Don’t underestimate our protean digital selves
By Molly FlattLast night I re-read Marc Prensky’s well-known 2001 treatise Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. I’ve been noticing how many of our clients still believe that there is an unbroachable chasm between ‘real people’ – those brought up on eye contact and conversation around the dinner table – and ‘social media people’ – those whose every move and relationship is self-consciously filtered through online platforms.
Sure, there are people for whom social media seems a phony pixelated fantasy land; and there are kids weaned on the anonymity and disinhibition of the internet who are disoriented by the boundaries of real life. But I’d argue that the vast majority of fluent social media users feel no such divide. As a 26 year old who falls between the ‘real’ and the ‘digital’ – a second generation immigrant – I am as comfortable enjoying a face to face encounter at a party as I am geeking out about some new platform online. And friends ten years or so younger than me are no bunch of austistic digital obssesives; they may loose themselves in Facebook the way I used to loose myself in books, but they are also spohisticated socialisers offline (when they want to be).
There is still too much patronising scaremongering out there about social media that needs questioning. Word of mouth projects which combine offline networking and experiences with online communities are so effective because, for people who live in both worlds without any sense of existential crisis, the intermingling and transition between them is enriching and inspiring.
In one of those strange coincidences, on the train this morning I read this New Yorker article by the excellent music writer Sasha Frere-Jones, and his words absolutely hit the spot:
One way to understand social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead, these users are living a life in which consciousness is spread out evenly over two platforms: real life and the Web. Rather than feeling schizophrenic or somehow pathological, digital natives understand that these two realms divide the self as much as speech and the written word divide language, a division that human beings have lived with for a long time without going bonkers.
