Introduction to Digital Natives - Essay Example

Sitong Yuan (Stone) UWP23 Paper Final Draft 4/15 ‘Digital natives’ refers to people born into a technological, electronic, and wireless society, and are inclined to interacting with digital technology froxm an early age. Today, most digital natives communicate with their friends or chat with others on Facebook instead of meeting people in person, due to the fact that digital technology makes everything convenient for them. However, since digital natives live in a world of social media, face-to-face or direct communication is increasingly becoming less important for them. Therefore, as a result, digital natives are unable to develop meaningful relationships with other people in real life, and they owe the replacement of face-to-face conversation as well as the emergence of emotional disconnection and generation gaps to digital technology. The contemporary society is filled with people who spend time chatting to their through the internet, and thus friendship has now lost all reality and become a purely virtual thing. Although, many digital applications or social network sites such as Wechat, Facebook and Skype provide many opportunities for digital natives to make new friends as well as interact with their existing friends, the fact remains that it actually harms the relation and connection that people share otherwise. They can send texts, emoticons, voice messages, images and even videos the internet, however, it still does not possess the quality that real face-to-face conversations possess. This is evidenced through Keller’s words as she rightfully identifies that through digital communication, one’s interactions tends to “be weak ties,” that is, a person does not “feel as personally connected” to the other people involved in the conversation as is the case when talking “face-to-face” (Keller, 2013). Consequently, digital natives are losing their real life communication skills, as they are used to communicating with others via digital media. The ultimate result is that digital natives are unable to develop meaningful relationships with others in real life, thus they seem to lead a very depressed life. This has been evidenced through various studies, such as the one conducted by Pantic et al., who find that the use of various social networking sites has led to “change in inter-personal communication and interaction” among people (2012, p. 90). Furthermore, digital products also provide many functions that encourage the young people to waste their time, for instance, games, social networking and so on. For example, I can usually see young people play phone games at bus stops, because digital products provide convenience to people in many ways. They can play computer games online at home as well as play games on their cellphones outside. With the constant improvements in technology, digital products keep becoming more powerful and portable than before, thus increasing their value of convenience. In this way, teenagers are addicted to digital devices, which worries thousands of parents to a large extent. It is now seen that young people would rather stay home and play computer games during their spare time than going out with friends or engaging and sports and other creative activities. Currently, it is common to hear students spending greater amount of time on digital devices than on their studies. Thus, it is seen that they live in the virtual world that is created by digital products and they find it hard to come out of that world. It is clearly understood that digital products destroy teenagers’ lives, as young people have less time to play sports, take a trip or chat with their friends in real life. Therefore, in addition to not being able to develop good relationship with people, Internet addicted students are also prone to scoring lower grades as well as being less healthier than other students. For example, Pantic et al also finds that too much usage of Internet as well as digital devices causes “detrimental effect to mental health” in children (p. 90). It is quite alarming that modern people seem to forget that digital relationship is virtual, and that it is quite different than real relationship that exists outside the virtual world. The communication on the Internet can only remain at the stage of word exchange and there is no feeling and emotion attached to this type of communication. However, in face-to-face communication, one can hear every word that is articulated by the other person involved in the conversation. Thus, we can look at his facial expression, and know about his present mood and inner feelings. Perhaps, some people would argue that we could have video chat on the Internet to see the facial expression and hear the tone of the person. However, video still makes people feel far away from others. The reason why two people have video chat is that there is an unreachable distance between them and they hope to feel the intimacy of face-to-face communication via video chatting. Therefore, we can say that video is an imitation of face-to-face communication, an “unreal” in plain terms. Recently, I found out a kind of phenomenon that happens frequently with me as well as my friends. I usually add some people who go to the same school as me and make friends with them on the social networks, like Facebook and Wechat. I can chat with “net friend”, who is known from social network, very well, so I think this person has become my friend already. However, when I meet him or her on campus, the only thing that I feel is being strange and awkward instead of having great conversation as with normal friends. Therefore, online relationship is unreliable, which is not as same as the relationship in the real life. This is the reason why I felt very strange when I met the “net friend” in real life. Therefore, it becomes clear that the relationships that are forged on networks may not necessarily be reciprocated in real life as well. 
 In addition, digital media enlarges the gap between generations, especially between digital natives and older people. “These older people are online, too, and often quite sophisticated in their use of these technologies, but they also continue to rely heavily on traditional, analog forms of interaction” (John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, June 22, 2010). Due to the fact that young people start to use digital products since they were children, they have a lot of habits that are different from older people. For example, my grandfather prefers to write letters to me after I went to US for college. However, being a digital native, I would like to send emails or make a video call to my family. Also, I found out that my grandfather would convery much more in a letter than over the video call, because he is uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the digital technology. Thus, he prefers to connect with people by writing a letter rather than making a phone call or sending an email, since he has communicated with others via writing letter throughout his life. Therefore, there are less communication between my grandfather and me, so that it is hard to develop the relationship with my grandfather. Furthermore, with the improvement of technology, young people enjoy using different kinds of high technological products, such as Google Glasses, which is a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display. However, many people in older generations are unlikely to try the new things, because it is hard to them to learn how to use the high technological products. Consequently, the gap between the older and the young will become larger since they lack common interests. For instance, young people like playing digital games during their spare time. However, old people like doing outdoor activities, such as taking a walk, go fishing, playing chess and so on. They prefer to enjoy the entertainments in real life. As a result, young people spend less time with the elder people, thus it is hard to develop the relationship with the older, since there is less common interest and topic between two generations. Taking account all the relevant elements above, I can strongly concluded that the digital natives are not able to develop meaningful relationships with other people in real life, because of digital natives’ new life style. Although the high technological products bring numerable benefits to digital natives, it weakens the relationship between each other. Therefore it becomes clear that digital technology negatively impacts the life of people and that digital natives are actually victims rather than benefiters of this type of technology, as in reality they are people who do not have any real relationships in life Reference Keller, Maura. (2013). Social Media and Interpersonal Communication. Retrieved from http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/051313p10.shtml Palfrey, John., Gasser, Urs. (2008). Born Digital. Retrieved from http://www.borndigitalbook.com/excerpt.php Pantic, I., Damjanovic, A., Todorovic, J., Topalovic, D., Bojovic-Jovic, D., Ristic, S., & Pantic, S. (2012). Association between online social networking and depression in high school students: behavioral physiology viewpoint. Psychiatria Danubina, 24(1.), 90-93. Read More