Siva Vaidhyanathan has written a short piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education that make a simple but very important move: he demystifies the idea that most youth in the US, much less the world, are part a tech-savvy generation.

The point should be made as there are a slew of not only journalists (who let’s face it, exaggerate and simplify and well, there is not much we can do about it) but academics making making and circulating claims. These not only don’t hold much water, but also hide some serious disparities out there when it comes to access and also hides the fact that the phenomena people extend to wide swaths of the population are usually far more circumscribed and cultural in their orientation.

I think his point hit home recently because my class on an uber-techie subject, hackers, is primarily composed of students who have never started a blog, don’t read blogs, have never used much less heard of RSS feed etc. I am not saying this either to disparage this fact (I am envious of these students in fact) but just to say note that those who are quite intimate with technology (and there is a small cluster of students in my class who represent such groups) are in fact a slice of the pie. This is an interesting slice and one that I study and one that I find really really interesting and can be used to track some braoder shifts and changes but in a far more limited register.

But I think we should be suspect of any move that takes the slice to stand in for the whole pie. This rhetorical embellishment is one that I have come to expect form journalists (for better or for worse) but I am less forgiving of the academics who partake in this problematic form of puffery, in what is a leap over people’s everyday reality and into the realm of imagination, which is better left to fiction.