Kris Gallagher, from DePaul University in Georgia Chicago, phoned a comment into FIR #298 to talk about who she calls “shadow natives.” These are people who have always grown up with PCs but not in their house. They have them at school in the library but not for personal use or experimentation for extended periods of time. Thus, they’re not exclusively digital immigrants or exclusively digital natives.

The assumption is that these shadow natives watch over peoples’ shoulders, so they know the lingo and are aware but don’t participate in social media—and the issue isn’t age, it’s economic background.

Shel suggested that they’re a form of digital immigrant because they did not grow up with a computer in the house while Neville thought that there are reasons such as ignorance, fear, or lack of interest, not just economic factors, that make someone a shadow native. Anecdotally, I’m thinking of people I know who have computers but don’t know what Twitter or Skype is just because they have no need for it or interest in it.

One of Kris’s concerns was:”Where do these shadow natives fall on the continuum of usage when their workplace adopts social media?” Are they excluded? Do they dive in? Do they leapfrog others who already have a familiar social media routine?

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang visited Firefox’s home, Mozilla, to partake in an advanced discussion on usage, and one of the topics that came up was the issue of early adopters and laggards. An observation of the public’s browser usage was that early adopters “sneeze” new Firefox technology to others who eventually catch on.

Also, Anna Farmery spoke with Connie Reece on The Engaging Brand. Connie has worked with Dell and spoke about the company’s successes and failures in reconciling newcomers and early adopters with internal social media initiatives like EmployeeStorm. She says that it is important to allow these shadow natives to understand social media in order to avoid the echo chamber/fishbowl effect.

Do you think that employees “sneeze” the internal usage of social media technology to their colleagues? Do shadow natives watch from the sidelines, or are they able to easily learn new applications when required?

(cc Flickr photo by iampeas)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites