Natives and Immigrants vs. Residents and Visitors

I’m an avid user of social media – especially Facebook and Instagram. My mum however, is not, and questions how many people out of my 700+ Facebook friends actually CARE about my ‘Summer 2015’ Facebook photo album, and why do I feel the need to share photos on Facebook? And, why is Instagram a thing? Don’t you already put enough photos on Facebook?!

I see the Internet as more than just a place to Google something: I upload and share photos and aspects of my life online, whereas my mum just likes to use it for functional purposes and doesn’t see the point in using the Internet the way I do. This contrast between us can be theorized within the digital ‘resident’/‘visitor’ continuum as proposed by White and Cornu. Within the continuum, I am more towards the resident end: seeing the Web as a place, a space for social interaction as well as functional, curating an online persona that remains even when I log off. My mum just likes to use the Internet to search for something or check her bank account; this means she’s a visitor, someone who uses the Internet for a specific purpose, like a tool. 

This resident/visitor typology has developed from the digital native/immigrant hypothesis, as proposed by Prensky. This hypothesis claims a correlation between computer competence and age – the younger generation make up the digital natives; automatically more apt at navigating the online world, since they were born into this world. Those who weren’t are merely digital immigrants, and their computing competence will always be negatively compared with digital natives.

However, this approach has now been widely criticized for making extreme generalisations. It reflects a stereotype prevalent in our society that I exemplified through my mum not understanding social media: that the older generation just doesn’t understand the manner in which we all engage with the Internet. However in spite of this discriminatory stereotype, there are many older people who weren’t born into the digital world who successfully use websites to project their identity online – whilst this doesn’t (currently) include my mum, it does include many of her friends.

The important aspect of this visitor/resident paradigm is that it takes into consideration the motivation for going online. My mum doesn’t use social media because she doesn’t want to – but that doesn’t mean she should be discriminated against as not understanding just because of her age! In the same way I might be considered a resident for my social media use, but sometimes I want to just log on to check my bank account balance too.