It's a Beautiful Day in the Digital Neighborhood

Our Places in the Digital Plane

At the turn of the century, folks could tell things were changing. The internet has survived the Y2K scare and now faced educating new generations who were growing up in an era of rapid technological advancement. It's within this context of educating these growing would-be techies that Mark Prensky first introduced the vernacular of "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants". 

Are you from around here?

Image Source: Wikipedia

It was 2001 when he first published this article explaining that for individuals born in the 1980s and later, digital technology was a part of their upbringing. In this was they were "native" to the modern world; generations before were "immigrants" who were learning the ways of computers and cellular phones after building a foundation in something different. While this terminology proved useful to exploring the shifts in how different groups interacted with technology, it also cast a wide net. Clumsy assumptions about who individually falls into which group based only on the broadest terminology can be especially difficult for youth of lower socioeconomic status as discussed here.

Will you be staying long?

In 2011, partially as a response to the flattening of the native and immigrant archetypes and the continued movement to digital integration, David White and Alison Le Cornu proposed a new typology for qualifying online existence: the visitor to resident spectrum. If you've only got a minute to catch up with these ends of the spectrum, you can check out this quick video by Leigh Ravenhill:

Video Source: Leigh Ravenhill on YouTube

If you prefer to read all about it, the core of the split is about how users interact with digitals tools and services. A visitor has a task they need to complete and will use the internet as a tool to get it done. A resident has gone online to find other individuals or a community to connect to or interact with. 
One of the most useful parts of this schema is it acknowledges the changeable nature of behavior: just as you could visit a place and decide eventually to move there for work, a user might find a platform they use to find answers to specific questions and then eventually become part of that platform's community, transferring from visitor to resident. Similarly a user of a social media network might go from daily post and check-ins to clicking over once every few months when they get a notification, much like a college student stopping back in to their old high school for a visit.
There is also the acknowledgement that an individual's online presence is not universal and may vary between systems and aspects of their life.
To help folks explore their own digital identity, White created this mapping exercise with open access tools to help individuals or groups compare their presence along the visitor to resident spectrum when considering the personal and industrial aspects of their lives.

My Map

Following the basics of the exercises linked to above, I created my own digital map below.

Image created by blog author

My Methods

• The represented programs and services are a snapshot of things I've accessed in the past two weeks. Some are newer habits and some a reflective of the time of year (back to school season and family travel)
• I specifically included programs or services where it was possible to be more of a resident or take part in a community. My tuning app sees regular use is not trying to get me to connect with friends or post anything.
• My professional axis is determined by two arenas- my teaching job and my graduate school workload.
• Square icons represent programs primarily accessed by a phone app whereas written out logos indicate much of my usage occurs through an internet browser. I labeled the app icons to make them more accessible to folks who are less familiar with any specific apps or at least this iteration of them.  You can read some interesting thoughts on app logo designs and redesigns here.
• Honorable mentions go to X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, and the Penny Arcade Forums. These were a strange thing to think about because I use them through an intermediary; in some cases I've been consuming content through them for many years, but it's always over my partner's shoulder. I know things I've suggested to them have been posted in these spaces, but there is still a notable distance, turning me into what I might call a tourist. This is opposed to tumblr, a service I am on the furthest end of the visitor spectrum with where I don't even have an account, but I still actively access it myself.

My Notes

I was pleased to see the gap between my personal and professional digital life as this is currently by design. Even for services that cross the divide I have built strong boundaries. For example, I use Gmail consistently for personal use, but I do not put my work email on my personal phone and rarely access it on my laptop despite Google Workspace being the heavily utilized at work. 
Similarly I put Google Drive on here an additional time to specifically note the Google account I share with my partner that we have been co-using for wedding planning.

I generally resist getting an app exclusively for shopping. The one notable exception to this is the app for my current grocery store which I use weekly to slowly build cash off deals. While it is most certainly collecting information about my habits, I don't use it for writing shopping lists or grocery planning and have almost never accessed it except for that weekly scan.

It was an interest trip through the past few years seeing which apps are no longer in the rotation. It makes sense that I am not firing up Kast currently, but during Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 it was seeing heavy use for group movie nights. I have fooled myself into thinking I will become meticulously organized with the right calendar system, only to abandon it for a paper planner weeks later.

Overall there is an interested distinction that exists for me when I compare my own internet residency to that of peers and see that where I am residing for connection, it is to maintain connections built originally through in person interactions. Facebook has little use to me anymore except for being the best way for my friends and I to share events. When a program wants me to "find friends", I have very specific parameters I set up for each service. This contrasts with the many folks I know who have joined communities where they knew some or even none of the contributors or who make a point to follow and then interact with creators. I will subscribe to a few YouTube channels, but you'll never catch me in the comments and I don't think I've ever sent a direct message (DM) through something like Instagram without having already talked to that individual first. I wondered as I mapped what my map would look like laid atop another users and where the scales of our axis's would align.