Digital Natives or Digital Slaves?

A “Digital Native” engaged in her smartphone. Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Being a “member” of Generation-Y myself, I look upon the younger folks that came after me, the so called “Digital Natives” and wonder… WHY (you see what I did there?) this is conceived as being something beneficial.

After this short introduction I want to clarify, that I am not fond of labeling whole generations of people. Still, I consider myself part of kind of a “bridge” generation. Where my life, from a technological point of view, was vastly different in my early childhood, compared to my teenage years and again compared to my now adult life.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m old. By my own standards. By everyone else’s standards. But honestly, time went so swiftly, I just didn’t notice.

When I was a kid…

• My family had an anlogue phone with a dialing-disc. We also had to share it with three other neighbours. Only one of us could talk, the others had to wait until the line was free.
• I played Videogames on my Commodore C64, which involved typing in commands and having a general understanding of how to operate a computer. This led to me exploring the programming languge “BASIC” a little bit.
• We had one TV in the living room and the whole family came together for typical 8os sitcoms and series like Alf, Knight Rider and McGyver.