Digital media and interactive communication are the most striking phenomena of social change and the cultural industry at the beginning of the new millennium. It is estimated that there are now over 6 million Italians, between 13 and 24 years old, registered on Facebook, while 80% of our young people own a smartphone. We are faced with what has been classified as the “Net Generation”, or generation of “digital natives”, a fitting definition coined by Marc Prensky in 2001.
Who are the “digital natives”?
The digital native expression indicates the generation of those who were born and raised in correspondence with the spread of new information technologies. And so these are young people, who have had no difficulty in learning the use of these technologies.
They are those who know how to use new technologies intuitively, effortlessly. Those who are comfortable with computers, tablets, mobile phones, internet connections, social networks, Wi-Fi connections, video games. It is the children and students who have lived through the ongoing computer revolution and who are “mother speakers” of digital language.
What are the risks for digital natives?
This epochal technological change, which concerns us all, but especially the younger generations, is not without consequences, on the relationship we have, but that mainly children have with learning, knowledge, processing and storage of information, communication, socialization. The mind, identity, relationships and education of digital natives are strongly conditioned by the ongoing digital revolution and are now organized around entirely new experiences and paradigms.
Some risks of massive exposure in the developmental age to screens are:
- The sensory and experiential subtraction that comes from the permanence in front of the screen. Sensory deprivation mainly affects young children damaged in the lack of motorized sense. This has repercussions in development, creating widespread phenomena such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, early eating disorders.
- Addiction, or video addiction. Virtual images interact with brain areas dedicated to pleasure and gratification; the risk is not being able to do without it any more. Video addictions take creative resources away from the new generations and dramatically mark the daytime and nocturnal time passed in front of the screens.
- Confusion between the real and virtual world: this situation occurs mainly in the field of violent video games, an activity that instigates children to violence as they play it down. It has been shown that a repeated and continuous vision of scenes of violence under the age of 8 creates a greater propensity for aggressive acts and to see others as objects, not as people.
- Regular and stimulate: the real educational challenge for parents
The educational challenge, since children are young, is complex: on the one hand it is necessary to regulate, on the other hand a correct use of these tools must also be stimulated, which must not be demonized. Let’s not forget the potential of playful learning through apps, games or videos that stimulate children: these are not passive but interactive visions.
The screen space can be a new environment where they have experiences that open to the discovery of the world. But it is from an educational point of view that perhaps the most evocative possibilities offered by new media to digital natives are expected. It is reasonable to think that within a few decades the new means will revolutionize our ways of learning and studying and that the world of traditional school will be radically transformed.
The first signs are already felt: the development of e-learning (distance education), the increasingly massive and accredited offer of online courses provided by prestigious universities, the possibility of creating multimedia content, entrusted to the collaboration of the most qualified experts in each field of knowledge, the impressive number of information, tutorials that can be found on the web about the most varied human activities, the development of a collective intelligence that, by putting them in the network.
The children must be educated from an early age to enjoy new technologies together with adults, giving temporal limits and alternating evolutionarily more stimulating tasks.
It is necessary, among the rules, to establish time limits for the use of devices. Setting a time limit allows the child to view the moment of detachment in advance, reducing the emotional impact. Young children, however, do not have the sense of time: at the beginning, therefore, it is useful to use an alarm clock that clearly indicates, and regardless of the parent’s intervention, the end.
How long? Under the age of two, touch technologies can contribute to cognitive development when used in moderation: a maximum of 15 minutes. Time can increase with age: half an hour up to four years, 45 minutes up to six years. In any case, it is not recommended to own a personal console or tablet before the age of six and a very strict control over schedules and contents is always necessary.
Of course, the great changes of recent decades pose digital natives in the face of new dangers: cyber bullying, for example, the harassment of criminals, scams, the sometimes confused overlap between the public and private sphere, the enormous amount of information, sometimes useless and redundant, which can end up disorienting, to disperse unnecessarily creative energies and generate anxiety, the development of many social relations.
Given the constant growth of the phenomenon, more and more social scientists and psychologists are interested in the phenomenon. And, despite the alarmism usually generated by such news, they want to emphasize that the benefits of using smartphones and other digital devices are higher than the risks. Provided, of course, not to exaggerate.
Every evolution eliminates some problems and creates others. A challenge that even the generation of “always connected” will have to meet.
https://www.marialeoni.it/i-nativi-digitali/
Within the study, Prensky attributes the name Digital Native to children born after 1985, the date of the mass diffusion of use-friendly computers. People who were born before this date are referred to as “digital immigrants” because they approached the “digital language” at a later stage of life.
Prensky also calls this empowered digital generation “Homo Sapiens Digital” as the potential that technology brings to the human experience has evolved; He uses technology to enhance man’s abilities by enhancing them.
Technology therefore allows us to enrich our cognitive abilities, improve memory through the tools of archiving, acquiring and returning data, for this reason digital technology can help decisively by providing databases and algorithms capable of storing and analyzing large amounts of data much more accurately than the human brain can do. (Prensky, 2001)
The difference between digital natives and immigrants also lies in the fact that those born in the Net Generation do not have an “analogue” past behind them, but are born immersed in this digital age. An adult who begins to use digital media has sufficient experience in searching, memorizing and managing information, because he or she has an ‘analogue’ background.
A child who has not yet developed the prefrontal cortex, whose task is to guide predictive behavior, the planning of patterns of action over time, the ability to relate to the outside world, and who interfaces very early with the media, creates his basic cognitive abilities on the digital model, with all the consequences observed by the studies…
Marralli says, “We have moved from a psychoanalytic culture to a computer culture, which cancels, or minimizes, true emotions. In modern society, 80% of information is received through vision, with such speed and intensity that the child may not be able to assimilate what he or she “sees”, ending up confusing reality with the virtual. […].
Surfing the Internet takes the child into a virtual world, where it is difficult to have real experiences, […] which can orient the child to always look for situations of strong emotion, almost always detached from everyday reality. The child ends up becoming a stranger in the family and in society” (Marralli, 2007, 65f.).
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What’s Driving Growth in “Groupthink”?
How to avoid this seductive yet destructive mentality.
Key points
- The pandemic, modern technology and increasing inequalities have supercharged groupthink.
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/global-lens/202106/whats-driving-growth-in-groupthink
Sometimes, It’s Better to Brainstorm Alone.
https://hbr.org/2010/02/when-its-better-to-brainstorm
What creative people understand about the importance of being alone.
In the digital age, it’s easier than ever to avoid spending time alone with our thoughts. If we don’t have family, friends or colleagues nearby, we can just whip out our smartphones or fire up Netflix. In fact, we so dislike solitude that we would rather administer electric shocks to ourselves than just sit and think.
That’s right—in studies that asked participants to spend six to 15 minutes in a room without any other stimulation, a significant portion (67% of men and 25% of women) opted to zap themselves just for the sake of breaking out of their brains.
But being alone doesn’t have to be the same thing as being bored or lonely. In fact, when the word “alone” was coined in medieval times, it referred to a sense of completeness in one’s own being, according to Ester Buchholz, a psychologist and psychoanalyst and the author of The Call of Solitude. According to Buchholz as well as a many other psychologists, solitude is an important—and normal—part of human existence. And it’s also essential for our best creative work. https://qz.com/649771/what-creative-people-understand-about-the-importance-of-being-alone
La solitudine dei nativi digitali”, ecco la pièce teatrale sulle nuove tecnologie. /The loneliness of digital natives”, here is the theatrical piece on new technologies.
“The phone calls, messages and applications show a tragicomic and surreal cross-section of society, through which the protagonist experiences all the moods of the human soul, but is unable to see the great hidden truth: this virtual life does indeed cause vivid sensations, but it is always and only a reflection of real life. The hyper-connection that isolates her more and more…”.
“The story hinges on the simple thesis that technology elevates man, with new ways of digital expansion, but it also has a great limitation: sooner or later it runs out. Once the distraction is eliminated, Anita finds herself in front of herself. The drama of loneliness and abandonment will consume our protagonist until the void left by technology is filled by something much bigger: the dialogue with her newfound consciousness, which will materialize in a giant teddy bear on stage. Anita finally finds herself and her connection, the real one, of a human being present to himself.”
And the creator of the original play further explains: “I wanted to tell the story of this girl, enraptured by today’s hectic life, constantly looking for something… But she simply hadn’t had a moment to stop and think, to think about what was the thing she missed most of all: herself, her, the center of her world.”
“They say life is that thing that happens while you’re busy doing something else. I think that’s true for most people most of the time. Often we are too busy to stop and observe the world and ourselves, our relationships, our emotions and thoughts.”
“We turn off everything: the TV, the computer, the telephone, we greet the neighbor, we hug the partner, we play with the children, we love the elderly, we help others, this is what makes life truly unique” concludes Silvia Paonessa.
UNIVERSE 
Nice post
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