Socio-Cognative Dissidence

I kind of get why it took off, Prensky's little framework. It's approachable and zippy, all wrapped up in a little package. It's marketable....latch-onto-able. I mean, I actually remember when my mother, a boomer and an educator, started referring to herself as a "digital immigrant" after a PD session about a decade ago. "See, Phyl, I'm a digital immigrant because I wasn't born into the digital world that you were born into!"

Except I actually wasn't. I am an elder millennial which is one of my favorite identities to indulge in. I want a tiara that says it. 

In college, as informed by the realization that I was not simply born in gemini, but during the transition between gemini and cancer, I called us the "X/Y Cusp," delighting in the liminal. There was a significant cultural divide, I observed, between folks born in the early eighties compared to folks born in the late eighties. I was known to oft wax upon the differences between children's media of the eras (Sesame Street vs Barney, for example) as well as the shift in the ages in which we first had access to the internet.  Born in 1983 and poor, I didn't even have an original Nintendo until I was like,13, and by then the Nintendo 64 was out. A home computer didn't happen until I was 15, and after that, our dial-up internet was strictly occasional. After the trials on those AOL disks ended, my mom couldn't always afford the bill.  I survived college in THIS millenium by staying up all night writing on public computers in the student lounge until a more resourced friend gave me her hamidown candy-colored imac. 

So for starters, I think like many dichotomies, Prensky's is false. The blatant insensitivity in his choice of metaphor is less alarming than the power dynamics, the othering of youth, that the metaphor affirms. While I think a framework which could help educators navigate digital literacy would be an extremely useful tool, I don't think Presnky’s offers the depth or critical lens that such a tool requires.

I found Boyd’s critique insightful. In my time running a debate league, I have consistently observed that our education infrastructure absolutely fails to teach people the skills they need to critically examine and reflect. In fact, I would assert that these skills are structurally disincentivized. I also agree that while this has long been the case due to the transactional nature of American education, the internet has rapidly intensified its impact, leading to a sort of endemic socio-cognitive dissonance. 

However, though I broadly value the critique of our collective failure to meaningfully and holistically address critical examination as an essential skill of digital literacy, I believe that socio-cognitive dissonance is being actively weaponized against many oppressed communities, including current youth and future generations of young people. It’s  weaponized not just through a deficit of instruction or access and equity, but also through deliberate campaigns of disinformation that target not youth, but adults. Adults hold far more power then young people due to the status conferred by age and often their whiteness, and their illiteracy has the opportunity to do far more damage. We see the consequences of this every day in 2022 by way of the rise in fascism, white supremacy, wealth inequality, as well as the rapid erosion of civil rights and the terrifying, system-wide avoidance of the realities of climate change.