An article in The Sunday Times explores the schism between “digital natives”—students who have grown up using an arsenal of high-tech tools—and “digital immigrants”—in other words, everyone else.
Most of the arguments raised in the piece will be familiar to anyone who’s read much about Millennials (The Chronicle, October 7, 2005): The natives, we’re told, are endlessly devoted to their cellphones, adept at multitasking, and possessed of seemingly short attention spans.
But Andy Clark, a former director of cognitive science at Indiana University at Bloomington, provides some food for thought. Digital natives should be regarded as cyborgs, Mr. Clark argues, because their thought processes have become intimately—and irrevocably—tied to the technology they use. “It will soon be harder than ever to tell where the human user stops and the rest of the world begins,” he says. —Brock Read
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