Webb’s Media

On page 2 of Literacy in the Digital Age by Frank B. Withrow, he throws out: ” Technology is second nature to our children” to summarize his great-grandaughers’ ease with using an Internet application. This gives me a horrible sense of foreboding of what lies ahead in the rest of the book.

I’m not going to say kids can’t be tech-savvy. They certainly have little apprehension about getting on a computer and clicking around aimlessly. If that is what is meant by second nature, I’ll concede that kids are often less risk-adverse than adults. The same applies to language learning and there is nothing I abhor more than the argument that kids learn languages better than adults because their brains are better at it. Certainly, kids have the advantages of having lower stakes in language learning or technology use as well as lower expectations on the part of others interacting with them. If you are five and you can open an Internet browser, you qualify as a young genius–if you 35 and you can’t open an Internet browser for whatever reason, people start looking at you condescendingly. And the funny thing is, in either case, when you’re 5 or 35, opening an Internet browser has absolutely nothing to do with your intelligence.

But I am getting away from the point. The point is that value-laden statements like the one above serve a very limited purpose. They simultaneously dismiss any children, who like the 35-year-old in my above example, have limited experiences with new technologies, and discourage adults who then think they’ve missed some mythical target age to be introduced to new technologies and they will just not be cut out for learning. While I agree that many new technologies are just part of the world of kids, I don’t think the fact that it’s second nature to them is necessarily positive—because the fact that something is second nature means you have not questioned its existence in your world.

To be fair, a little farther on he explains that we must “develop literacy skills that include critical analytical skills that enable citizens to use technology efficiently and ethically.”

We are tasked as a global society. For some people, computer technology is just part of the landscape, even while in the US, some people live without full indoor plumbing. Not relevant enough? Ok, how about explaining to the 1.6 billion people worldwide that live without electricity that computers are just part of the landscape. That could be a starting point for citizens concerned with ethical technology use.