TV: Frontline 'Digital Nation - Life on the Virtual Frontier'

[Ryan Goble]

Did everyone catch this PBS special?

Within a single generation, digital media and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialize and even conduct war. But is the technology moving faster than we can adapt to it? And is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we've gained?

In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world. Continuing a line of investigation she began with the 2008 FRONTLINE report Growing Up Online, award-winning producer Rachel Dretzin embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations. "I'm amazed at the things my kids are able to do online, but I'm also a little bit panicked when I realize that no one seems to know where all this technology is taking us, or its long-term effects," says Dretzin.

Joining Dretzin on this journey is commentator Douglas Rushkoff, a leading thinker and writer on the digital revolution -- and one-time evangelist for technology's positive impact. "In the early days of the Internet, it was easy for me to reassure people about what it would mean to bring digital technology into their lives," says Rushkoff, who has authored 10 books on media, technology and culture. "Now I want to know whether or not we are tinkering with something more essential than we realize."

You can view the entire show at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/

From: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

[Harry Smith]

That was an incredible episode of Frontline. I watched it when it first aired. I think there was some really great stuff, and I also think there was some sensationalist backlash with the school monitoring the camera's on student laptops. I think it's so fascinating to see how kids are growing up so connected, how they've never NOT had the internet and how it's changing how we think of information and knowledge.

[Ryan Goble]

Harry, thanks for jumping in the discussion - yes it truly is a "brave new world" but I still don't believe there is such a thing as a 'digital native.' What do you think?

[Harry Smith]

Well, I think there IS some truth to the concept of being a digital native, in that the new generation seems to be more at ease online than ever before. But that doesn't preclude the older generations from coming to a similar comfort level.

Even so, that comfort level that the students feel nowadays, I think, needs to be tempered with the all-important skill of information literacy. I'm always stunned to see how much credence people place on what they find on the internet, regardless of the veracity of it's source.

[Ryan Goble]

Well my fav quote on this topic comes from David Buckingham:

Despite the fact that children’s brains have not adapted sufficiently over thousands of years to enable all of them to read and write, it appears that, within the space of one generation, technology has brought about fundamental evolutionary changes that are making children unrecognizable even to even their own parents. Children apparently been reprogramming their brains to accommodate the speed, interactivity and non-linear structures of computer games (Prensky, 2006;35) – and this has resulted in physical differences in the organizations of their brains.

David Buckingham in Beyond Technology; Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Culture.

Anecdotally, having worked in a very wealthy Chicago suburb and a very poor community in the South Bronx, I think a very small percentage of the students are truly information literate and they need a lot of scaffolding become proficient. A lot of teachers assume their kids know how to do things like change a file format, or use iMovie and I don't find that to be true at all. My ten cents, worth about two in this economy :)