My children live in the digital world as much as they live in the real one.
Whether they are chatting to their friends on Xbox Live or FaceTime or viewing their profiles on Instagram, these days it seems that there is always a virtual guest in our house.
Their expectations of life are fundamentally different to mine at their ages – eight and 10. They were among the first generation to swipe a dumb screen and wonder why nothing happened; the first to say when a toy was broken: “Don’t worry, we can just download a new one”; and the first to be aware that the real world runs seamlessly into the digital one.
These digital natives understand the etiquette of the digital world – how to text, how to email, how to get wi-fi and how to watch whatever they want, whenever they want. And homework is a whole lot easier now that they have the virtual font of all knowledge at the their fingertips – Google.
As the author of the book Growing Up Digital, Don Tapscott has spent a lot of time looking at how the generation born in the age of computing will differ from those before. Full article
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