Free yourself or forgive yourself of the crime or consequence or inevitability of being always already a part of society, and the world will support you and your acts. What’s unclear is whether society and the world are distinct, or even if such a thing is imaginably possible. And to what extent is Emerson’s Nature aligned with his “the world?” And does my nature partake in the world’s Nature? I just don’t…I’m having an impossible time seeing where I am in the array of “badges and names,” “names and customs,” “large societies and dead institutions” that surround me, and so I just don’t know how to absolve myself to myself. And as a digital immigrant, this is possibly even more challenging, a Ship of Theseus problem. What is the essential element of myself as myself per se? And what is the essential element of a digital native as a digital native per se? Her digital-ness? A mere temporal distinction; born sometime after March 12, 1989? Unless you’re poor or black or from a developing nation, then who knows when the cut-off for digital nativeness is.
Sam Hamilton, Bridgewater College