I wanted to share a citation that I submitted for a course this past term, it was regarding the introduction in Race After the Internet by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. It kind of turned into its own argument in term of the application of “Digital Natives” and how this word causes a disappearance or erasure of the very people used in its metaphorical intent.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"Digital Natives"
Lisa Nakamura discusses racial coding through the use of the term “digital native” to describe people who have grown up with access to digital technology and the internet, and who are subsequently familiar and confident with its usage. The term “digital native” was first introduced by American educator Marc Prensky in the article, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”. Prensky uses this problematic framework to articulate the generational gap of technology and internet usage between educators and students, citing one’s aptitude with technological tools and applications as a form of language-learning that determines one’s familiarity with technological environments and networks (3).
Nakamura refers to “digital natives” as a means to problematize issues relating to race and technology -- This alludes to the absence of Indigenous people in these conversations but also the harm in using racialized metaphors to demonstrate expertise or fluency of Western-Euro technological advancement. Chickasaw scholar Jodie Byrd discusses racial coding and the use of "digital natives" in “Tribal 2.0: Digital Natives, Political Players, and the Power of Stories”: “With the motif of the frontier to describe the innovative, capacious, and lawless terrains of digital interconnectivities comes the inevitable “Native” and “tribe” as signifiers of a nostalgic longing toward luddite refusals on the one hand and a romantic irony that recovers the primitive at the bleeding edge of technology on the other” (57). Indigenous scholarship discusses this further through the work of Marisa Elena Duarte who challenges the presumption of Indigenous people and technology being incongruent to one another in Network Sovereignty. This work explores the importance of understanding the physical impact that technology and internet has in hardware which occupies Indigenous territories in the chapter “Network Thinking” (9-25). Therefore, it is worth considering how phrases like “digital natives” are used as racial coding which results in the elimination of racialized people -- and, their subsequent histories, physical territories, futures -- from the very meaning that these metaphorical frameworks are derived from (11).
Works Cited
Byrd, Jodi. “Tribal 2.0: Digital natives, political players, and the power of stories”. Studies in American Indian Literatures, 26(2), 55-64. 2014. eBook.
Duarte, Marisa Elena. Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country. 2017. Print.
Nakamura, Lisa and Peter Chow-White. “Introduction—Race and Digital Technology: Code, the Color Line, and the Information SocietyLinks to an external site.”, Race after the Internet. 2012. eBook.
Prensky, M. (2001), "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1", On the Horizon (Links to an external site.), Vol. 9 No. 5, pp. 1-6. Digital.