Growing up with the digital natives

The virtual world is in their palm, at their fingertips, at their beck and call...

My teenage son was sprawled on the sofa. Every now and then he would look at the TV screen where the CSK players were engaged in a battle royal with RCB players. In one hand he had his smart phone, into which he would furiously type messages. Suddenly he would rush to the laptop and work with intense concentration. Almost absent mindedly, his hands would dip into the packet of chips and pop a couple of wafers into his mouth. I found the entire situation mystifying.

“Are you watching the match?” I asked.

“What do you think”, he replied, sarcasm dripping out.

“Can’t you put your phone away and focus on the match?” I asked again.

“We are discussing the match in our WhatsApp group,” he explained, not even looking up. Okay, I thought, one mystery solved. I could relate this to sitting around a TV with friends, watching and commenting, and dissecting each batsman and bowler. They were “eHanging out” together.

A few moments later he was at the laptop, fingers flying over keyboard.

“What are you working on now?” I questioned.

“Fantasy League”, was the cryptic response.

Ignoramus mom did not want to reveal the depth of her ignorance, so I sneaked out and searched for “Fantasy League”. It appeared Fantasy Cricket was a game, where a player could create a virtual team of eleven players, meeting certain criteria. A player earns points based on the actual performance of the cricket player in the IPL matches. The attraction was in the prizes, which could be match tickets or official IPL merchandise coming your way. That explained the intense concentration, but that a virtual team should exert as much pull as a real team was seriously puzzling to me.

The next time I met a friend, I touched upon this topic lightly, to see if this was something commonplace.

“Tell me about it,” she exclaimed. “The simple fun has gone out of the game. Watching IPL seems like a lot of work.”

I heaved a sigh of relief, glad my peer could relate to my confusion. We went on to discuss the generation gap and tried to recollect things we did that would have baffled our parents – we could come out with things like our taste in food or clothes, and interest in video games, but not much else.

Later, I came across the term “digital natives”, which would apply to the young generation of today. This generation has been pampered with the any time, any place, any device convenience made familiar through smart phones and downloaded apps. The virtual world is in their palm, at their fingertips, at their beck and call – that it is sometimes intrusive is not something they are consciously aware of. Whether it’s games or chat or shopping, the virtual world does tend to dominate, but like it or not, we are also in the SMAC era (Social Media, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud Computing), and we need to move with it.

So, instead of reminiscing about the good old days, maybe we need to get into the act of preparing the Next Gen with tips and tricks to manoeuvre their way through the mazes and mines in the virtual world, so that they come out unscathed from virtual encounters… it all finally boils down to acclimatisation, genetic mutation and the survival of the fittest. Darwin’s theory of evolution in the twenty first century?

vasanthi_suresh@yahoo.in