Digital native variation

(The) high degree of variance, both within and between Post Internet People, tends to be the hardest thing for their parents and teachers to grasp.

Social and technological savvy online were virtually the same for Old Internet People and still loosely linked for Full and Semi Internet People, but they’ve become completely decoupled for the Post cohort.

This defies predictions that digital natives would pick up technological skills as easily as speaking. Rather, “computer skills” have become as meaningless a category as “electricity skills.”

Like children of the offline kind of immigrants, second-generation internet kids do grow up fluent in the communication styles of their peers, but no generation anywhere has ever mastered the skills of adulthood without mentorship.

The Post Internet challenge is to parse out which tech skills are acquired incidentally while socializing and which skills were incidental a decade or two ago but now aren’t, and so need to be taught.

Source: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch