Knowing | Participating | Living

After a nice offline weekend at Keuka Lake, I am working to catch up with quite a bit of RSS backlog. This includes a couple of posts that are fitting together quite nicely with my recent experiences.

David Warlick got my thoughts flowing with a post last week on being a digital native. During a recent workshop, David asked his participants a few questions to judge their use of some technologies. What he found was that while most of the crowd had used Gopher and Telnet and almost everyone had heard of blogging, very few were actually blogging. As David noted:

These are educators who, in the early 1990s, were on the edge. They were paying attention, recognizing an emerging revolution in information, and latching on. What happened between then and now? Why have they missed the new revolution?

My take on this was:

I guess maybe this shows a potential problem with the whole Digital Native/Immigrant concept. There are a lot of digital natives out there that are still functioning at their original level of introduction when they first became natives. The real question is: are you a digital native that has continued to immigrate as the technology developed?

Well, Stephen Abram has an answer – or at least a definition that we can use to discuss an answer. In a blog post on the same day, Stephen was writing about Internet Voyeurs:

Definition: An Internet Voyeur is someone who is aware of the tools, sites and concepts of the new ways of web ecology but hasn’t really experienced them personally. They’ve read about blogs, maybe visited a few; they’ve heard about, for example, MySpace and The Facebook, or del.icio.us and Flickr but only understand what they look like from afar and on an intellectual level.

His advice for bridging this gap is to make sure we provide time and support for voyeurs to “play” with these tools. I did that last Tuesday during a workshop on Managing Digital Information Overload where I provided a guided tour of some Web2.0 tools and plenty of time for play. In the end, the biggest hit was Pandora, a Web2.0 tool that uses your input and feedback from other listeners to build your perfect radio station(s). For a group of mostly Internet Voyeurs, adoption of a tool like Pandora is a great step forward. Now at least we can have a conversation about how del.icio.us is like a Pandora for websites or RSS is like setting up a Pandora station for blogs you want to read.

In the end, I really like the level of awareness represented by Internet Voyeurism. I tried to do a little buzzword translation to make it easier to talk about this:

Digital Voyeur: A person at this stage of awareness exhibits the quality of Knowing about a topic. She or he can define a concept, idea, or tool, but may not have ever experienced using it personally. Awareness may come from workshops, demonstrations, or reading – in other words Voyeurs know what a blog is and have seen blogs, but they don’t read or write on blogs.

Digital Immigrant: Immigrants are Participating in online ideas and tools; e.g. they read blogs, get information from Wikipedia, and listen to sporadic podcasts. Users at this stage have adopted a tool, but have not adapted to fully embrace the new potentials. An immigrant may be participating in a certain release of a tool, but may not be aware that new releases are available or new features have been added.

Digital Native: At this level, a person is Living the concept. A native has adapted his or her lifestyle to embrace the full potential of a tool. Natives are aware of changes in features and make conscious decisions about using those new features. People at this level of awareness are able to synthesize ideas or tools into other possible areas of use. Natives are contributors to a technology, rather than just users – they engage in blog writing or commenting, they edit Wikipedia articles, and they upload tagged bookmarks.

One of the key features I would also add to this discussion is that we need to view Knowing, Participating, and Living (or Voyeur, Immigrant, Native) as a continuum as opposed to a hierarchy. We also need to evaluate a level of awareness for each tool/idea/concept. For example, I would say that I am Living blogging (I write and comment quite a bit) but Participating in podcasting (I listen…sometimes, and occasionally produce my own, though I do teach podcasting) and only Knowing Flickr (it is blocked, and I don’t have a camera phone or a Palm with a camera so I just haven’t gotten into it).

So go forth and seek ye out those who Know and give them an opportunity to Participate by showing them how you Live a technology. Or, to put it differently, CLICK HERE to check out my personal radio station on Pandora.

Posted in infomancy | 3 Comments »