Why Members of Gen Z Aren't Digital Natives

 

People will say students today are "digital natives" who should navigate school software and web platforms with east. They are so wrong. 

Today's students aren't "digital" natives, they are SMARTPHONE natives. They know their social media, and can pop a snarky gif reaction into a group chat with astonishing speed.

But unlike Millennials, who were the first generation to be named digital natives, they have never loved their laptops. Millennials first interacted with the internet on computers, and it was their window to a wider world. As kids, they saved their schoolwork onto floppy disks. Later, they burned their own CDs, and saved their papers on thumb drives. They knew as routine chores such activities as updating their drivers and reinstalling their operating systems. They used word processors with practiced ease.

 

My Gen Z students feel like their phones are an extension of themselves. Their laptops are just a tool they use for school. A lot of my students are first-generation college students, and never owned a computer until Covid lockdowns. Some didn't get one even then. Phones were a necessity; laptops were not. (Desktop computers don't even enter their minds as an option. Only a tiny handful of my students have one, and they're almost all PC gamers who use them mostly as a video game console.)

You can see interesting evidence of this in the disjuncture between who manufactures my college students' phones, and who makes their laptops. At one time, back in the 2010s, half of my students used iPhones from Apple and half used an Android phone from a wide array of companies. Today, 95% use iPhones, and those with Android phones are either very poor, or very eccentric. But when it comes to laptops, only 20% use Apple machines. Students get any old brand of laptop, because they think it's ridiculous to spend the kind of money a Macbook costs for something as unimportant to their lives as a laptop computer.

I was unsurprised to find that students have become less and less competent at installing software as smartphone natives replaced digital natives. But I was more surprised to find out how rudimentary their word-processing skills are. They use Google Docs--a very simple website platform that automatically saves to the cloud--and are often literally afraid of using Word. A surprisingly large number of my college students today find a full word processor intimidating. They don't know how to use a feature like Track Changes, for example, and believe it will be too esoteric a skill for them to learn. Some don't know that they have to save their documents somewhere, and so they lose their work. Those that do save their documents to their hard drives have no idea where they did so. They just type the filename into the taskbar search box, and if they forget what they named it, they can't find it. The idea of setting up folders in which to save work for different classes is utterly foreign to most of them. 

Today's students can keep 30 different group chats going for months. They can view and interpret memes with great subtlety, understanding their history and context. They can talk to you at length about how to keep a light touch on your photo filtering lest you damage your mental health. But ask them to download and install a piece of software, or embed an image in a document rather than attach it, or enable a browser extension, and a whole swath of the class will secretly panic, and secretly fail to do it. They won't tell their instructor they need help, because they know they are supposed to be "digital natives," and they know their instructors think this should be a breeze for them. 

But it isn't. Because they aren't digital natives. They're smartphone natives.