Life as a Digital Native and How the Internet Will Affect Our Children

1. Social Media: I announced my intentions to read Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (shortened to Born Digital in this post) on Google Plus and Twitter! No responses as of yet, but I'll update as they come.

2. Why I Am Reading This: I originally perused our list of book options with the mindset to find a work centered around digital identity or "slacktivism". However, when I saw this title, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, I thought that this would be extremely useful to me in the future. It is a topic relevant to my life and something I would prefer to have a general knowledge of before I embark on the path to parenthood in the far future. My primary goal is to educate myself on how to prepare to raise a family in our digital culture, but I will need to find an academic focus-perhaps digital nativity.

3. Book Preview: My initial thoughts when looking at the book (love that it's in BYU's ebrary) is that many chapters are titled after an identity: "activists," "aggressors," and "pirates," for instance and the others are rather blunt and technical. I perused the book and have come to the conclusion that this not so much a parenting book, but more of a way to express the many capacities of the internet and the digital world. The authors are extremely credible and even include a link to their website in the last chapter of the book (how often does that happen?).

4. Early Social Proof: Sadly, from the time I started this post to now, I still do not have anyone interested into my reading adventure. However, I asked my husband Cory and our friend Sean, whether they had rules about video games and internet growing up. Their families both had computers located in open, visible areas and their moms had to know their passwords. Cory was only allowed to play video games at first on weekends, and later, after they played outside and it was dark. My parents never gave me rules regarding technology or internet safety. They also had the computer in our study, facing away from the door-something I would probably not do as a parent now.

5. My Book's Friends: First, the book most frequently bought with Born Digital is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains Nicholas Carr. Intriguing title and is essentially a neurological study on how surfing the web affects our brains, in comparison to reading a book. Don Tapscott's Grown Up Digital is also recommended and it too, is a study of how growing up with the internet affects brain functioning, amongst other things. He was involved in a 4.5 million dollar study of people born from 1978-1994 and how digital culture impacts their lives. It seems as though many people are interested in the biological and physical consequences of the internet.

6. Who Cares?: Both authors are director/fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and have a large following of academics. Palfrey is also a frequent commentator on various news networks. When I did a #BornDigital search of Google and Twitter, I was surprised to see its existence and popularity because of a Yahoo! series devoted to the college class of 2017 and their adventures. The series includes guest posters like professors, videos of students' lives and all types of digital media submissions.

 7. Formal Reviews: I like this review (http://techliberation.com/2008/10/10/book-review-palfrey-gassers-born-digital/). Sorry, it won't let me hyperlink it! It is From the Technology Liberation Front  and I believe its author Adam Thierer did an excellent job of summarizing the book, while pointing out flaws (like lack of opinion-too much unbias). I appreciate that they include a PODCAST discussion with John Palfrey! Listen here (http://techliberation.com/2009/02/09/tpw-41-book-corner-featuring-john-palfrey-author-of-born-digital/) It's still not allowing me to hyperlink these...

8. Informal Reviews: I was looking through Amazon reviews and found a familiar name, Adam Thierer-our author of the review at Technology Liberation Front. He gave the book 4 out of 5 stara and wrote a different, more concise review on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Born-Digital-Understanding-Generation-Natives/product-reviews/0465018564/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_link_2?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=2&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=byRankDescending). Overall, the book received 3 out of 5 stars but most of the reviews are positive.

9. Courses:

10. Digital Media: