I proudly announce that I belong to the first generation of „Digital Natives“ – children who were born into and raised in the digital world [1]. But wait, you could also call me a Millennial, or Generation M or Net Generation. What my Generation has in common is, that it is widely assumed, that we are a bunch of tech-savvy people. In Prensky’s view we are “all “native speakers” of the digital language”, as we have spent our “entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age.“ [2]

Guess what: We all know by experience that this is not the case. Thankfully it took not long until Prensky’s view was questioned and White and LeCornu came up with the Visitors and Residents typology for describing online engagement of individuals’ as “people behaving in different ways when using technology, depending on their motivation and context, without categorizing them according to age or background.” [3] Visitor mode means to see the web as a toolbox, to use for achieving certain goals: Information gathering, shopping, E-Banking, etc. whereas in Resident mode the web is used as a community place where one is able to express opinions and actively develop a digital identity.

To reflect and gain an overview of an individual’s online engagement landscape White and Le Cornu introduced the “V an R mapping process” [4]. While attending a Webinar with David White, we got the chance to start working on our own Visitor and Resident map. I then realized that I want to go back in time and look at my own journey into discovering the digital age by looking at how my map looked at several important stages of my own journey.

I started with the year 1995, as this marks the year of my “first contact” with the digital age. Until then I did not have any contact with computers or the internet at all. In 1995 my family moved to Menlo Park a city in the now famous “Silicon Valley”. It was in 1995 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin the founders of Google met for the first time on campus of Stanford University, just three years before the “birth” of Google. I kept in touch with my friends back in Germany by letter. But it was then that I wrote my first email to my friend Diana. We communicated with our fathers’ email addresses. At home we got a WebTV Networks Box [5], a box, that you connect with your television to access the internet. For the first time ever my mum and me got onto the internet and we spent plenty of time searching the web for pictures of famous actors .

• 1995 – First contact: Wrote my first email with my father’s email account
• 1999 – Start of the era of messaging: I signed up for my own email address and I started chatting.
• 2007 – Social networking: Using ICQ Messenger and start being part of social networks, StudiVZ was a German community for students and was very popular back then.
• 2012 – Developing a professional profile: The year that I made my first appearance in my professional role in the web
• 2021 – Present pandemic times: Reactivation and intensified use of web tools and places

Well, it also would have been interesting to have had a look in the future. As for the speed of technology development who knows what will be up next?

References

[1] Palfrey, J., & Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives. Basic Books.

[2] Prensky M. (2001a). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

[3] White, D., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/3171/3049

[4] https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/evaluating-digital-services

[5] https://news.microsoft.com/1997/04/06/microsoft-to-acquire-webtv-networks/