Palfrey and Gasser and Blackmon

While chugging my Arizona sweet tea and leafing through my study abroad information books, I decided to take a break and read /post long-winded for class.

What a little smartass. 

I am a digital native. I grew up directly connected to technology. I remember getting a computer and internet and my dad's first cell phone (which  I remember setting up my first email address with Hotmail. I remember having a hard time figuring out what my email address should be. I remember my dad getting a new computer (that came with a demo of the original Sims) and my sister and I wanting to "paint," play solitaire and build houses on Sims on rainy afternoons.

Now, as a student, I use technology during the majority of my day... whether its in class, on campus, or at home. The technologies that I use are part of my childhood and my present day as well as my future, inevitably.

The Palfrey and Gasser reading, where I was introduced to the term "digital native" was powerful. It made me think about the many ways that the current technologies we have really do take over our lives, quickly becoming a way that people define us as people.

With that thought, I realized that we as a society place labels on people depending on the technology they utilize. An example, "He's an iPhone user, she has a Samsung." This classification can also be related to income and financial stability in the world. Citizens of other countries around the world probably cannot afford some of the technologies we have in the US, let alone have the electricity and networks to operate them properly and effectively.

Samantha Blackmon's (Cyber)Conspiracy Theories? African-American Students in the Computerized Writing Environment was also very interesting to me. I never thought I would be one to become interested in gender and racial studies, but this reading was very interesting to me for many reasons.

For the many students who Blackmon spoke with for her article, they all shared one common observance: minority students are both underrepresented and/or misrepresented online. Not all African-Americans are rappers or great at sports. Not all of them even like sports.

As far as internet usage, access and knowledge go, minority groups have less of each of them for a variety of reasons. If you do not have access to the internet, you cannot use it, thus you cannot gain knowledge of its many facets.  Its unfortunate. If, in an education setting, a student fails something because they do not know how to use the program, Blackmon points out that it is usually blamed on the student, when in reality we should all be looking at the cultural and social conventions that put up those road blocks for a minority student to try and hurdle over.

On a final note,  I liked Elspeth Stuckey's definition of literacy:

"Literacy, like communication, is a matter of access, a matter of opportunity, a matter of economic security - a total matter."

Thanks, Elspeth. I agree. Cool name, btw.