Recently I learned I am an immigrant, a digital immigrant, and the digital natives are restless. They are getting sick of us immigrants holding back life flow, simply because we are not natives and don’t really understand the terrain of the informational age.
Timothy Leary, known for his courageous leadership in the 1960s, advocating the use of psychedelic drugs as a method of expanding self-awareness, reemerged in the 1980s as an advocate of cyberdelic, the new counterculture. He was a philosophical promotor of personal computers, the internet, and immersive virtual reality. Leary proclaimed PC as the LSD of the 1990s and admonished bohemians to turn on, boot up, jack in.
I was born in the 1950s, I welcomed the sixties radical focus on love, dancing, legitimate protest and most important, turning on to self-awareness through meditation and psychedelic drugs. In those days we weren’t trying to escape anything, we wanted to be more self-aware. We wanted to face our covered up fears, to release old pain and live according to love and peace. When Timothy Leary rallied around the emerging internet as the new LSD, I was cool with that. But, I didn’t join the ranks of cyberpunks, and at the time I didn’t realize I was on my way to becoming an immigrant.
1996 John Perry Barlow, founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote an article named A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. He is quoted as saying, “ Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
This was the year in which I was switching from a typewriter to an electric pre-computer typewriter. I still remember the steep learning curve of that experience. Over these many years, I have come to cherish and love my PC, laptop, phone, and most importantly, the vast wealth of music, film and written resources at my fingertips. Yet, I did not grasp the enormity of what was happening. I moved along thinking of myself as keeping up with the technological times. By then, digital natives were on the rise, and I certainly was not “keeping up” with their native knowledge. I was rapidly becoming an immigrant, new to the culture.
In our current times, there is much controversy in connection with the words native and immigrant. North American natives were conquered, obliterated and confined by the country’s emerging founding fathers. Today, the descendants of the original tribes continue to struggle for recognition and honor. But, digital natives are born every day all over the world. They might not be cyberpunks or radical hackers, but cyberspace is in their blood, is part of their DNA. I can never catch up with that.
Immigrant is another hot word right now in connection with people who want to enter America for improved life opportunities. They are told to go back where they came from, and not kindly. My immigrant status is different. I will never be a digital native, but I can learn from the natives. I can acknowledge their self-awareness is on a different level than mine, mostly due to the placement of our learning curves. And, hopefully, I will not be turned back at the cyberspace border. It could happen. The digital natives are the ones who are inheriting this world, whose futures are fast-sliding into oblivion while all the digital immigrants, self-ordained leaders, quarrel who is right or wrong.
Cyberspace is a wild west frontier. John Perry Barlow was right in projecting a future in which cyberspace governing would need to be established. Cyberspace is not bound by countries, it is a world of its own. There is no way us digital immigrants can keep up with the scope of the natives. It has come time for the natives and immigrants to work together, to end this division of power and focus on how best to upgrade our self-awareness methods for greater sustainable life force for all.
