Catshanghai

If you were born before 1990 then you are almost certainly a digital immigrant, which means you grew up with paper and like to process one task at a time. At the Singapore information literacy conference, Ian Jukes and Matt Mackinis argued that digital natives have grown up
immersed in technological multimedia to the extent that their brains have been rewired to process multiple tasks simultaneously. Stephen Heppell showed a short extract from a 1996 BBC Newsnight video when he arranged for a group of teenagers to watch four television programmes at the same time. These were proto digital natives, but they had no
trouble following the thread of so many channels in unison. As a teenager in the late eighties, I used to channel surf between BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4. I got a vague sense of the plot, but I found it difficult to internalise so much information bombarding me all at
once. Digital natives have no such trouble.

I have decided to recreate Professor Heppell’s experiment by showing you four Internet videos simultaneously. If you feel sick or confused then this is a sign you are a digital immigrant rather than a digital native. Try it and see.