There's an interesting post over on
jill/txt where she wonders if students are
losing interesting in blogging due to the novelty having worn off. She writes "Basically they just ignore it all. And they're smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don't really understand blogging." Conversely, it seems her students are much enthused by Facebook.
What I am wondering about are the discussions we've been having about digital immigrants vs digital natives. The discussion was sparked by Jess's
post on Frontline where she adopts some terminology from Mark Prensky.
Marc Prensky says digital natives are born into technology and thus are native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. Prensky also has a term for those of the Luddite persuasion; digital immigrants might adopt most aspects of the techy environment but will always retain their accent.
One could argue that contemporary graduate students might well be blog natives; blogging is nothing new to them. Yet, ironically, if so, they are less interested in blogging than those who have come to it new. Research into the "real world" tends to reveal that immigrants vary between those who try to completely embrace the culture of the host land and those who try to retain the "old world" culture. Perhaps the interest in blogging over the last few years has been driven by those "immigrants" who wanted to adopt this new technology; the 'Luddites' simply didn't engage with it. As we enter an era in which, perhaps, blogging is seen as normal then what me might see is the occasional surge of interest as new groups of "digital immigrants" discover it. E.g. elder bloggers, perhaps even Aibo bloggers.
One of the things we may notice about transliteracy is that it may routinely disappear. What I mean by that is that examples of transliteracy may be more noticeable among digital immigrants as they start to experiment with new media. Once we become digital natives, the use of the new media may become second nature and the transliterate use of this new media may become normalised and in becoming normalised become invisible.
If the first part of my title piques your curiosity and the latter part leaves you in convulsions, chances are you're not (yet) au fait with txt spk. You might wonder if there is any need to bother developing any adeptness with a language that refuses vowels, apostrophes and spreads exclamation marks willy nilly (I mean, really!!!).
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