motivated to engage with the web as a social platform, while my dad’s motivation to use the Web is for work-related emails and as a professional platform.

Both, however, are Digital Residents while performing these activities.

 

Prensky, M., 2001. MCB University Press Volume 9 (5). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.

White, D. S., 2013. YouTube video on ‘Dave White’s channel named ‘Visitors and Residents’.

WHITE, David S.; LE CORNU, Alison. Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, [S.l.], aug. 2011. ISSN 13960466. Available at: <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049>. Date accessed: 04 Feb. 2015. doi:10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171.