While addressing the challenge of educating millennial children Marc Prensky (2001) emphasized on the technological environment that they are brought up in. Prensky coined Digital natives and digital immigrants to label today’s digital users but failed to notice much larger problems such as digital divide. Instead of labelling users, the Digital Visitor and Resident (V&R) model provides us a framework to map one’s online usage. This is a simple model to capture a wide range (continuum) of online engagement. Visitor and resident mode are two ends of the horizontal axis. When one uses an online resource to perform a certain task and leaves it once the task is completed depicts a visitor mode of engagement, one example could be using google translate. When the translation is done, the user is no longer needed to be online or moved to another tasks. One the other hand, in residence mode one enters online with a digital persona and looks for other digital residents to connect to. Our prime example is all kinds of social media such as Facebook and Instagram. When one is logged in Facebook (it’s possible to log in without any login or persona but this is not so common otherwise we wouldn’t have billions of users), the engagement comes from either posting an update to the community or liking, commenting on other updates. In resident mode, the duration of engagement is indefinite because of many reasons for instance no particular task is there to complete to begin with. Lately a Netflix show called ‘The social dilemma’ caught my eye. It talked at length on how we have moved from a tool based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation based technology environment. The reason why I am talking about this show now is that I see a connection, the visitor mode is all about tool based technology, tool is innate here we use the tool to do our job. But in current reality certain tools are equipped with all AI based manipulative and additive ammunition that are designed to do only one thing that is to increase users retention in their platform – resident mode. So, I am quite intrigued to learn about the V&R model, I see it can be used to do a longitudinal study on a group of people to capture the shift in their online engagement.
The digital dilemma – visitor vs. resident