Tag Archives: Generational Gap

Who’s invited to the party?

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Siva Vaidhyanathan recently wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Generational Myth.” In it, Vaidhyanathan makes the blunt statement, “There is no such thing as a ‘digital generation.'” He goes on to debunk the idea of a generation of “born digital” or “digital natives” who are fundamentally skilled at operating digital technology. Meanwhile, Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt offered up their slightly differing perspectives on the issue on Digital Campus #32.

I found Vaidhyanathan’s article fascinating, and made me think quite a bit about the issue. I agree with his premise, that it is preposterous to think that your age somehow makes you either inherently competent or incompetent at using technology. I hate the term digital “native” or “immigrant,” as they carry a phenomenal amount of baggage, and there are far too many exceptions to the rule to make it worthwhile. It’s a simple generalization that people latch onto because it is such an attractive analogy at first glance. But unfortunately, a closer examination causes the analogy to break down.

Having said this, it is useless to simply dismiss any talk of a generational divide. While there are plenty of 60 year-olds out there who know more about computers than I do, and plenty of college students who can barely send an email, there is oftentimes an overarching difference between the two. Someone who has grown up with regular access to the internet, cell phones, and portable music players, generally has an attitude or perspective on technology that reflects this experience. For one, they might have fewer reservations about personal privacy, and be more willing to post information or pictures about themselves online. Some may not be able to remember the time they opened up a phone book or an encyclopedia. Many expect songs, movies, and TV shows to be freely (or at least readily) accessible over the internet. Does every person under the age of 20 share these views? No. Do a greater percentage of young people share these views than their parents? Probably.

Much of the discussion of a generational divide views the issue entirely through the lens of a privileged socioeconomic class. As many people have pointed out, there are a lot of 18 year-olds who don’t have regular access to a computer or the internet. Henry Jenkins has written about this extensively, and also presented a talk at UC Berkley titled “Combating the Participation Gap.” To assume that every young person is tech-savvy is a mistake. To assume that every young person even has the resources or ability to be tech-savvy is an even graver mistake. The churning wave of technological trends and forces are not only seen as intimidatingly complex, but is more importantly seen as irrelevant and inaccessible to a significant portion of the American (much less the world) population. The teenager whose family is struggling to put food on the table is probably just hoping to someday get a computer with high-speed internet, much less understand what the “long tail” is.

Examining the field of digital history requires a strong understanding of these issues of participation. Who’s currently at the party? Who’s been invited to the party? Who doesn’t even know the party is going on? Of course, digital history is compounded even further by the demographics of its umbrella discipline: by sheer numbers, the majority of history PhD’s are white and/or male. And that, in and of itself, deserves a separate, more thorough discussion…

Webcams, Ithaka, and Facebook

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First, an encouraging article from the Chronicle discussing the decision by some professors to experiment with the form and length of their lectures. Dalton A. Kehoe, of York University, decided to post his lectures online. After receiving negative feedback from his student, he realized he needed to shorten the online lectures and break them down into 20-minute sections. I love this idea. The willingness to experiment and alter what you’re used to as a professor is a truly admirable trait. And I also think that broadcasting your lectures would allow for a critical element of self-evaluation that too often gets lost as educators settle into their individual comfort zones.

Next up is a post at the AHA titled “Links, Spaces, and Changing Habits of Historical Research.” It highlights two reports from Ithaka, one discussing how different disciplines approach research, while the second study analyzes the changing place of online sources in journal citations. The first one was a little discouraging. According to their report, history ranks near the bottom of a variety of categories in using digital resources in pursuing research, including a resistance to relying on online tools such as e-only journals and Google Scholar. Meanwhile, the second set of articles finds that history articles published online do not have any greater chance of being cited by other scholarly articles. While Robert Townsend attributes this to the fact that an alarmingly high percentage (18%) of links to online sources no longer function, I would also hypothesize that there is an unwillingness to even cite E-journals and other digital sources, as these are still seen as sometimes illegitimate sources of true “scholarship.” I have had several professors that would have criticized a bibliography for having a purely online source. In this vein, I look forward to the remainder of Mills Kelly’s postings on “Making Digital Scholarship Count” (Part 1, Part 2) as a way to combat this perception.

Finally, hat-tip to Jesse Lemisch for his posting on HNN, Historians and Facebook: In the Halls of an Electronic AHA. It’s encouraging to see a 71 year-old dive into something like Facebook and recognize some of its potential for academics, especially for historians. I also think Mr. Lemisch represents a the trend towards “aging” Facebook, as more and more older people start to use it, in place of the original demographic of college-aged students. It will be interesting to see if Facebook emerges as a widespread resource for scholarly collaboration and connection, or if it remains largely within the social sphere.

Whittaker Chambers and Osama bin Laden

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While reading about some of Barack Obama’s more radical detractors, I visited sites that were at best stupefying and at worst racist. One theme that really struck me was this continuing perception that he is a Muslim, or at least a strong Muslim sympathizer, a perception that has become so insidious it has led someone to create a great response to the ridiculous question: http://isbarackobamaamuslim.com/.

Although I’m fascinated in a gawking-at-a-car-crash kind of way by these attacks, my mind quickly wandered into the realm of American history and arrived at the not-so-novel realization that the politicized use of “Islam” has completely supplanted the use of “Communism” as a means of fear-mongering and smear tactics. That parallels are striking. The idea of East vs. West, a global struggle (a la Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations), with each being a nebulous, trans-national ideology that looms over Western ideals of individualism and democracy.

None of this is particularly original, and has been echoed by others. However, the parallel truly symbolizes a yawning generational gap in the United States. Quite simply, I belong to a generation for whom communism is an utterly abstract, impotent, and, frankly, quaint relic of the past. Instead, many people sadly view the “Muslim world” (as it is problematically termed) with the same fear, unease, and condemnation with which many people viewed the “Communist world” for much of the twentieth century. I had thought about the rapid plummet of Communism as a viable ideology before, specifically when one of my classes read Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of Whittaker Chambers and the professor was absolutely shocked to find that not a single person in this upper-level American history course knew who Chambers was before the class. At one point in the near past, your opinion of Whittaker Chambers stood for perhaps the singular litmus test of your political sympathies. Now, anyone under the age of 25 would be hard-pressed to know anything about him, much less his historical significance. Older generations find this difficult to believe.

Whittaker Chambers, along with crawling under your school desk for an air raid drill, belongs to an era that has become largely irrelevant to twenty-first century American culture. If someone were to call me a commie pinko, I would likely receive it with the same mild amusement and perplexity as if someone called me a square – while I may know on an academic level what the insult means, it packs absolutely no punch. However, Obama’s extremist critics have demonstrated an effort to lay the seeds of a McCarthy-esque political witch hunt in which Islam has taken the place of Communism. However, my youthful optimism keeps telling me that these smear attacks will never reach the critical mass necessary to create a sizable impact on the 2008 elections. And for the most part, I believe it.