Good article. My kids have grown up surrounded by Internet-enabled computers and, while they're skillful with them and I've always boggled at the notion of people for whom Google has always been available, they're not qualitatively different from anybody else I know.
Idiocy like the cited suggestion of having professors deliver their lectures on Facebook (because God knows lectures are just like idle chat) has always bothered me. It just makes me think the suggester has no fricking clue about the Internet, but wants to be seen as a visionary.
I work with a great number of people who are younger then me. between 10 to 15 years younger.There is a great number of them that treat computers with suspicion, if i bring up the terminal (on osx) they are often in shock.
A good amount of younger people, are not tinkerers, and i feel tinkering is the impetus that drives many people who become developers or other IT oriented workers.
The curious thing for me, is that i have an unverified suspicion it was different before, there was less of this suspicion when i was young, probably because the assumption that "it just works" was viewed as marketing, and not reality (blow on those cartridges, and DJ on the floppy disk to skip bad sectors, you remember that?)
I'm in my forties, I buy every gadget, have 3 phones, 2 digital SLRs, derive most of my home entertainment from the internet and generally feel lost if I can't get online. I have a friend who's 28 who doesn't have a cell phone, doesn't have internet at home, and basically feels that life online takes away from life offline. So there's at least two anecdotal data points.
The only difference between generations is that my students write incoherent sentences on paper and the internet.
I have this sinking feeling that an average ninth-grade graduate of fifty years ago (basically what it took to be a secretary, if I've got my bearings right) was about as competent and educated as today's college sophomores (present company excepted, of course).
So, extrapolating from two dubious data points, we're extending childhood by 5 years every 50 ... 29-year old "minors" coming up by the end of the century ;-)
"A recent study by the Pew Research Center, an American think-tank, found that internet users aged 18-24 were the least likely of all age groups to e-mail a public official or make an online political donation."
E-mailing public officials is a decent point. However, I don't necessarily think you can hold them not making donations against them. The 18-24 age bracket is probably one of the poorest as well.
I think 'digital native' is actually a pretty good way to classify a member of my generation - I've never not had a personal computer in my home. I would imagine this has greatly shaped the way I locate and consume information.
However, what the term 'digital native' tends to connote is an intricate and intuitive notion of the underlaying principals of modern technologies (how does a computer work, what is the internet) - and this is certainly not the case for nearly all members of the "Net Generation". For most, technology is a black box; just as mysterious as it is to our parents - it's just more familiar.
In my experience, most kids' technological proficiency extends to Microsoft Office. Most have very little interest in actually understanding the technology they use.
In my experience I find that there are at least 50 people misusing Office for every one using it in any sane manner. I would be surprised if this was any different for the so-called digital natives, (of which I am at the older end of the age range).
The other appalling thing about the "digital native" meme is that it originally had a very specific meaning (basically that we should rip out and replace the entire educational infrastructure because the existing system is very broken--which I generally agree with--but only because kids today are in some way different from their elders--which I don't) which has been lost and now it's basically meaningless and reduces down to something like "computers are hard, they scare me, kids today scare me too."
I don't think it really greatly shapes the way you locate and consume information - and again, I'm comparing me (born 1966) with my kids (born 1994 and 1999). The feeling I have is that I always conceived of the world the way it is now, and it's only now catching up. Google wasn't earthshattering, although it's true that I do a lot less interlibrary loans. I keep up on news better, because I always found newspapers tl;dr (except for the comics page, and Web comics are better than anything on there nowadays anyway).
I've taught my kids everything they know about the Internet, the only excepting being that my daughter researched Twitter for me and how to tweet from my phone - but only after I asked her to. And yeah, she found xkcd on her own - a year after I'd been following it.
So I just don't buy it. Unless I'm a digital native, which is chronologically impossible, I'm forced to say that there are just some people who deal well with the Internet age and some who don't, and there is a generational skew due to exposure - but talking about "natives" vs. "immigrants" is boneheaded.
Your larger point is spot-on. I have yet to interest either of my kids in programming, despite numerous attempts. For my son, 11, the computer is essentially a gaming and cartoon serving machine, and for my daughter, 15, it's a portal to her friends around the world and something to write her fan fiction and more serious work on, and find music. How it all works is just not interesting to either of them. (Darn it.)
Idiocy like the cited suggestion of having professors deliver their lectures on Facebook (because God knows lectures are just like idle chat) has always bothered me. It just makes me think the suggester has no fricking clue about the Internet, but wants to be seen as a visionary.