#UOSM2008 Topic 1: Digital Visitors & Residents

Picture source: http://dial.myblog.arts.ac.uk2011/12/13/210

“Explain the concept of digital “visitors” and “residents” drawing upon your reading and your own online experiences to date in support of the points that you make”.

Because of the rapid growth of the technologies in the past few decades, people have been categorized into two groups. One group consists of people who were born in the digital age and were surrounded by the technologies, such as video games, emails, the Internet, social networks, etc. and are considered the “native speakers” of computers or “digital residents”. In contrast, the other group consists of people who have come to technology later in their life, normally people from the older generation (Prensky, 2001).

There are some clear differences between the groups (White et al., 2012):

Digital Visitors:

• They have defined goals or tasks when they are using technologies, especially the Internet.
• They are quite concerned about personal privacy issues, as they stay relatively anonymous and avoid creating a digital identity.
• For them, online social networking (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) is considered to be banal and time wasting.
• In their opinion, the Web is just a set of tools which can be used only for specific tasks, such as search and retrieve data (/information), communicate via emails, etc.

Digital Residents:

• They see the web as a place where all friends and colleagues gather together.
• Part of their life is spent online.
• They have profiles on various social networks and they feel themselves as a part of the community.
• The distinction between online and offline life is becoming more and more blur for them.

However, is this distinction between people precise and always true? Does it define how well and efficiently they use online sources? Definitely Not!  Data indicates that despite the fact that most of the people over 55 are made up of Visitors there are lots of examples of Residents in that among them. In the same manner, not every young person under 25 is a digital Citizen (White, 2008). The reason for these rule breaking is the fact that it is not important “what” you are using on the web, but “how” you are using it.

As an example in support of these exceptions from my personal life a good friend of mine is studying Computer Science, but he was surprised when I have introduced him well-known websites, such as scholar.google.com, dl.acm.org and ieeexplore.ieee.org for searching online articles and conference papers. At the same time, my parents are far from technologies, but they can easily access the Internet, purchase tickets for bus, planes and trains, book hotels and read news from websites and sources existence of which I don’t even know about.

To conclude, after a research on this topic, I have realised that we, the young generation, as a ‘Residents’ of the web have more advantages than ‘Visitors’, because we are familiar with the language of technologies around us. Our duty is to use these technologies as effectively as possible, because as was stated previously it doesn’t matter what do you use, it is how you are using it.