I just finished reading Born Digital and I can’t stop thinking about it. Not because it was so insightful, but because many of their major insights seemed so obvious. I’m a little too old to be what they term a “digital native”, and I started with computers a little too late in development, but I still found their viewpoints and assumptions extremely foreign.
The book is highly recommended if you are over 30 and online activities in the people younger than you is strange and weird to you. But for me, too many of the things it said were obvious, and it was the perspective of the people to whom the book was directed that was strange.
The thesis of the book is, basically, that online activity in young people is not only not bad, but is actually good. It can empower and connect people in new and exciting ways, and parents and teachers and legislators should try to find a middle ground between reactionary prohibition and overeager adoption of technology for its own sake. All of which is true, and as a summary its a it unfair to the authors of the book who present a nuanced argument over 6 chapters showing how this same situation is true in privacy, security, sharing, copyright, etc, etc. But despite its truth, it’s also obvious. To me. But apparently not to others!
So the book is recommended if Facebook confuses you strangely, and will just further muddy the waters if Facebook makes sense and the reactions of older people to it confuse you. For me, the book was most useful in illustrating how very different it is to grow up online and interact with people all over the world. The fact that many of us now wake up, catch up with our friends worldwide, and then get out of bed and put on pants is a wonderful new thing, and to be embraced, but it is astoundingly bizarre to a large section of the populace. And right now, that section of the populace is also in charge. So if you are part of that population, I recommend the book highly. For others of you, it is interesting in much the same way a foreign tourist guide to your hometown might be: Full of strange assumptions about the reader and reasoning based on wacky axioms, but in the end an interesting way of making you rethink your surroundings.
