Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

Reviewed: Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Basic Books

I remember the moment it dawned on me that our old social rules and norms might not be adequate to this digital era we live in. I was chasing down a story in Philly about a unionizing drive at a local restaurant, which happened to be owned by a well-known progressive activist. The organizers were a bit skittish, but I contacted them via their MySpace pages, and persuaded them to talk about the details of the drive and the ironies of the situation (the owner supported unions in principle, but didn't want one in her shop). It proved more difficult to get them talking about the antipathy that had developed between the parties: one woman in particular, who worked at the restaurant, was understandably measured in her criticism of her boss. On her MySpace page, however, she displayed no such restraint.

Like any journalist, I wanted to render the dynamic of the situation I was documenting as accurately as possible. So, reasoning that the MySpace profile was available to anyone (and not thinking much else about it), I quoted something from it in the story I eventually wrote. The night the piece went live online, the organizer called me, frantic (and possibly tearful): though I'd found her through her public page, it had never occurred to her to consider the thing, you know, public. She felt betrayed, exposed, and vulnerable. And she thought I was an asshole.

That was the moment.

Digitization means social change -- an undeniable reality after an awkward epiphany like that one. Still, I'll admit I was a bit skeptical when my editor sent me Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. Much of the attention paid to digitization seems to be hysterical in nature, and a book by two professors about the proclivities of people raised in the digital era sounded to me like a recipe for hyperbole. I expected to write a review gently mocking it, and making the clear-headed observation that, no, kids today are not some new breed of human/iPhone hybrid.

Unfortunately, that approach won't be available to me here. Because after a slew of interviews with what they call "Digital Natives" and a thorough survey of the digital world, Palfrey and Gasser have written a book about this social transformation that is both insightful and responsible. It may even help people prepare a little better for clumsy digital-era interactions like mine.

The premise here is indeed that Digital Natives are different. The authors are wise to be clear that, by Digital Natives, they refer not to a generation, but a population: those people born after 1980 who were raised with digital technologies and who "don't remember a world in which letters were printed and sent, much less hand-written, or where people met up at formal dances rather than on Facebook." I could quibble with this -- I was born in 1981, and think I belong to an in-between group that does remember those things; plus, technical aptitude varies greatly even within the Digital Native cohort. But these distinctions aren't that important here, because the book is written for people who came of age before digitization really took off, and takes a "We-as-parents" sort of outlook. The fact that the terms are defined a bit too broadly doesn't really sidetrack this mission.

The most helpful thing that Palfrey and Gasser do is to catalog the various ways and realms in which digital technologies, and the people who use them, are changing society: things like personal identity, privacy, safety, property rights, distribution of information, and political activism. As I expected to point out when I thought I'd be reviewing a ten-o'clock-news, oh-my-god-your-children-are-alone-on-the-Internets kind of book, in some of these arenas people are simply doing things they've always done, but using a new medium. Cyber-bullying, for example, is motivated by the same impulses as classic bullying; now it's just disembodied, and performed in front of a potentially larger audience. Political activism, similarly, has been made hugely more effective and democratic by the highly social nature of the digital world, but is still, in large part, about fund-raising and persuasion.