Growing Up "Analog" and "Digital"

Heverly's "Growing Up Digital: Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life" raises some interesting questions about growing up in the digital age. At 26 years old in the year 2008, I'm in the unique position of having grown up in both the "analog" and "digital" world. I remember first having the Internet in my home as a sophomore in high school, and also remember how cool it was to buy a computer (a big honking desktop) for college because it would be "essential." I first got a digital camera and cell phone in college, releasing me from the chains of film and landlines.

Perhaps my overlapping position within these two realms has blunted my understanding and perception of what Heverly talks about in his article. I've always realized how fast things develop, and that my generation is experiencing new things at a different shift in time than the generations before me. However, I've never considered how people "grow up digital, similar to how they grow up a particular race, or to a particular height (216). Could growing up "digital" be just as defining as growing up as a 6' 7'' white kid?

I'm wondering what will happen to things such as the posts for this blog. Could I just let it float around in cyberspace infinitely? If I choose to delete it after this class is over, will it truly be gone? I really don't know. But the truth is, 10 years or so into my own digital aging, I've already begun to litter pieces of myself (digital pictures, blog posts, emails, etc.) in the digital world. Hopefully no one will ever blackmail me with an explicit online video--as was the case in Heverly's examples--but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to avoid similar problems given the nature of the digital world.

Maybe the next generations--the ones who will take cell phones to Kindergarten and virtually dissect frogs in 6th grade Biology--will experience this shift in identity the most. I like what Heverly says about education in this sense:

...there has been little, if any work done on how to educate children regarding the long-term effect of either creating digital media files that include themselves within them, or allowing themselves to be included in such files created by others" (214).

This is interesting. Will we need to "digitally" educate our children about having a picture taken? Perhaps my 5th grade Social Studies class will become Social Digitality Studies...