Digital Natives, Yet Strangers to the Web - The Atlantic

by ParentCo. April 22, 2015

"Although many of today’s teens are immersed in social media, that doesn’t mean "that they inherently have the knowledge or skills to make the most of their online experiences," writes Danah Boyd in her 2014 book It’s Complicated: The Secret Lives of Networked Teens.
Boyd, who works as a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, argues that "the rhetoric of 'digital natives'" is dangerous because it distorts the realities of kids' virtual lives, the result being that they don't learn what they need to know about online living. In other words, it falsely assumes that today’s students intrinsically understand the nuanced ways in which technologies shape the human experience—how they influence an individual’s identity, for example, or how they advance and stymie social progress—as well as the means by which information spreads thanks to phenomena such as algorithms and advertising. Loewy decided that this void could be eliminated with an honest, interdisciplinary high-school curriculum for the digital age—a program that would fundamentally shift how schools address kids’ virtual experiences." via Digital Natives, Yet Strangers to the Web - The Atlantic.


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