JUST BECAUSE WE DON’T GET IT, DOESN’T MEAN THEY DO
There’s no question that the younger generation are faster texters and have a meme culture that far surpasses anything on the internet heretofore.
Quality rhyme, right there. Quality. (This is not sarcasm!)
One of my favorite scenes from the TV show Grace and Frankie is when Frankie gets a new computer and calls Apple for support and whispers, “I’m 70!”
There is some truth to the idea that older people are not good online and young people are digital natives who, with every generation, will always be soooo much better.
But it’s only half the truth.
START EARLY, GET MORE MUSCLE MEMORY
What we mistake for mastery is probably just muscle memory.
Muscle memory has nothing to do with muscles. It’s actually about an inert white substance in your brain called myelin. This comes from a really excellent book called The Talent Code, about how we get good at things.
[Fun fact, researchers thought myelin was useless until they autopsied Einstein’s brain and found a TON of it, and thought, hunh, maybe we really use all of our brain and aren’t wasting giant swathes of it!!!]
And while some of the claims about the glory of practice have been debunked, myelin is still a revelation in how we learn things. (The debunking is mostly about how much improvement can be practiced into us. There is a lot more genetics involved in a world-class violinist or a baseball pitcher’s throw than we would like to admit in our individualistic bootstrapped society.)
But short of Olympic-level performance, you can still get massively better at things.
Your ability to do a task depends on neurons firing at the right moment. Think about it: the difference between a mediocre violinist and a great violinist is the ability to play a note exactly when and how they want. It’s all in the timing. That’s what myelin controls. You do something enough, it wraps around those neurons so the timing of their firing gets more and more predictable.
So in regards to computer or smartphone use, there is no arguing that if you start as a very small child, you’re fine motor movements and your ability to navigate your environment online is huge. The myelin you’ve been wrapping around those little neurons is very well formed timing fingers to perfection.
This is not the same thing as understanding what you’re looking at.
THE FANCY NAME FOR THIS IS DIGITAL LITERACY
It turns out a child’s level of digital literacy is usually in line with if not behind the rest of the other literacies they have to learn in school.
Kids are not better at the internet because kids are not good at reading yet, and the internet is a particularly challenging form of reading.
WEBSITES ARE A NEW FORM OF CONSUMING INFORMATION
I took a web design class years ago and was fascinated to realize this. Newspaper articles, novels, nonfiction books, political speeches, and academic lectures are different formats for presenting information. It could be the exact same information!
A website is an entirely different form, a super complicated one.
WEBSITES ARE IN 3-D.
The information does not flow from page to page but exists in little pods linked together, more a K’NEX set that got super creative, not a book.
THE META-SKILLS BEHIND BROWSING THE WEB
- Know how to read.
- Understand the architecture of a website with its link ecosystem.
- Understand that a lot of websites are accidentally or maliciously lying to you, and that they may look better than official sources of information.
- Understand that even with websites that aren’t lying, they most likely only have one piece of the whole picture about a topic and you have to look and multiple websites.
- Understand Search and that it is algorithms showing you information that is partially true, accidentally false, or maliciously false in one long, identical list of links.
These are sophisticated intellectual gymnastics that kids who are still working on object permanence are…not good at. Yes, their little fingers may text faster than you have ever been able to do anything, but that doesn’t translate into literacy.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
Kids are only going to be better than adults if we teach them to be.
You can learn by osmosis how to manipulate a mouse and how to build a Minecraft village that is stunning and its complexity. (But even with that, if you get an actual architect into Minecraft and teach him some basics, he’s still going to be better at it.)
Poor readers are poor digital citizens.
WHAT TO DO WITH THIS INFORMATION?
Fund schools!!!!
Kids really need to learn this stuff from qualified teachers, just like every other literacy.
We’re not going to have a generation of people so much better at the Internet. We’re gonna have a generation of people who are exactly as good at the Internet as we as a society have taught them to be.