The Ambivalence of the Digital Natives

My generation invented the internet. Now we pass it down to the next generation who grew up with it - the “digital natives,” a term coined by education consultant Marc Prensky in his 2001 article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”. The premise of his article was that the rapid appearance of digital technology has changed the way young people think and process information. More so than their parents’ generation, they require a media-rich environment in order to learn and develop. They feel more at home in cyberspace.

Or do they? Is their attitude about this digital age of ours all that different than the generation that preceded them? Do they truly understand the potential hazards, along with the benefits, of a technologically boosted lifestyle as witnessed by their elders who remember the days before people carried the internet around with them in their pockets. Some researchers believe the pervasive preoccupation with cyberspace can inflict psychological damage on all of us, especially the young. Do young people themselves see this?

To address these questions, I designed a group interview technique that I conducted with my undergraduate students. With the help of a professional designer, I created a 10 minute video entitled The Birth of Cyberpsychology, which is available on YouTube. The beginning of the video consists of text that very concisely summarizes the history of the internet, leading up to the creation of cyberpsychology as a new interdisciplinary field (with my particular brand being a psychoanalytic cyberpsychology). The main portion of the video then consists of a series of quotes about technology from famous people, interspersed with 30 images that illustrate different concepts in cyberpsychology (e.g. online disinhibition, text relationships, addiction, avatars, identity management, bullying, transference, dissociation, disembodiment, virtual reality, perceived privacy, etc.). In a tipping of my hat to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the mu