Do you speak digital pidgin or digital creole?

When one discusses the generational differences for online activity, usage and ability; I've often found people rightly point out that there are many silver surfers who are experts on the internet, and many Gen. Y youngsters who can't be bothered with Facebook, or virtual worlds and so on.

However, I finally realised the best way to explain the difference is to refer back to Noam Chomsky's work on acquisition of languages and Stephen Pinker's work on how the brain, erm, works.

And, thinking about it more, it is of course just an extension of the idea of 'digital natives'.

You see we (and I include you, dear reader, by virtue of the fact that you're reading this, you are within a demographic that is almost certainly outside Generation Y, let alone the Net Generation) speak digital pidgin.  But children growing up today, playing with virtual worlds and making friends through social networks, adapt immediately to the new way of connecting: they speak digital creole.  It is engrained in them. Their brains are hard-wired to create grammar in any language, and therefore, they must be hard-wired to create social etiquette and the 'grammar of life' in whichever environment they find themselves, right? OK - this extrapolation is my own work (based on no research) but it does seem to me to be self-evident.

So why pidgin versus creole? Well, when the colonising invaders reached (modernised/burnt/ravaged - delete as you find appropriate) a country and imposed their language (such as English) on the natives, those natives would speak a very simple form of the language: 'Pidgin English'.  However, their children, who would hear the simple ungrammatical bastardised language that their parents were forced to speak, would naturally create a grammar from 'Pidgin' and, in effect, create a new language: 'creole'.

The question I was asked yesterday, therefore, of 'how do you recreate those coffee-shop or water-cooler moments in the virtual space' do not apply.  The young will not think of the coffee-shop or the water-cooler as a place to meet people or exchange gossip. They will have other places and technologies to do that.

Once people can get over the idea that a digital future is not  the same as the present, but online, it will be much easier for them to understand the true potential it has.  After all, the future is, like, still to come, right?

And to illustrate the point, Douglas Adams, author of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, said in the early eighties:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.