The Historian's Dilemma and the Question of Generations

Flickr Image: 

Siva Vaidhyanathan just published "Generational Myth: Not All Young People are Tech-Savvy" in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review. http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=cyR8ms385ZjjcHcyWC5drKsJZckwxjkz I've already written to him to let him know how much I like this piece . . . And it also makes me antsy. As a historian of technology, I often find myself vacillating between generalization and specificity. Well, there's that one diary from which we can extract every ounce of detail about daily life for a sixteen year old milk maid in Puritan Portsmouth. . . and on the other hand there is the category of persons that one diarist represents. Ah, yes. The problem of Representation. Again.

Here's the issue. Siva rightly points out that not everyone born after 1985 is equally a participating in our digital age, even though Marc Pensky's term "digital native" seems (at present) to be sticking. In a few more years, there will be so few of us "digital immigrants" (those who have had to learn this new language of digital culture as adults, and who still speak it with an accident, oy vey) that the term will hopefully be a quaint and archaic marker of the technophobic anxieties of our transitional moment. I agree completely that "digital native" is a weird term. I look forward to its passing into irrelevancy. And I agree that not everyone born after 1985 has a video game in his or her hand . . . except that this recent Pew survey did a pretty good job of crossing demographies of race,class, region, religion, gender . . . and it looks like 97% of American teens 12-17% play video games. 97%! That's not a problem anymore. It's a changed environment.

So here's the historian's dilemma. How do you account for monumental social, cultural, political, and/or economic change while still acknowledging a range of differences among individuals who are experiencing that change? How do demarcate rupture and continuity, how do you differentiate within a generalization? it would be insanely naive (and Siva does not do this) to ignore digitality. I tend to agree with Robert Darnton that humanity has seen four (or, arguably, five) great information ages, and ours is the last of these, the most rapid, and the most globally transformative. To not recognize the dynamism of this moment is to act, well, like most academics are doing these days, pretending one can carry on with business as usual, as if the students we teach now are exactly the same as students we taught a decade or two decades (or three, four . . .). They aren't. Their world is vastly different and the opportunities for learning are vastly different. Even if individuals insist that they don't participate in digital culture, well, they are wrong. They do. Even if they don't know they do. It's like saying you don't breathe air.   Culture is everything and culture changes.  You can resist it, but that resistance too is both an individual and a generational marker.

As I've said, Siva's points are right on the mark. My comments are not offered here to refute his but to underscore that, even when not every individual partakes in the same way of vast historical changes, their separation is differently inflected than it would be if they were not marked by that difference. No human actor acts separate from a culture. Which is a different comment than saying that every individual in a culture is unitary, possesses the same qualities, the same affections, the same interests. So his caution is well taken about being careful not to generalize about "everyone under thirty" or "everyone over thirty."

At the same time, well, how does that refrain go again? O yes: "Always historicize!" an oxymoron (always historicize? as Eve Sedgwick wittily asks) that is just about perfect for expressing the Historian's Dilemma.

---------

Thanks to Flickr member Gangle for this photograph of historical re-enactors. Please click on the image for other photographs in Gangle's Flickr stream and for full documentation.