Natives vs. Immigrants

I wish I had a dollar for the number of times I've heard "Doesn't your neck hurt from looking down so much?" or "You're on the road to carpal tunnel at this rate" comments from my parents and grandparents about me and my brother on our phones. I can't count how many times I've heard my friends talking about getting the lecture from their parents or remarks from professors. The older generation literally thinks our phones are glued to our hand and they're pretty much right, but how can we help it? This is what we've grown up with. Cell phones started as a luxury right around when our parents started having children and it was rare to own one. Now, however, cell phones have gone from being a rare to a need, now rare to pick up an actual land line telephone. If someone doesn't have a cell phone, well, they're kind of cut off from the world. As technology has become smarter and smarter and given to us to hold, the feeling of needing to communicate has also increased. If we have the opportunity to be in contact with friends, family, and the rest of the world 24/7, why wouldn't we take advantage of that? 

We were born into a world where constant communication and constant use of digital things is normal-as digital natives, it's pretty much all we know. So how can our elders criticize and blame us? They always say something like "back in my day, we didn't have all these fancy devices" and go on about doing math in their heads, talking in person, reading books to find information, etc. Sometimes they ask "Would you even be able to survive back then?" Well, yeah, I would. Because having to talk to someone in person and writing papers from information found in books would be the norm. No one had cell phones, no one had computers-it would feel nothing like being without a phone or a computer today, because there was nothing to be cut off from. They used what they had and that was normal. To my parents, I always try to use the comeback "So you're trying to tell me that if all these digital devices were around when you were a kid, you wouldn't act the same way we do with them?" They usually never have anything to say to that one-it just makes sense. Yes, I'll admit our generation is addicted to technology, but our parents and grandparents would be the exact same way if they had these opportunities growing up.

When telephones were first invented, everyone was probably blown away by this grand new convenient invention. In no time, everyone had a phone in their household and instantly made it the new norm of communication. It's natural for people to flock to bigger and better things, and our parents did just the same by getting cell phones and computers themselves. Just because our generation uses technology more doesn't mean anything but that we understand it better. They understand and are more drawn to things they grew up with or have been around for most of their lives, simply because it's comfortable and it's native to them. Have they ever considered that they're so opposed to all this constant use of technology because it's just foreign to them? Nothing is different in our brains that makes us addicted to technology, nothing changed between generations that makes us "go crazy" without constant communication. Digitalization is native to our generation and we're just doing what feels normal to us. It's nothing to be penalized for-as the world around us changes, humans do too.