Bridging the digital divide – natives vs. immigrants

I first heard the distinction made between digital natives and digital immigrants earlier this year and it resonated immediately.

While I was born before the advent of personal computers, fax machines, pagers, cell phones, and the Internet, I am a digital immigrant who has gone native.  I bought my first personal computer in 1983 – it was a Kaypro (click on the link to learn more!). The operating system was CP/M, a competitor of DOS. I’m guessing you know which system won (Hint: The most popular version of DOS was MS-DOS and the MS stands for Microsoft). But for the years that I used it, my Kaypro was an amazing machine. It had dual floppy drives that took double-sided, double-density disks, a built-in screen, and a keyboard that attached to the front of the computer to make it “portable.”

There are those, like me, who have declared allegiance to a land where we were not born.  In contrast, there are those born as digital natives who reject their homeland and, with it, the digitization of reality.  This distinction (native vs. immigrant) covers a continuum, with people scattered across the spectrum.

I prefer e-mail to phone calls (e-mail is easier to track for my business), but prefer phone calls to texting (phone calls are often more efficient).  I don’t belong to Facebook, but I use Twitter (just to be clear, I only tweet to alert followers to a new blog posting or newsletter; I wouldn’t even know how to attach a picture).

My wife cannot use our universal remote control while our children can figure out most electronic devices intuitively – they are not among those of my generation who mourn the demise of printed manuals.

The next time you face a breakdown in communication, consider whether there is a digital divide and what you may be willing to do to bridge it.

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