Since posting my summary on Digital Visitors and Digital Residents, I have read the views presented on the blogs of others and been presented with things I had not considered before.
The most interesting to me was the statement on Agnieszka’s blog that one’s position on the visitor/resident spectrum is likely to change at different stages in one’s lifetime. My current position being closer towards the resident end is due to my current situation. I am a university student who needs to be constantly using the Internet for things such as conducting research, contacting my peers for things like collaborative studying or for socialising, managing aspects of university communication like email, submitting assignments, etc. These activities are all things that I am likely to be doing frequently for large parts of the day, and hence lead to my digital residency. Having lots of free time as a student, I am also liable to use the Internet to access multimedia such as music and video for entertainment. There are very few tasks for which I use the Internet as a digital visitor: these may be things such as shopping or online banking.
This led me to consider that in later life as my situation changes, it is likely that I will become less of a resident and more a visitor for certain aspects of my digital life. Being a Web Science student, during my working life my dwindling residency is likely to be limited as I will probably still use the Internet most of the day – however, perhaps in different ways than I have before. This links to another part of Agnieszka’s post that I found quite interesting. She had visualised the aspects of her web presence regarding visitor and resident traits. It built a clearer picture of where she is on the scale, and shows that one need not just pick a lone point on a line, as most people are likely to be visitors in some aspects and residents in others.
Delving deeper into the topic, I began to think about why some may be more adept at using certain technologies and have higher levels of digital literacy than others. Socio-economic factors that could limit digital literacy are quite easy to think of, such as a lack of access to technology and the internet due to price barriers, but more difficult to propose are potential cultural factors. I wondered if it could be attributed to a lower importance being placed on technical abilities in certain cultures, or perhaps a language barrier due to tech and Web content being unavailable in certain languages, or even restricted access in countries where Internet censorship exists. Overall, this topic has made me think more about the way people use technology and the Web, and the reasons why.
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