I was glad to participate in this conversation with others who question the whole digital natives/immigrants, net geners “movement.” Of course many are off to the ELI annual meeting where this movement seems to generate its ideas.
Being relatively new to academic discourse from the inside, I’m wondering if this is the way it goes. There’s popular culture that may or may not be grounded in rigorous investigation, but nobody seems to mind. We all jump on the bandwagon, cause it’s there, the D.J.’s good and the celebrities show up.
As was pointed out in this conversation, where’s the discussion of class, SES, ethnicity and I’ll add gender? It’s painfully obvious, (to me anyway) that this talk is coming from predominantly white male voices. The circling conversations as well. I think I might have posted this white paper before,
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, which gets at the issue from a different angle, defining and categorizing via activities and use.