Digital Native vs Digital Immigrant: Line of the Week 11-01-09

This week's line of the week emerges from a provocative post by Brian Whalley of Hubspot, an online marketing company I know well & respect a great deal. In it he discusses how important it is for organizations today to have people who are so completely at home with the digital universe that it is essentially a way of life for them. He & the folks at Hubspot have deemed these people “Digital Natives.” Those who may not see technology as the "be all, end all" [because they are coming to it later in life], they call “Digital Immigrants” [or "those those who speak web with an accent]. Whalley went on to offer a cute little quiz to see how people rated themselves on this score.  However the post is not without some significant "issues."

Definitions: Digital Native vs Digital Immigrant

First of all, keeping these two definitions in mind, he goes on to discuss a new book just put out by 2 key people at Hubspot stating that: 

"...they recommend hiring more Digital Natives, not Digital Immigrants ('speaks web with an accent')..."  

The line as well the underlying attitude it reflects caught many people's attention & raised a few hackles. It is also an HR person's nightmare. As someone who coaches employers about how to navigate such "rocks & shoals" in the workplace, I found this to be both a huge problem as well as a potential liability for the company. Why? Aside from the problematic reasoning which I'll get to in a moment, all it takes is some "forty-something" or older who's passed over for a desired position to be able to point to such a document & scream "discrimination." Could this post [alone] be considered certain proof of such discrimination as in "case closed?" Absolutely not. What it creates is a sense of vulnerability that no company wants & the potential for a "legal headache," which no  company needs. 

Put The Focus On 'Skills' Not Age

My suggestion is that Mr Whalley clarify his thinking in a new post [something he tried to do in a comment] that speaks to the fuller meaning of what he was trying to convey. It is my belief that what he & others in the company meant is that organizations hire people with the skills of 'digital natives.' This takes the focus off of "age" & puts it squarely where it belongs: ability. While it may be what he meant, unfortunately it's not what he wrote.  Additionally, many of those who commented on the post [including me] pointed out that such a narrow definition is an injustice to the amazing pioneers in the field who helped contribute to the creation of the digital universe. I'm referring to people who have names like Jobs, Gates, Packard, Dell, & many others like them; none of whom fit the specified description of “native.” Perhaps it's safer to say that people like Jobs & company reside in a kind of twilight zone between the two groups. The whole analogy is problematic. After all, in political terms, I seriously doubt that anyone would consider Ronald Reagan, the father of his own brand of huber-Republicanism, as someone who "spoke Republican with an accent" even though he started out as a Democrat! Just thinkin'

Digital Line of the Week

This discussion gave rise to the digital line of the week in the form of a summary comment made by Peter Rastello. Whether you agree or not, I think he gets kudos for style points. He said

"..."if you weren't born with a mouse in your crib, you're not in the Digital Native club..." 

That seems to be the long & short of what was written by Whalley. What's your view?

Comments

[ellen gunty]

Thanks for your comment. Obviously, I couldn't agree more. It's all about ability & nothing more. To their credit, the folks at Hubspot quickly saw the pothole created by this kind of thinking & terminology. They switched to a far more appropriate term. Instead of labeling people as [digital]"immigrants or natives," they now assess whether or not someone is "digitally fluent." Kudos for being an early adopter!

[Susan]

I am female and 55-years old, so needless to say I was not born with a mouse in my crib. But I have had computers for the past 28 years since 1982, my first being an IBM PC which ran MS-DOS 1.1, and even though it had 9,600 baud modem, there was nothing (except for the Prodigy Online Service) to really dial in to! All commands were typed in DOS language on a black screen with neon green flashing cursors and text, as no mouse was needed. My monitor, which was as almost as big as NASA's Skylab, was the "upgraded" VGA, and I had a dual floppy disk drive --the black disks that were over 5" inches, as the smaller 3½ disk had not come along yet.
Friends would come to my home and ask me why in the world I would ever need a computer, and laugh. Those are the same friends who still call me all hours of the day and night today, pleading for help with their systems, or peripherals, or software, or viruses that have invaded or crashed their systems.
Bottom line is there are exceptions to every rule! Though I wasn't born with a mouse in my crib, I am still most definitely NOT a Digital Immigrant, but a proud Digital Native :-)