While addressing the challenge of educating millennial children Marc Prensky (2001) emphasized on the technological environment that they are brought up in. Prensky coined Digital natives and digital immigrants to label today’s digital users but failed to notice much larger problems such as digital divide. Instead of labelling users, the Digital Visitor and Resident (V&R) model provides us a framework to map one’s online usage. This is a simple model to capture a wide range (continuum) of online engagement. Visitor and resident mode are two ends of the horizontal axis. When one uses an online resource to perform a certain task and leaves it once the task is completed depicts a visitor mode of engagement, one example could be using google translate. When the translation is done, the user is no longer needed to be online or moved to another tasks. One the other hand, in residence mode one enters online with a digital persona and looks for other digital residents to connect to. Our prime example is all kinds of social media such as Facebook and Instagram. When one is logged in Facebook (it’s possible to log in without any login or persona but this is not so common otherwise we wouldn’t have billions of users), the engagement comes from either posting an update to the community or liking, commenting on other updates. In resident mode, the duration of engagement is indefinite because of many reasons for instance no particular task is there to complete to begin with. Lately a Netflix show called ‘The social dilemma’ caught my eye. It talked at length on how we have moved from a tool based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation based technology environment. The reason why I am talking about this show now is that I see a connection, the visitor mode is all about tool based technology, tool is innate here we use the tool to do our job. But in current reality certain tools are equipped with all AI based manipulative and additive ammunition that are designed to do only one thing that is to increase users retention in their platform – resident mode. So, I am quite intrigued to learn about the V&R model, I see it can be used to do a longitudinal study on a group of people to capture the shift in their online engagement.
Hi Mohammad, great job. I can see and read it.
Thank you!
Great work Mohammad, this is useful for our next meeting on Tuesday! See you then
Thank you Anna! Certainly we can bring it up on Tuesday.
Thank you for an interesting blog post Mohammad! It was really interesting with the link you do from topic 1 in ONL and the Netflix show you mentioned. I am thinking of how the corporations of these platforms strives to increase their users retention on their platform and relates that back to parts of topic 1 in the course: digital literacy. Is it part of our digital literacy to be aware of the strategies the corporations have? How should the user deal with the situation in order to be a conscious and healthy critical user of the services they offer? Your post spurs interesting discussion topics, thank you for sharing! Best wishes, Karin
Thank you for reading. The safest bit is of course to delete all kinds of social media account. But the networks are so large that it is hard to be out of the grid. Routine use, being critical on the credibility of what we see might help. But we all share similar brain structure that the corporations know how to manipulate. I am not an expert on this topic though. See you soon in the meeting today.