Book Report

Web 2.0: Reasons to Love It or Hate It and Definitely Stay Tuned In

A Review of The Digital Divide edited by Mark Bauerlein

For people like me, who love to ask questions and hate making decisions, The Digital Divide is a stupendous book.  While I, in general, believe that the vast majority of Web 2.0 apps will, in the end, be determined to be beneficial to humankind, this book was great fun to read because there are a lot of theories that argue the opposite (as well as agree with me).  A collection of essays, The Digital Divide, brings together viewpoints from the 1990’s through the late 2010’s and covers topics from your brain on social media, identity issues, privacy issues, child development and beyond.
          One of my favorite themes of the book is our brains: how they’re changing for better or for worse, the problems with the non-digital world not adjusting to the new way of thinking and learning, and vice versa, and the problems our brains have with learning all this new digital stuff.  Two of the essays talk about two polar opposite groups of people who tend to not understand each other: digital natives and digital immigrants.  In my Mom’s house, it’s my mom versus Taylor, my 14-year old sister.  I found these essays very enlightening and in defense of both groups that, try as they might to communicate to each other, are not speaking the same language.  As a result, we have digital immigrants (those who weren’t brought up in a digital world) teaching digital natives (those who were).   As a student who has been in this situation, I totally understand, and I think it is of great value to both sides for them to understand that they, literally, aren't speaking the same language (and this book would be of value to them).  There is research to show that the way we currently teach kids is losing its effectiveness because these teachers cannot or will not adapt. Marc Prensky writes in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants:

Digital immigrants don’t believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the immigrants) can’t.  Of course not -- they didn’t practice this skill constantly for all their formative years.

He continues to argue that video games have proven to be a successful, fun, and engaging way to educate digital natives and we should continue to be open minded and willing to adapt our teaching/learning styles from traditional methods.  While Prensky’s essay is interesting, it lacks a lot of concrete evidence to support his theories besides a couple anecdotes, but his second essay, Do They Really Think Differently, tackles some of these issues.
    He begins with some mildly startling statistics about how much the modern kid is exposed to video games, the internet, emails, texts, TV, commercials, and more.  All this stimulus actually changes the brain’s structure and how people think. This is a phenomenon called neuroplasticity and if true, our brains reorganize every time we experience new things.  Prensky goes on to argue that the modern child does not have a short attention span as parents and teachers love to conclude, but just lacks interested in the “old” ways of learning and doing; her attention span is just fine when she is doing what she wants.  One area for concern may be that because we are so stimulated in our modern world, we are losing the ability and the time to reflect and learn from our experiences, but Prensky argues that if educators were more willing to adapt game based learning we could more quickly figure out how to solve this issue.  In the end, the ideas are complex, interesting, and no where near resolved, but I do tend to agree that the world is changing and there seem to be many people who are doing it a disservice by digging in their heels and clinging to the past; one of the big things I’ve learned in CIT 154 is that Web 2.0 is always changing and evolving.
         The rest of this first section continues to focus on some common themes with some focus on how learning all these new Web 2.0 apps is actually good for us because we are stretching our brains (even though it may seem painful at times), and how the blogging and social media has allowed the average person to write and engage an audience(not matter the size) about whatever topic is important to them - a feat that never would have been possible in world just 15 years ago.  From our class, I have to come to understand a lot of these ideas more personally.  It was my first blog (but not my last) created in CIT 154 and by far the most digital collaboration I’ve ever participated in.  I have ever done Nicholas Carr’s article, Is Google Making Us Stupid, definitely was the voice of the devils advocate here - arguing that the ADD style of learning that Web 2.0 is inspiring may be, somehow, making us less human.  But his mildly humoristic approach without much to back up his instincts, doesn’t leave much for a scientist to ponder on.

Another excerpt, from User Skills Improving but Only Slightly by Jakob Nielsen, seemed out of place as it seemed more of a how-to for web designers.  It went into user research statistics, the only interesting part the fact that this research has shown that the general public is slowly learning how to use the internet better.

          The book covers many more topics from our identity creations, collective research, activism, and theories on what’s next.  It would be of great value to anyone who was a philosophical interest in Web 2.0 things and how we humans and the world are changing.  I could write 1,000 pages for each one of these topics, but I’ll close with my favorite part of the whole book because I think it neatly, coherently, sums up exactly how much we don’t know and cannot predict about how Web 2.0 application can and will change ourselves and our world: Douglas Rushkoff’s They Call Me Cyberboy.  A self-proclaimed Internet Evangelist from the early ‘80s, he talks about how he and his fellow nerd buddies would dream of the internet in its full glory, connecting people to each other and endless knowledge; making the world a vastly better place for all of its inhabitants while envisioning themselves as these rogue geniuses who no one understood.  They had to coax people and businesses to join them and each new recruit was celebrated.  But, something they did not expect to happen, happened.  Businesses almost overnight one night jumped on the bandwagon and soon the internet was just another way to sell stuff.  Online banking, stock-trading, direct marketing soon became the norm and the ideology of a nerd paradise connected techno-hippies disappeared.  Rushkoff sadly chuckles at his naivety, but in a world as truly unnavigated as ours, I understand why he was so and it’s why I don’t like to make decisions.  As educated as they may be, in the end they are guesses, but I can’t wait to see what happens next.