Monday, 2 November 2015

Reflective Summary - Digital Visitors & Residents

The scaffold of Digital Visitors and Residents has proved contentious.  While it appears most people have embraced it, others have remained cynical about its consistency and practice. The academic commentary throughout the framework have helped developed people’s understanding of the matter, I am no exception.

In response to HuiMin’s  blogpost, I questioned her understanding on the distinction of Digital Visitor and Resident.  She argued that there were a handful of people who shared a combination of traits from both sides but failed to give convincing evidence to support the statement. The hypothesis seeks not to compartmentalise individuals, but to understand the ways they use the internet. This brings me to the next point where Constance's blogpost illustrated that there might be a deficiency in White's framework, but have yet to clearly construct a solution for it. Therefore, like what I projected in my previous post, there must be more empirical evidence of technical skills like gathering, managing, and evaluating information online to support White's terminologies. Hence, it does not wholly replace Prensky's Digital Natives and Immigrants' framework.

Wan Chyng’s blogpost presented a balance between the two perspectives on Digital Visitors & Residents. Using herself as an example, she described how her use of the internet were influenced by her day-to-day schedules. Additionally, it was quite interesting to know that her dad is quite active on social media despite his age. The image shown below was taken from Wan Chyng’s blog:

In retrospect, the main limitation of White’s scaffold is the lack of empirical research made throughout the years. There were some minor discrepancies amongst the reference lists of all the blogs that I scrutinized. Therefore, like what I concluded in my previous post, I do not think White’s framework is a good alternative to Prenskey’s theory because they are addressing two different facets of internet consumers.
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