Business and Blogging

Blogging with an Accent

by Des Walsh on June 12th, 2007

Another stimulating post today from David Weinberger at Joho the Blog, on a Berkman Center discussion on the “digital natives project“.

The matters being discussed have importance for anyone producing a business blog or indeed using any social media as part of their business communication.

I’ve been fascinated by the digital natives and digital immigrants concept ever since reading media baron Rupert Murdoch’s April 2005 Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on the role of newspapers in the digital age. As Murdoch explained in that speech:

I come to this discussion not as an expert with all the answers, but as someone searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language. Like many of you in this room, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives. They’ll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband internet access.

Following a link from the above-mentioned blog post, I found an earlier document, a 2001 paper by Marc Prensky, titled simply Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. I found the whole document fascinating, full of gems of information and observation, such as on the “accent” of the digital immigrant:

As Digital Immigrants learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent”, that is, their foot in the past.

He gives as an example reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us.

Another example is provided by the fact that I’ve just printed out the six page paper, not content to read it just on the screen. Uh, oh!

Yes, I’m very conscious of being a digital immigrant and speaking with an accent. And in a way which I imagine many immigrants in the offline world would identify with, some of my compatriots from the “old country” in which I grew up display a mixture of incomprehension and disinterest when I speak in the language and with some of the acquired accent of my new digital country. Others are keen to know more and even to experiment with the language and its tools, such as blogging.

Business blogs alone are not going to solve the challenge of communicating with a market made up of digital natives and digital immigrants, but they are part of the toolkit for meeting that challenge

And while I may not always feel that I’m making myself understood, I don’t feel at all homesick.

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POSTED IN: General, Social Media, Writing