Digital Natives

 

We talked about digital natives in today’s class, which means people who born into digital age. In China, we usually called this cohort “after 00s”, children who born after 2000 are around with technology since they were born. Compared to our 90s, those digital natives have a better ability to accept new technologies. It is not rare anymore to see a primary school students own a cellphone or Ipad, and active in the social network sites. I began to realize the huge gap between 90s and 00s when I was first fall behind my 5-year-old cousin in Plants Vs Zombies.

Although overall teachers say CMC brings more positive effect more than negative effect to children on academic, the CMC definitely changed the way they growing up. When I was small, children in my age are supposed to be sweet and please elder people in a dinner party, the elder will then give some gifts or pocket money in return. However, children today don’t do this anymore, they always sit there quietly and play games in their Ipad or ask the elder to show them some new digital devices. This may makes them lack of social skills, and decrease the interaction with other same age children. When they enter school, since the searching engine made everything quick and easy, some children even use the internet to find the answer to their homework. During the long summer vacation, they can even find someone else to do the homework for them via internet. As for the composition homework, some children just search the title on the searching engine and copy and paste from the first page, it is easy for teacher to find it out because the compositions from different students look so similar that they all come from a very smaller range of sources.

Except the negative impact on children’s academic and daily life, the internet safety is the most concerned aspect by the whole society, since teens from 12 to 17 has a close second rates of internet use more than other age groups. We mentioned that 53% of parents concern most on the interaction with strangers on the internet. That is true, children and teens are still too young to find what is right and wrong, and they are easily to be deceived by strangers. In the social network sites, games, and other media, teens are usually be a target for criminal. Take video games as an example, since women are start getting into games today, young girl users are also become a big group active in games. Almost in every game, women figures are often sexulization and associated with violence. Some male player will be attracted by the sexy figures and it is common to see the male player harass the female player in the game. They will keep asking for the contact information and say dirty words to the female. This will play a really bad impact to the young girl players. When I was 11 years old I played the first online games, many male players asked about my age and other personal information, some even said they fall in love with me. I was lucky that I didn’t believe them, but some young girls are unfortunately deceived by those bad guys and lost their money or other reputation, some even put themselves in danger because they met in real life. Boys are usually better when playing games, because the male players are too much in the world of game. But boys are easily to get into troubles if they get conflicts with other players. They are also easily to be bullied if the conflict cannot be solved.