I have a rather.. tenuous relationship with my father. He is very much of the old guard. Not necessarily a technophobe, but he doesn't really understand it. For example, we've always had a PC in our home. That PC, for the longest time, was an IBM box that only ran DOS. That didn't deter me from playing games on it, sometimes awful though they were. He saw the machine as a tool, something to be used for taxes and word processing, if you were lucky. Honestly, I'm probably lucky that he let me futz about with DOS so much.

This does expand into more areas than just technology, though. Another prime example is how we put things together. He will read an instruction manual cover to cover before he even so much as touches the base components. Me, I've put enough things together in my lifetime that I can at least look at what's included and make some (educated) guesses. And if I'm wrong, I can live with that! And I can look on YouTube to see what I did wrong. Or Google. Or WikiHow. Basically, anywhere except the actual place I'm supposed to be looking.

So I completely understand the Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants debate. It's something I've had the (dis)pleasure of experiencing in my own personal life. What's more interesting, I think, is noting that I don't believe that we necessarily know more than previous generations, thus failing their "intelligence" metric. Instead, and far more useful in our day and age, we know how to find it. How often have I been asked to find something, only to find it minutes later in a Google/Wiki/IMDB search? Far too often, but my father isn't the one with those skills.

I am.