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Developer's View: Real Life Inspirations Or Abstract Ideas?
StormDriver writes "According to writer Marc Prensky, most of us come from a generation of digital immigrants. It basically means the modern web developed during our lifetime, it is a place we migrated to, discovering its potential. But people aged 20 and younger are not like that at all. They are digital natives, they've spent their whole lives here. 'Hey, let's do a digital version of our college facebook' is a digital immigrant's idea, just like 'Hey, let's make something like a classifieds section of a newspaper, only this one will be online.' Or 'Hey, let's make an online auction housel.' 'Hey, let's make a place for online video rentals.' The thing is, recreating items, ideas and interactions from the physical realm on the Web already ran its course." To me, this sounds like the gripe that "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." There are a lot of real-life services and experiences that have yet to be replicated, matched, or improved upon in the online realm; I wouldn't want people to stop taking inspiration from "old fashioned" goods as starting points for digital products.
"Hey, lets make another Facebook, only more betterer!"
Now get off my lawn!
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
I'm 28 and haven't seen any sign that my fellow Millennials are any fundamentally better with computers than Generation X or the Boomers. In fact, I've found that my grandmother who is 82 and doesn't even have a computer has more common sense about how she would use one if she bothered to buy one. For example, when I told her of all of the people I knew who got viruses by not updating their OS when automatic updates have been available for at least 10 years, if not about 12-14 (Windows ME?) or by clicking on every link and file attachment they're sent, she asked how stupid could those kids be to be that lazy and trusting. You can make excuses for them like phishing, but the fact is that more often than not, it's just laziness or unwillingness to learn to do any better.
The inventors are a handful of people at any time. The rest are consumers.
Once, if you had a computer you had to know its ins and outs. Same as people who once drove cars or flew planes. Nowadays cars just work and people barely know where to put the fuel in, cue people putting in the wrong fuel. No owner of a Spyker would ever have done that, they KNEW their car and its needs.
There will be new inventions made by old and young people but what they all have in common is that they don't just consume whatever tech is available in their time but think about and think about what is lacking or missing. The man who made lighthouses saw how his wife was cooking and made a better stove. Simple as that. Could easily have been her son as well. Or a grandpa watching his granddaughter. Inspiration comes from looking at the world and not just assume but to question. And no, kids are NOT better at it. If they were, they would be far harder to teach.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I am tired of driving, ditch diggers, mechanics, manufacturing in general. Oh yeah lets use photons instead of electrons to transfer data.
Its all BS, until robots do everything for us and we are all researchers there is always something to invent or figure out.
Al these metaphors and hubris over the years "who will build the off ramps from the information super-highway into the digital ghetto" etc.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I'm working on creating a digital mouse trap.
I wouldn't necessarily believe anything I say.
The divide between those who grew up with the internet and those who did not is huge . You can see it in policy debates and philosophical problems: the previous generation thinks the internet is a neat toy, while the native generation thinks it is as essential as the air we breathe. The previous generation thinks intellectual property is a big deal, where people can and should control/profit from their ideas, while the native generation could not give the slightest care to these antiquated notions of copyright and patent law, or even such traditional notions of borders and censorship: the internet is for sharing and remixing the old and new to form something completely different.
The big thing is that we still haven't collectively decided what the internet is for. The immigrants focus on its ubiquity and ease of use while the natives focus on communication and collaboration. Real-world applications need not apply.
Anyone else notice how the summary excerpt started talking about the web's recent appearance, and then segued into talking about "digital" as though it were a synonym, thereby implying "digital" tech appeared fairly recently?
TFA is just one example of "digital"'s abuse, but it's ubiquitous. That word is now so rarely used in any connection with its meaning, that I think hackers have bricked the word from our language. That is so gay!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
When the electric guitar was first invented, it was played just like an accoustic guitar but with amplification. Later, artists like Jimmy Hendrix came along and played it like it was a fundamentally different instrument. I think that a similar cycle is likely going on with the web, as the original article says. Like the electric guitar, the web has ways of "playing it" that are fundamentally different from the non-web counterparts. The best innovations have come and will come not from porting non-web faculties, but inventing new ones that could not exist without this medium.
Since the 1970's every generation has independently invented disco and think they have something new. Donna Summer, Techno, Lady Gaga, etc. But eventually they get over it.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the next real game changers. Some that might qualify would be real AI and robots, ultracaps capable of replacing batteries, political landscape shifts such as the adoption of the idea that the communications infrastructure is as important as, and for the same reasons, as the transport infrastructure with associated rights of passage and removal from commercial interests, just as private toll roads are almost unknown today, a space elevator or other means of inexpensive space travel, a confluence of insulation, local power generation, and storage to free the "average" home and vehicle from the power grid and oil interests, real 3d display technology... web innovations are rarely, at least recently, of a great deal of interest to me. Maybe it's just me, though.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Personally, I don't give a **** whether its a digitised remix of of the events formerly known as real life, or new and exciting virtual experience, I just wish they'd stop granting patents on everything under the sun simply because someone made an e-version. It's idiotic that things we've been doing for centuries are suddenly "new inventions" just because a computer is involved. And don't call me just another grumpy old geezer, because that's last century. I'm posting this rant from a computer, so it must be original and unique.
The latest trend seems to be to abandon the desktop metaphor and make everything look like an iPhone. Big graphical buttons arranged in a grid, easy scrolling, no overlapping windows.
Anybody who uses the phrase "digital natives" without a heavy dose of irony can usually be safely ignored.
Are there cases where dragging physical metaphors into computing is brutally-old-and-busted? Sure; but making MP3 players with UIs consisting of elaborate(but non-resizeable) bitmaps renditions of 1970s stereo gear was a moronic idea back in the 90s, just as it is now. Outside of agonizing over-literal nonsense like that, 'real life inspirations' seem to take two forms, neither obviously outmoded:
1. Remnants in name only: Your email client likely still has an 'inbox' and an 'outbox' because, at some point, somebody actually had two boxes on their desk. Guess what, it doesn't matter. The computerized abstractions have gained so many features(instant search, threading, sort-by-whatever-you-want, etc, etc.) that they bear almost no relation to their physical counterpart. They have to be called something, so the legacy name is harmless enough.
2. Borrowings that make sense because people want them: Y'know why stuff exists in 'real life'? Because people wanted them it. If they wanted the dead-tree version, they will probably want an electronic one, as well. Once that gets built, it will eventually be polished(having features added and archaisms removed) until it moves into category #1.)
This argument also seems to implicitly overstate the number of things that are somehow fundamentally digital. There are a lot of (mostly failed) ideas involving the dissemination of information in surprisingly modern ways within the constraints of antique media. Making variants of these ideas actually not fail this time will be a change; but it won't be one fundamentally tied to the internet(in anything other than an economic sense).
First you have to learn to code before you look for inspirations. How about a contest?
. http://www.quixeychallenge.com/?ref=Melyan .
From the article: "It’s time to embrace digital natives and give them something cool, that doesn’t try to imitate existing concepts." Maybe. There's still a huge, wealthy immigrant population that has lots more dough than the natives. Before I set about catering to either group, I need a business model. "Something cool" may be part of it - I won't ignore native sensibilities about "coolness." Something saleable will be a larger part, whether conceptually imitative or not.
Your 28? Well, you're 8 years past the point
Here's somebody who both knows AND doesn't know the difference between posessives and contractions. In Soviet Russia, this is not uncommon, yet common at the same time.
"Dammit, all these charts a tables need to be on a computer!" -- me in 1976 playing D&D.
I would argue that the "immigrants" have a more pressing desire to innovate because they felt the crushing limitations of the non-virtual world first hand.
I remember in the early 80's, computers were considered a novel. No one needed one to run their business, and no one cared about knowing the world's problems every hour of the day. Today, people can't live without email or a cell phone. At my work, employees go nuts if their calendars and emails aren't synching with their smart phones.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Not just for geeks, but for everyone.
They suffer from non-participating members, and spam.
There is definitely room to create something new and better
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The summary shows itself to be a bit clueless regarding the development of tools. The medium is unimportant a tool is simply something that helps people perform an activity in the real world. "Digital natives" will behave exactly the same way as "digital immigrants", they will identify a need and build a tool. They may not call it a "facebook" because they don't have the metaphor readily available but if they want a place to share and communicate their interests and activities with others as well receive the same what they build will effectively be a social network tool. Humans haven't significantly changed in ten thousand years. They have bettered their circumstances, advanced their technology, and as a result turned their attentions away from survival and toward loftier pursuits but in the end we're basically pattern matching, problem-solving, self-altering, self-aware meat computers. As a result while our input (and hence our metaphors for activities and tools may change) we will continue to act and approach life in a very similar manner.
I'm sorry, but the college kids that I've been around don't strike me as being particularly internet savvy at all. For all this hype about "They were born on the internet, they were raised at its tit, etc." they actually strike me as being no more tech savvy than any other generation. Sure, they all have Facebook profiles and play a lot of those Farmville-type games, but they still have to call someone to set up a router. They still have to ask me how to do a complex google search. They still seem to know fuck-all about internet security. My brother-in-law had to call me in to fix his laptop after my Generation-Y super-internet-savvy niece infected it with about every phishing virus known to man. The young programming students I've dealt with seem no more or less comfortable with programming than any other young programmers from other generations (and I go back a while).
So where exactly are all these Generation Y ubermensches I keep hearing about? Because I sure haven't met many of them. There are geeks in that generation like any other, but, as with all generations before them, most of them seem pretty clueless about tech.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
One important thing to note is that the laws of the physical world are pretty much ingrained in us. Not only in us, even in animals and their reactions to things. Things from the physical realm *have* to obey these laws (or they wouldn't work) and just imitating them can help here. *Understanding* why they work is better, though.
One reason the iPhone took off as it did despite its touchscreen was the fact that the scrolling was modelled closely on the behaviour of "real" things: There is friction and inertia, you can "throw" a page, everything works in a reliable, predictable way because it's the same way every physical thing behaves. There is no abstraction here at all, it even painfully emulates things that have no real meaning in the digital world. They have meaning for us and our animal minds and bodies, though. We are a product of millions of years of evolution in the physical world and while there is freedom in breaking out of this there's also much to work with in this.
Generation Y are experts with Facebook and Twitter, and really good at playing video games, Beyond that, they know absolutely nothing!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Really? Name them.
And no, the fact that some things are stupid when done online rather than in real life does mean they can necessarily be improved upon.
This is a blog post on a website for sharing bookmarks, and the author complains of lack of originality! Stumbleupon started in 2001 and even it had predecessors like linkbook.com.
So where exactly are all these Generation Y ubermensches I keep hearing about? Because I sure haven't met many of them.
4chan
I'm sick, just like half the people here it seems, of tired old memes that refuse to give way to better ones.
For example, why do turf wars and ideological wars rage endlessly about how to bring the physical into the digital - rather than finding out what amazing new realities are possible in purely digital media! My biggest pet peeve of an example is paper and books. They were invented for abstract ideas to be transmissible and to have them last beyond a conversation between two people, or the sole mind of an idea's originator. Now that we've had commodity computers for 20+ years, there are only the barest signs that we're starting to think of 'writing on digital media' outside the bounds of books. Good luck to us on that point - an infinite world awaits.
-- Too busy at work to log in. Thanks.
There's no such thing as one optimal point of view when it comes to understanding the universe or creating artifacts or inquiring into the human condition, just to cite a few examples.
Each generation has its peculiar fashions and prejudices. Each generation is imaginative. New generations tend to bring a refreshing skepticism of preexisting paradigms - and this is good, or anyway better than complacency - but there's no guarantee that what they come up with will be any better than what came before. Less experience is not intrinsically an advantage over more experience; it stands to reason that more often the converse is true.
One certainty is that, as the volume of human knowledge grows, its surface area increases also. It's at this surface that genuinely new discoveries and new ideas can take place. Unless it turns out that we're living in a bounded space, it's not the case that we're in any danger of running out of new material. And new generations do tend to be especially comfortable at this surface, because their life experience is all about new discoveries and new ideas - at least, discoveries and ideas which are new to them.
It doesn't follow that all new discoveries and new ideas are revolutionary, or even necessarily very interesting. Most aren't, in my experience. Most are either prosaically obvious or shallowly misguided. I'm old enough to have seen a dozen generations of computer hardware come and go. Certainly there's been much incremental evolution along the way, but of all the hundreds of shiny new technologies that were supposed to be revolutionary, only a handful have actually stood the test of time. I'm happy to see anyone, young or old, propose a new one. But please, let's dispense with the hubris.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
So "digital natives" have no experience with physical objects, and can never draw inspiration from things they encounter in the non-digital world?
Um, yeah.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Probably not what you expect: When I started teaching about 10 years ago, I was given a class on the Software Development Life Cycle. I dug into the textbook and had this realization: All of the examples and case-studies in the book start from the position of some paper-based business wanting to computerize their processes -- but that's crazy, right!? Here we are post-2000 (by a year or two at the time), so obviously any business at this point is already computerized.
But here I am 10 years after that, and every time I go in for a doctor's visit the secretaries are still pulling manila file folders out of a mammoth set of cabinets at the back of the office. Every time I submit grades to school at the end of a semester, I'm required to transcribe information and daily attendance "X's" onto official paper rollbooks and photocopy them a few times and submit those. This being in New York City.
So, no, not everything has been put online yet, and now I suspect that it never will be.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I agree that "digital native" and other terms are contrived and fluid. Rather than argue the definition of terms invented by marketing droids, let's ask the better question of what the next step from the Information Age is.
Ideas precede action, so in that sense there is no limit to the evolution of how we organize and present information. But no matter how ornate our ideas, the physical world is. Ideas influence the material world, to be sure, but put a bullet in your head and no idea in the world will save you.
So it's worth asking if the skills we have gained organizing and processing information on the level of ideas will help us master the physical world better. Can we make our homes, goods, and surroundings reflect the order we have imposed on abstractions housed within 1's and 0's?
I believe they can, and the blood/brain barrier, as it were, is being breached on at least two fronts: 3D printing/additive manufacturing, and bioengineering. If we can materialize CAD drawings and DNA sequences directly, our physical world may come to echo virtual reality more quickly than any of us can now possibly imagine.
The digital natives [sic] will likely look at the physical world and wonder why it does not reflect the virtual one, rather than the digital immigrants [sic] who look at the virtual world and wonder why it does not reflect the physical one. They will probably expand upon the Internet of Things, 3D printing, bioengineering, and do it at the pace they've become used to on the Internet rather than in the pre-Internet material world. Their frustrations, and therefore their actions, will be driven by the physical world's inability to live up to the expectations acquired in their virtual worlds.
For better or worse, I expect that we are sliding down the event horizon of permanent dis-equilibrium until we reach the singularity.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Whatever you do, do not believe these two reasons. Never use then as a justification to not do something.
1. If it was worth doing, someone else would have already done it. (No market)
2. Someone else is already doing it, so there is no point in you doing it too. (No profit, too much competition)
Commerce happens because of value and value alone. No one has done it just like you, or will do it just like you. Facebook wasn't first but their way won. Apple didn't invent computers or phones but they went on to make the best, and incredible profits even while charging a premium.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
More like a generation of kids getting really good at doing mundane, dumbed down tasks in a virtual space. The reason why things--shopping, dating, taxes, whatever--were ported from real world to virtual was because it made real life easier. If using computers to make real life easier has run it's course, then why do I care about a new generation innovating a bunch of useless crap on the internet that doesn't better my real life.
all I know is that new generation has more linux chromosome and thats good enough for me!
... and emphasizes why most of the software or process patents make no sense. When people came out with plastic sleeve pages for photos instead of little glued paper corners on blank paper, they didn't need to explain it as a new way of making a photo album; but digital manipulation of digital photos somehow became a whole new concept. Email is not paper mail, but it's like voicemail or fax (themselves already legally equated to older technology), and the *concept* of mail isn't new.
I remember when it was a big deal that a TV show was being carried over long distance "live via satellite". Now that's how people get their *normal* TV - heck, it's how people listen to radio in their cars. The fact that it's digital instead of analog is NOT a big deal - yes, there's lots of technology change, but it's still "receive a broadcast radio signal". It doesn't need new definitions and new rules and new laws.
The young programming students I've dealt with seem no more or less comfortable with programming than any other young programmers from other generations (and I go back a while).
Well there you have it -- you are obviously too old to truly understand their specialness!
I know the feeling.
I am the "digital native" people are looking for. At 20, I did practically grow up with the internet. It was there, always, ever since I was born. Of course it never really hit mainstream until the turn of the century, at least for me. Dial-up just never could get me plugged in (can't tie up the phone line too long). I remember only getting online when my parents would leave and work on stuff offline that I would submit to online communities. But that's not really being immersed.
But now, I am plugged-in. I spend an outrageous amount of time on the internet, and fully admit to an internet addiction. My first instinct when I don't know something is to use Google. I have a wealth of resources at my fingertips almost all of the time and there is a feeling of detachment from reality I get when I get on. I lose a feeling of embodiment and feel more like an entity, free to roam wherever he chooses.
But, whether or not this creates competence about computers is another thing entirely. Other people my age know where the power button is, they probably know what a graphics card is, and probably a few internet memes. That's the extent of it in my experience. I still get young people on internet forums who also can't seem to latch onto the idea they can use Google to answer their questions.
Obviously, they're being incredibly savvy behind our backs somewhere--probably in some secret dance club.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Can you get a hooker and buy drugs online? Yes? Then we have hit an Apex.
Abstract Ideas.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
All of us inherit a world which is in a state of continually becoming . What that means is even people who are born today exist in a world of off line auction houses just as people who were born 30 years ago were. Offline auction houses are no more a property of the people who were born thirty years ago than they are of people born today. Neither generation invented them.
Old people don't get the internet but that's because they're not interested. They don't get a lot of other non-internet things also. Don't forget, a lot of human activity and interest has as its unspoken ulterior motive getting laid....
This is the same argument used by people who said that the internet was going to change the form of the literary novel entirely. Maybe something new and impossible pre-internet will happen (has it not already ? ) in the literary world but mere words being read in a linear fashion are still the fastest and richest way to mainline an arbitrary story into someone's head.
So some people are now younger than the internet. Meh. From this, nothing follows. TVs been arond since the 50s but it still took until 2004-5 for it to consistently have anything good on it....
A digital native is someone who suffers from Tardive Dyskinesia and can't sustain simple conversations about anything other than computers, programming, etc. They can't sit still, have nebulous ways of expressing their emotions, exhibit the most Kafkaesque mannerisms and countenance... Look and act dumb, say stupid things outside of proper timing, lack any kind of common sense!
From the article: “Hey, let’s do a digital version of our college facebook” is a digital immigrant’s idea, just like “Hey, let’s make something like a classifieds section of a newspaper, only this one will be online”. Or “Hey, let’s make an online auction hall”. “Hey, let’s make a place for online video rentals”.
I guess that's supposed to identify what the author wishes to refer to as the identity of the "digital native." In what may be some simpler terms, it looks the author is referring to what would be, rather, a matter of adopting existing forms, for expression in the technologies available of the online medium. It's a matter of adoption of technology, that - not anything in regards to duration of exposure.
I'm sure that the phrase, "Digital native" must carry a certain romantic, imaginative tone to it - perhaps, rather hearkening back to some old cyberpunk novels. (I haven't read those, though I've heard of some. Personally, I've thought that the technology, itself, is neat enough, without having to render it into a fictional context.) I don't think it's good for anything more than poetry, though.
"It's like FaceBook, but it's entirely for gamers with registered stats, competition organization, walkthrough wikis, easter eggs, cheat codes and skins!" I've heard this before, it's called, "High Concept." It is the reason why 90% of US movies are easy to forget within a few years. "It's Jaws...in Space!" The description of 'Alien' which lead to a franchise that has lasting impact, but the vast majority of high concept ideas end up as forgettable works. There are lots of things in the digital world that the real world doesn't have a ready analogue for (though many are created to explain them to those that didn't do much immigrating in 40+ age realm.)
Digital analogues (ha) were necessary for trying to exploit the potential functionality of modern computing (or explain things for funding). The fermionic world will continue to innovate new things for the human experience, and the digital world will incorporate them. The digital world will create things that have no comparative functions in the physical realm of human experience, and the real world will find ways to use the core idea that came from them. To say one group will always think from this environmental context is to ignore modern civilization wouldn't have happened without people who could do otherwise. There is a maximum 2% genetic difference between any two people without significant genetic defects (T21), which means someone who genuinely believes in Intelligent Falling has nearly the same intellectual potential Dr. Martyn Poliakoff, and conversely, the average slashdot poster has nearly the same social skill set Princess Di.
"The periodic table of videos show sixtysymbols in a numberphile testtube," is strangely recognizable to the target audience of one reference in the above paragraph.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
I agree completely. I'm 17, and I've only known two or three other people my age that are skilled with computers. The vast majority know nothing beyond the basics, and they readily admit this. Not trying to be elitist here, but I'm tired of adults going on and on about how kids these days are so special.
Anybody want a peanut?
So let me get this straight, young people are digital natives because they are using web enabled graphical reinvetions of unix commands?
A digital world is a place for your mind to 'live' in. We achieve this by making 'interfaces' to the digital reality, which are compatible with the user's senses - visual, auditory, touch. This way the brain is stimulated into 'believing' it and becomes part of the hardware-software machine.
Of course, we are about half way there - the next step is emulating the rest of the senses - smell, temperature as well as sensations - pain, pleasure, etc.
I guess all of this can be achieved with a computer-brain interface and I personally think I'll see this during my lifetime.
So yeah, there's room for invention, but I think we're getting closer and closer to perfection in many areas.
We of all generations are experiencing new technology together. Its kind of silly to say one generation is superior because it is fresh or another because it is experienced. We see this in the job marketplace where there is salary-experience compression: the capable new employee is paid about the same as the older guy.
On the other hand, outside of technology there may value to other aspects of business such ans management and social skills. Age-stratified companies like all boomers or all college kids may paint themselves into a corner lacking skills of one kind.