Critical Reflection on Three Questions Essay

For this paper we will be doing some critical reflection on three basic; yet much argued questions. The first is an argument of Marc Prensky’s. Are our youth the digital natives that he coined? Are the older generation digital immigrants? Second, we will be looking into making money online and the question being asked: Are there limits? Lastly, we will be looking at whether or not it is a crime or netiquette to copy and paste or, in general use another’s works as your own. Is this wrong? In this paper, I will bring to light a few arguments and explain in detail and try to offer a feasible counter-argument in return. The first question offered by Mr. Marc Prensky is: Are our youth the digital natives and is the older generation the digital immigrants? I can agree that this, as a statement is, in my mind to a degree, is true. The one statement that I do not believe was cited here by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, authors of a book titled Born Digital: â€Å"Are you a digital native? If you were born after 1980 then you are† (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008). This statement loses me in that when I was a freshman in high school, we all stared at the first iMac and Apple IIe with awe and wonder. No Facebook, no IM, just DOS and not even 3. . I doubt, very much, that a teenager from this day and age could even fathom on what to do with DOS. Prensky believes that I am the digital immigrant. I believe this statement. I was not born into the digital age, therefore I am not native. This would be much like my ancestors immigrating to the United States, we are not from here anymore then I am from this age. Also , Prensky goes on to add that: â€Å"Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to â€Å"serious† work. †Ã¢â‚¬  http://depd. wisc. edu/html/TSarticles/Digital%20Natives. htm I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. People from my generation are used to work. We will not hesitate to print something out instead of just reading it off the laptop. We grew up with words and almost no pictures (graphics) as is the opposite for the younger generation. Next, we will be discussing; making money online and the question being asked: Are there limits? When you talk about making money online, there are two main entities that come to mind. EBay and Amazon. These are two giants where the average Joe may open an account and sell what he has to anyone in the world. Making money online can be a very good thing. It can be very profitable, but are there limits? I believe there certainly are. Some people still do not realize that there are illegal ways that people are making money online right now. One way is by Nigerian Letter scams. In 2001, estimates by the Secret Service claimed that more than $100 million was lost to Nigerian letter scams each year (Mintz, 2002, p. 15). I believe that if done legitimately, there really should be no limit to how much one can make online. Ideas like Fraud, theft and other scams are not good practices to teach or follow and should be sought out and banned from the internet. This way we help to protect the innocent and naive from such false ventures. Lastly, we will be looking at whether or not it is a crime or just plain netiquette to copy and paste or, in general use another’s works as your own. Is this wrong? Is it really stealing to copy and paste from a website that you don’t even own? One would argue that a piece they spent time creating was indeed taken and used by someone else, perhaps on their Facebook page. I too have fallen victim to this a time or two. In the end, I wished them luck and hoped that what I did, in some way helped them. It made them happy to take what I had created and post it on their page; in some small way, it does honor to the original creator of said works. Someone took the time to not only read what was created, but they felt proud to use it. No, I do not think you can steal something like that. If you owned the website and had created a logo or an expression than that would be very different. However, on the likes of Facebook and Myspace I do not feel that such things exist. In conclusion, we have discussed an argument of Marc Prensky’s. Are our youth the digital natives that he coined? Are the older generation digital immigrants? Second, we looked into making money online and the question being asked: Are there limits? Lastly, we looked at whether or not it is a crime or netiquette to copy and paste or, in general use another’s works as your own. Is this wrong? We in turn discussed some relative arguments to all of the above questions, while adding a few counter-arguments and finished with our thoughts.