Message to Marc Prensky: Duh!

I am a digitial native; although, I cavil with the moniker, but that conflict must defer for the time being. I make such a declaration because I interacted with a monitor and a qwerty board my entire life. I will never forget the old "Lisa" I would saddle up to in media class at Wilson Elementary, and Mrs. Hopkins would walk us through the "educational" software flashing in gradations of green. At home, I passified in front of Doogie Howser M.D. and his digital journal. My mind lullied to sleep by the rhythmic clicking of his thoughts across orphic enchanted keys. Now I read Wired, subscribe to podcasts, and refuse to pay for anything digital. My prophet is William Gibson; my leader is Chris Anderson; and my peer is Cory Dotorow.

In the face of all this, I stand reciting Walt Whitman's famous line, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself." I believe this elicits from the postmodern identity in which we are unable to hold a mirror up to ourselves and say, "There I am. This is me." I think this refers to the second part of Whitman's line: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Also, it explains Prensky's statement about Digital Native's penchant from learning: "They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked." The last two attributes Mr. Prensky points to identify the quantum speed and collectivity of the noosphere in which the Digital Native actuates and reiterates culture.

This culture performs within a hive-minded episodic fascicle of infinite ramification. Therefore, as Prensky cites from Peter Moore, logic algorithms impede the process of learning, "Linear processes that dominate educational systems now can actually retard learning from brains developed through game and web-surfing processes on the computer." Prensky suggests that we must adapt to the non-linear randomness of "future math", which he indicates as, "approximation, statistics, binary thinking". I agree with Prensky on the first two, but techonology in the classroom and in society has taught me to refuse binary thought and embrace pluralism, such as the parallel processing Prensky declared a cornerstone of Digtial Native interpretation. In high school, technology became a corpus: a body of knowledge that enables a a student to dissect and replicate performance both realistically and virtually. I engaged technology as exponential, integral, and limitless. The Matrix did not assuage any of those notions and compounded them with mythology and paranoia. In other words, technology became both human and god. In college, I found a new society of technology. Professors questioned every aspect of being and evolution through the technocratic complex. Students were asked to become self-aware of the liminal coalescence. And it either became a blue screen of death (for those gamers: the red ring of death), or a dynamic DNS among the Cloud. I'm sure there is something in between, but the Native never moves backwards.

Truthfully, I learned a little from the articles and video. One, the video was too slow, and provided the crux of my Native identity. Two, I'm Plastic Man. Until next time, away!