Digital Natives

This is what my children are - digital natives. Think about it - my generation, "Generation X" - we're the first settlers in the newly discovered digital world. We grew up with satellite TV, satellite communications, the very beginnings of the Internet, and pretty much every home eventually had a computer in it - our first was an Epson that had a tiny 4-inch green screen and folded up into a suitcase.

My parents were missionaries in the digital environment. My mother worked for a while as a computer networking technician for Alaska Pacific University. She set up computers in villages the Alaska bush, which were networked to the University in Anchorage via satellite, and then to the central hub for the company which was running the program, Control Data. These are the very basic underpinnings of the tool we know and share on a daily basis, the Internet.

Mom's parents, my Grandparents, were the discoverers of this amazing new digital world. Grandpa ran the program at APU (nepotism, I know). People of his generation built the first actual computers - from ENIAC to the invention of the microchip. These were the Columbus's of their time - those who dared posit that the world was not flat at all ...

Which makes me and my generation the proud parents of the first generation born fully immersed in the ever-changing world of digital technology.

Think about this: since my daughter was born in 1991, cell phones have shrunk from the size of a walkie-talkie almost down to the size of a credit card. The computer has shrunk from a box the size of a suitcase and a monitor the size of a house to a thin notebook which you can fit in an envelope or a hand-held device 1,000 - times more powerful than that first Apple IIe I was so very proud of in the 7th grade. For her, technology ebbs and flows like the tide does for us, and she's used to instant information, instant entertainment and instant gratification. Why not? All she has to do is Google it if she wants to find something out.

The problem with this - and I see it as a generational problem from which even my generation suffers to a degree - is that in learning that she can find it now, she has failed to learn the PROCESS. She doesn't understand, and we're, as a generation, as two or even THREE generations, failing to teach, to train her generation in how the PROCESS is as important as the RESULTS.

Why learn to exercise when you can get liposuction or lap-band surgery? Who cares about learning to take care of ones self when all one has to do is get a pill to fix it?

Why learn how to perform long division when you can just pull up your calculator on your laptop?

Why balance your checkbook? Why even HAVE a checkbook? Just log on to the bank and look at your account balance!

But when they don't understand the need for Process, the need for learning the steps, they don't truly learn the hows and whys as to the way the world (OUR FAULT, not THEIRS), they feel entitled to the benefits of that process even though they didn't go through it.

And now the government is following through and entitling their entitlement. Let's bail out the economy! Let's socialize medicine! Let's tax the rich and give to the poor not because they deserve it, but because we CAN.

We no longer have to work to earn our living - we can be guaranteed housing, medical care, food - why bother working? We are ENTITLED to these things, according to the president. We needn't EARN them!

I, for one, am going to teach my children how to EARN what they need, and how to protect what they EARN. It's the only way we, as a society, are going to survive - the way our forefathers built this nation, and something we need to return to.