Digital Terms

As part of my dissertation research, I’ve been spending several days reading stuff about different generations and their usage of computers and the internet. I’ve found books such as with good analysis of the computer usage of Millenials—such as Palfrey and Gasser’s Born Digital- and I’ve carefully analyzed the 2005 Pew Report on “the Internet and American Life”—but I’m still searching for more detailed distinctions in computer usage than just the terms ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants.’ What terms, for example, exist to distinguish a digital immigrant whose only use of online connectivity is to access email from a digital immigrant who participates in online meetings, uses Skype for phone calls, and plays one or more MMORPG? I can’t find any. And who has studied the differences in the way that older members of the Builder generation differ in their response to the computer from younger Builders, and older Boomers from younger Boomers? There’s got to be research out there somewhere on this stuff, but I just can’t seem to locate it.

Plodding Into the Future

These days, while I’m trying to spent my private Lenten time focusing on ancient disciplines (like chanting, meditation, and lectio divina), much of my work time is spent trying to pull the institutions I work with into the 21^st century to join the rest of us there. Churches, denominational bodies, and educational institutions seem so slow to embrace any sort of change, much less to engage actively and passionately with it. Denominationally, I serve on a committee that’s supposed to be envisioning what the church of the future might be doing and how it might be involved in the world, but instead, we’ve spent much of our time designing and then getting committees to buy into mission and value statements. Congregationally I want to find a way to use online connectivity to deepen our common life, but so far people are using it as yet one more means of doing business. And in teaching I’d like to use virtual worlds to give us new ways to build intellectual communities that go beyond the limits that geography imposes but the people I share the idea with just want to tiptoe their way into such possibilities, which meanwhile race ahead out of their reach.

I’m keeping at it. Yesterday I wanted to resign from the denominational committee, but instead lifted up some possibilities for the next church year. At the college, I’m going to be doing two workshops—one for the Faculty Seminar day and one for the Online Seminar Evening—on different aspects of virtual communities. And at South I got our group together last Tuesday to talk about how to use things like online blackboards to increase sharing and build relationships on non-church-related topics, with that kicking off this Sunday.

So we’re off like a herd of turtles and it’s plodding and frustrating!