Collective identity is, in principal, a social group that is constructed or that we, ourselves, form. The growth of the Internet has been the biggest change in technology over the past 10 years, and therefore it is inevitable that something as powerful as the Internet is going to chance our vision of society. The Internet has become a central part to our lives; used in a variety of occupations by a huge majority of the population it has become one of the most important communication developments of this century. We now live in an age of transmediality; a migration of content across a vast number of different media forms (the Internet being the solely most important platform for content being portrayed on). Therefore, the Internet has significantly affected the different groups in society causing a sense of fragmentation. Affecting this new generation of people, it is now a real difficulty for the older generations to interact with this new ‘digital’ generation or as often dubbed, ‘digital natives’ (2001, Marc Prensky, ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’). This younger generation or ‘digital natives’ have grown up with the Internet throughout their lives forcing their perception of the Internet to be a very important element to their lives. In contrast, the older generations or ‘digital immigrants’ have not grown up with the Internet forcing their perception of the Internet to be very limited plainly because they are not used to it and do not know entirely how it works.
Over the past couple of years, it has become clear that the media has changed in a number of different ways. This can be shown by the Media and web 1.0 and Media and web 2.0 ideas. This difference between the old media (web 1.0) and the new media (web 2.0) is that there is now a heavy emphasis on the people rather than media itself. For example, ‘The new media are no longer mass media… sending a limited number of messages to a homogenous audience… the audience itself becomes more selective’ Sabbah, 1985, suggesting that media is run on the audience rather than the mass.
We can see this by the increasing popularity of citizen journalism, which has increased in popularity ever since the Internet was made available to a variety of people through devises such as phones and iPods. Through social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, it is now easier than ever to update news very quickly, ‘on-the-go’ and has become steadily popular with the ‘digital natives’. For example, the Hudson River plane crash in New York was first reported via a video on a phone which was then placed onto the persons Twitter account. In minutes, it had been reported to the world and is a real example of citizen journalism.
The sense was that the old media (media 1.0) was controlled by oligopolies, individuals such as Rupert Murdoch, who own a number of dominating companies. Now, the sense is that the media is controlled by the producer meaning streams of different opinions and more valuable media.
Marc Prensky’s article, ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’, 2001 places great emphasis on the collective identities and how they have been affected by the Internet. He states clearly the difference between the ‘Digital Natives’, ‘”native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet’, and the ‘Digital Immigrants’, ‘those who were not born into the digital world but have, at some point, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology’. He places the population into these two separate groups and suggests that because they both speak different ‘languages’, it is difficult to teach because they no longer understand each other. For example, ‘our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language’. Prensky says that ‘Digital Natives’ are used to receiving information really fast, thriving on instant gratification and frequent rewards. ‘Digital Immigrants’ have no real care for the skill that the ‘Natives’ have acquired and assume that the ‘Natives’ are the same as they have always been. Through things such as the Internet, the Digital Natives have a real belief that learning should be fun; via games, programmes and other technological delights. The Digital Immigrants, on the other hand, believe that learning shouldn’t and cannot be fun and that there should be emphasis on slow learning- through lectures, books and simple learning.
The Internet has fundamentally changed the ways in which we are to communicate between society. Before the Internet, the only real communication was the birth of telephone. The Internet has enabled communication through so many things such as; email, social networking, blogging, file-sharing sites, Internet chat. All of this is mainly used by the Digital Natives and is an extremely important part of their lives and was only really formed over the past decade. This rise in interaction can also be seen with sites such as Second life, where you play as an avatar and meet new people on the Internet. These sorts of sites have quite an ominous and ambiguous effect- you can pretend to be anyone you want to.
To conclude, the Internet has changed our notion of collective identity. No longer is there a concentration on Web 1.0- where the media is controlled by oligopolies and is very centralised, now the concentration is on Web 2.0- where the media is controlled by the producers through things such as citizen journalism. Collective identity can also be seen in Marc Prensky’s, ‘Digital Natives, Digitals Immigrants’ idea. With the difference between the generations and their perception of the Internet; the Digital Natives having grown up with the internet and is part of their daily life, and the immigrants having to get used to something they are not entirely comfortable with. The Internet has also changed the way us, as the collective identity, communicate with each other. We can be completely different people through avatars on sites such as Second life and Habbo Hotel. The power of the Internet has changed technology, conventions and ultimately our culture.
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