Digital Native Schative

A couple of weeks ago, there was this little row (that you may easily have missed) about some recruiter requiring digital nativity (yes.) of candidates (and whether that would be discriminatory since it would exclude ‘old’ folks). As in this here discussion.
Where the point was largely missed that one would indeed not want to hire anyone who would consider themselves qualified on this point…

As

• Considering yourself such a native, or ‘born digital’ or whatever ridiculous phrase one could use, disqualifies you as you have no clue:
• Those born in a time when there was already something digital (e.g., like stand-alone PCs), will still have grown up in environments with hardly if any of those devices. Either due to region (PCs were around in the US in the 80s, not so much elsewhere) or class (as if less moneyed classes had PCs in the US, before the 00s). Same / similar for all (sic) other ‘devices’, ‘systems’, and developments, that one could consider to fall under the ‘digital’ class if there were such a thing. If ‘born digital’ is about ‘computers’ having been around: that started in the 60s ..! If it is about pervasive ‘digital’ stuff being around: Those kids are still infants (mentally!), 0-20yrs of age; only some escape this nubness and indeed do understand technology.
• So, there’s hardly anyone who could actually claim to be born and raised (sic) digitally. Maybe a handful, possibly placed outside their bio family by authorities as the digital overload would count as child molestation (compared to their peers, playing outside).
• And, all the other kids may have actually learned something of the outside world in which one has to live (or be kept (sic) in a basement all their life…). May; apart from those that didn’t properly learn to ride a bike since they were driven around by tiger moms. Still, the ‘born and raised’ digital, would be of no use in the real world due to knowing nothing of it.
• The ‘digital’ has in the mean time exploded. Is it about mobile, about social, about devices, about apps, actual applications, programming, security, business deployment, assembler, design (of ‘web’ sites (huh whaddoyoumean ..!?), apps, devices, brands, or ..?), privacy, economics, …, …? No-one can cover them all; some may cover a few but certainly not more. So anyone claiming to master the world because they were ‘born digital’, I show you the Fool. Ecco homo.
• So you’d better not hire such worldview-morons.

But then, you could hire me. I was trained to work on mainframes (operations) and early PCs (use, programming down to C and assembler), have learned hardcore HTML (3, 4) back in the day and moved to ‘modern’ applications, and understand the Real World through education and experience (also in the business world), etc.etc.
Your call.

For reference:

[‘Native’ …? Córdoba]