I came across this article while traveling(via Mobile Google Reader) and again when I returned to the office (in my mailbox). As it has to do with generational generalizations (a topic that I have been reading about professionally and personally for a while now) I thought I would throw down a few ideas to see how they perculate.
In general the article seems to be countering the the Millenial Generation as Digital Wizards argument common from technophiles these days. The argument made early on seems to make the usual counters providing ‘proof’ that millenials still use the technology of academia (books and libraries).
If you ask me, both sides are wasting time trying to prove their correctness. The black and white thinking of an 18 -24 year old will do x y and z all the time is as incorrect as thinking that an ‘introvert’ will never say anything in a group setting or a ‘thinker’ is incapable of understanding an emotional agruement from a ‘feeler’. We need to think about how do tendencies of the life experience of our students inform the tools and processes of our interactions with them.
I think this is a pretty good cross representation of what we could expect to find in any group of our ‘traditional’ college students.
Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can’t deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. Many can’t afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.
While this is true I still believe the Millenials are apt to view technology as a layer in their life which translates into them just using the technology instead of understanding how the technology works or global best practices of a particular technology. I equate this to how I use my car. I turn the key it runs when it doesn’t the folks at the Ford Garage get a call.
Later in the article the author writes –
Talk of a “digital generation” or people who are “born digital” willfully ignores the vast range of skills, knowledge, and experience of many segments of society.
True enough but there is merit in some generalization or we become overwhelmed as it is chaos. So the question is how do we organize our understandings of this generation in a way that is useful and true without putting on our blinders to accept the nuiances of individuals within a generation?
Thoughts, Experiments and Experiences 
It’s rare I read a tech theory post these days that catches my attention like this one. I’ve been starting to think this way for a while – technology = commodity, who cares how or why it works, it just needs to work. However, every year I keep expecting students to grow more self-sufficient, but in my mind equate tech-savvyness to self-sufficiency. WRONG! A growing group of people expect technology to make their life easier, but understand less about the nuts and bolts.
The difference is is that we were on the tail end of the “revolution”. When you’re part of the revolution, you get the inner workings, appreciate the complexity, because you were there when it began. People who didn’t get it then were the luddites, but kids coming to college now are almost equally luddities. They were not even there.
I also wonder how much of it is the attitude about technology?
The expectation that things are excessible/controlable from some central point.
Or is that where you were going with the commodity metaphor?