It's dead, Jim.

A smart man admits when he’s beaten. He knows when it’s time to move on.

The Digital Naturalized Citizen idea… just wasn’t meant to be. I like the DNC for its distinction of a nuanced mid ground between the Digital Immigrant and the Digital Native. I loved coming up with it as a response to Prensky, I really did. But for this project, the nuance is its weakness. The DNC is just too damned similar, outwardly at least, to the DN. In all of my brainstorming of how I, as a DNC, could really present three distinct digital modes that would be anything other than identical than if I was a DN, I could think of nothing. The best I could come up with is that, perhaps as a holdover from a life without IM and Twitter, I think best in complete sentences, and thus I preferred not abbreviating myself on tweets. Not the solidest footing.

So, it’s time give in to the creativity part of our prompt – and let’s face it, I couldn’t really be that creative in showcasing my DNCishness – and go with another aspect of myself:

Roger, The Sci Fi Geek

I’ve always been a huge sci-fi geek. I spent a summer as a kid rewatching abused recordings of all 6 (as of that point) Star Trek Movies, a handful of ST: TNG episodes, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. If there’s a book on my bedside table, 100:1 odds that it’s scifi. All the movies I put on our NetFlix queue are scfi. I have plenty of theories, both about why it is that scifi is so popular a genre for myself and the greater culture, and why it is that Han Solo shot first. One of the first times my girlfriend(later to be my wife) made the mistake of asking me what I was thinking as we laid awake, the answer concluded after a 45 minute treatise on why I thought it was the height of arrogance for us to patently conclude that we knew all there was about physics and dismiss the possibility of faster than light travel.

My life’s aspiration is to be a successful scifi author. So yeah, I can get some mileage out of this topic.

Sure it's not as cool as the DNC, but it is me without a doubt. I’ve already got a host of appropriate digital outlets for this, and have a great idea where I’m going with them. Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and Second Life all come to mind with a myriad of possibilities. So now I can look forward to the Pecha Kucha presentation, which I had been dreading before.

FWIW, I'll post the sites here asap, for those of you browsing/posting beyond the course's requirements.

From a different angle

After conferring with Dr. Schirmer and thinking on the earlier feedback, I’ve decided I’m still going on with the topic of the Digitally Naturalized Citizen, but I will change the way I discuss it. For the background on the topic, see the next blog entry below this one or see the entire paper here. First, I’m going to ruminate further on what I think define a DNC, and maybe it will resonate with some of you and maybe it will contrast – I look forward to feedback.

Thinking of myself as a DNC brings up the following ideas. Think of them as the way a DNC expresses his or herself:

I still tend to think and write online in whole thoughts and in whole words. In Twitter, for example, I tend to max out the 140 characters. This is not because I have more to say, but because I tend to avoid fragmentary thoughts or abbreviations as much as possible. I found myself deleting and rewording so I can get a whole thought in without abbreviating. I don’t think of such writing habits in Twitters as deficient, however – i.e., I don’t care if someone tweets in that way, assuming it doesn’t occlude meaning. Example: My recent tweet of “Protip: liquids should not be independently symmetrical. Notable exception: leftover gravy prior to reheat.” I’m sure that could have been more succinct, but that’s just the way I think, that’s just the way I talk, therefore it’s just the way I tweet. Is that a product of a life started devoid of tech, no matter how immersed I am now?

I don’t think this makes me sound like the worst sort of Digital Immigrant, but l want to tread lightly here. I cannot comprehend the tweets and status updates regarding the most mundane stuff. I’m not trying to be the old man shaking my fist at the skateboarders from the front porch – I don’t begrudge them their very existence. Would a DNC, unlike a Digital Native, boggle at oversharing/overconnection, but not in the way of the Digital Immigrant’s lamentation that these are the Four Tweets of the Apocalypse?

I’d like to note that I’m aware that I am making generalizations in the above points. I know that not all Natives are overconnected and that not all Immigrants are paranoid.

I’d be happy to extrapolate further on the DNC idea if anyone would like, but for now, any reactions from readers?