#+TITLE: The “I like” Technique
#+SETUPFILE: ../../theme_lev1.setup

* Digital Natives
  :PROPERTIES:
  :CUSTOM_ID: digital-natives
  :END:

Angela had been taking care of her grandchildren since they were very
young. Her eldest daughter, Francesca, gladly entrusted them to her;
Angela was a good help, as Francesca was so absorbed by her daily
routine, juggling work and a thousand other commitments. Her ex-partner,
the kids’ father, had been living abroad for several years now; they
were on good terms but certainly he wasn’t useful in raising them daily.
As for them, Elm and Olivia were always thrilled to stay with grandma.

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When the little girl turned twelve, her father gave her a mobile phone,
a /smart/ one, with a big touch screen, a nice camera, and the Internet
connection. It was beautiful, it was called iPhone, and it had a pink
cover to protect it from falling. So he could call her, or rather, video
call her.

Since the minimum age for using WhatsApp had been raised to sixteen, she
had installed FaceTime, an app by Apple. Olivia was on cloud nine. She
got into her cell phone that day, and a year later, she seemed lost in
it. 

She didn’t like going to Grandma’s anymore. She said to her, “How
boring here. You don’t understand anything about apps. Daddy is really
cool! Look, he made me a TikTok account, from remote!”

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Angela didn’t understand. She saw her granddaughter shaking in front of
the screen, trying to follow the rhythm of the song that was rumbling
through her headphones, and she felt cut off. She was in a lot of pain.
In fact even Elm, the eldest, had moved away a bit because of the
computer: now he was spending hours playing Fortnite, an online
role-playing game in which you conquer an imaginary island, as summarily
explained to her a friend from yoga, Adele. 

She sounded like an expert to Angela, since she talked about Internet stuff like she were perfectly
comfortable with it, even if she was already in her 70s.

She tried to read up. She discovered that her grandchildren, like all of
their peers, were defined as /digital natives/, that is, individuals
born together with digital technologies. A generation of people at ease
with these technologies, as opposed to previous generations, defined as
/digital immigrants/. But then what was her friend Adele? An old
/digital native/? A cheater?

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“But what digital natives!” Adele burst out laughing when Angela asked
her about her secret. “My son is a geek, he’s been playing with
computers his whole life. He inherited it from his grandfather, who is
my father, who repaired radios, TVs and sound systems. For me, these
computers are no different from the machines that there were before.
Just a little more fragile and complicated. And obviously connected!”

But Angela continued to feel uncomfortable. She really hated those
smart-things, she felt like they were replacing her in the
grandchildren’s lives. Of course, she had to admit it: she knew several
people who, just like her friend Adele, had become very clever geeks, to
such an extent to engage in interpersonal relationships mediated by the
digital devices: in short, they were dating people they met on online
platforms!

Somehow, some of her peers often found the interconnected multimedia
realities more interesting and engaging than the disconnected
situations: they had all the recognized digital media use and abuse
characteristics that should have been peculiar to the so-called
natives - both qualitative and quantitative. 

Yet they were people born before TV - in the 1940s - not with the Internet or the Web! How was
that possible?

* The Point of View of Cognitive Neuroscience
  :PROPERTIES:
  :CUSTOM_ID: the-point-of-view-of-cognitive-neuroscience
  :END:

All humans with a brain can become /digital natives/ because the brain
is extremely plastic and changes very quickly in learning procedures.

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This does not mean at all that these people are capable of
understanding, analyzing, modifying and teaching the procedural
mechanisms that they repeat! The presumed generational difference
between digital natives and digital immigrants is based on the confusion
between different types of learning and memory, in particular between
/procedural memory/ - or implicit - and /declaratory memory/ - or
explicit.

/Cognitive ergonomy/ is a matter of head, so as to say: body and habits.
Thanks to digital media humans can decrease their cognitive load and,
for example, delegate the task of remembering all the numbers of their
address & telephone book. The /work/ they have to do (/ergon/, in Greek)
is performed by the address book, which works through precise /rules/
(/nomos/, rule). An indispensable help.

We didn’t take any classes to learn how to consult the paper address
book. And not even that of our phone, or the management of contacts on a
social platform. Maybe we had to ask someone more geeky than us, we
probably don’t know exactly how it works, but the important thing is
that we reach the goal. 

To achieve this, we will have to do a series of repetitive actions, namely, to go through a procedure. We follow the
obvious traces in the algorithmic procedure interface designed for us by
others. The procedure coincides with the steps of the /algorithm/ that
lay beneath the interface.

To simplify, let’s say that the organization of our cognitive system is
mainly based on on /intuitive faculties/ and /reasoning/. Relying on
/intuition/, all we do is interpret a context through patterns that are
already part of our unconscious mnemonic baggage. The cognitive and
computational effort is minimal, since we don’t have to think about what
we’re doing. We act automatically.

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Instead the /reasoning/ requires a considerable cognitive effort, we
must dwell on a problem, make a hypothesis, follow a sequentiality that
requires a slow pace and full involvement. Intuition allows you to act
and use a tool without being able to explain how it works, while
reasoning can make us able to to explain exactly how something works
without being able to use it.

A violin expert may have no idea of how her own musculature works, but
she knows how to use it perfectly. Conversely, by reading a manual we
can be theoretically able to describe the steps to drive a tractor
without being able to drive it in practice.

* Practical Alternatives
  :PROPERTIES:
  :CUSTOM_ID: practical-alternatives
  :END:

By now Angela was convinced that she could manage to get by with that
digital stuff. She reached out to Adele describing her problem.

“You need to apply the ’like’ technique!” her friend exclaimed… “Here’s
how it works: once you find out what you like, you try to find out a
practical alternative. You like dealing with your granddaughter, right?
But this FaceTime thing upsets you, as well as TikTok, right?”

“Yes, that’s right. Imagine that I bought myself an iPad so I could
install FaceTime. I just can’t understand the other one, but at least…
Now when I call Olivia, she answers.”

“Sure. So you need something to cover up the same functions: seeing each
other through a screen, but without all those nonsense, like having to
have an account and an Apple device… look, I use Jitsi with my
grandkids living in Montevideo. That’s how it works: we make an
appointment, with a time and an address. For example,
https://meet.jit.si/nonna at 5.30 P.M. Central European Time. At this point,
I open a browser, I type in the address, I enable the camera and
microphone and zac!, I meet up with them. No login and password, no
notifications!”

“All right, I’ll do it, but first let’s try together once. I don’t want
to make a bad impression with something that doesn’t work.”

“Of course it does. In fact, show me your tablet. There you go.” In the
course of… a half hour, Angela had become familiar with the new toy.

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And it worked!

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Olivia initially grumbled a lot. Then she let herself be persuaded, and
remained astonished. Maybe she could have used the same system to call
her friends secretly… On FaceTime everyone was always there all over
the place. Not to mention WhatsApp (of course she had an account even if
she was younger than 16 years old) she couldn’t stand all those
notifications anymore.

Instead her grandmother’s system was simple, nobody knew about it and it
was not related to the phone number, so it was necessary to make an
agreement before. There was no way to send notifications to call someone
who wasn’t already informed of the appointment: time and address.

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“Grandma, you’re a genius!” Olivia concluded.

“Mostly I have a good friend!”, winked Angela with satisfaction.
