In the research article, Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham mention the social construction of loss.  It is the idea that each new technological innovation is “accompanied by a nostalgia industry that immediately valorises a pre-technological, innocent world that was simpler, better, fairer, and easier to live in. Similarly, the Digital Native identity is premised on multiple losses: loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of control, loss of privacy, etc, which together imply the loss of political participation and social transformation; the loss of youth as the political capital of our digital futures. (12)”

In the video this point is also made that children and teens are losing so much. It seems like a lot of the conversation is based on these losses and gains and it’s sort of like a tug of war but fear and negative implications tend to get the upper hand.
I think the fact that they called it a nostalgia industry is something that deserves close reading because it does offer a way to capitalize off the fears people have. Things like self help books or books against the new technology can be more easily sold, and also older technologies can keep you in their service. For example, DVD’s or VHS tapes surely don’t want to admit that Blue Ray is better….. the same goes for records, which are still popular among certain groups. Anyway, nostalgia as an industry seems like an interesting idea to me.

The article I chose to look at this week came when I googled “pre-internet nostalgia” and instead of finding what could be a pretty biased paper, I found a guy who worked in the technology industry but was also born before the popularization of smartphones. He would not be classified as a digital native, so he has some perspective on  what it was like before…. but instead of saying one way is better than the other he explains some of the feelings a lot of people go through, such as when they leave their phone at home: “I’m discombobulated this morning: I forgot my iPhone, so I have that homesick, disconnected feeling you get when you realize you’re phoneless.”  He describes the connection we have to our phones are a part of our re-wired system which is better described below:

“What’s really happening is that, after more than 10,000 hours of exposure to the internet and digital technologies such as my iPhone, my brain has been rewired – or, rather, it has rewired itself. Science has a name for this process: Hebb’s Law. When neurons fire together, they wire together. It’s no coincidence that the 10,000-hour rule has recently entered our culture’s popular imagination, explaining to us that after doing something for 10,000 hours, you become an expert at it, because that’s how much time your brain needs to fully rewire itself to adapt to a new medium.”

I think it’s important that digital natives know that their habits can be changed and that they can always innovate as Nishant Shah in his video example where a women’s groups in India was able to make a point about women’s rights through facebook. We know what the internet can do fairly well, so we might as well push the envelope and try new things that can hopefully help people.

pre internet brain

http://www.content-loop.com/douglas-coupland-miss-pre-internet-brain/