28 Raised by the Internet: A Cultural Survey
Dana Wilke
About the author
In the Fall of 2023, I asked students in my Writing and the Humanities course to perform a personal cultural inventory. I imagined images of ethnic food and tales of immigrant parents. But some students did not claim an exotic ethnic background. One in particular, Dana Wilke, took a shockingly creative and deeply insightful route. She claimed that the Internet was her culture and proceeded to prove it. What follows is a concise but brilliantly honest assessment of how the “digital native” generation experienced childhood. Her essay captured my attention and gave me a lot to think about. Perhaps you’ll find Wilke’s comments similarly fascinating. The essay was presented in slide format, so the slide viewer is embedded in the page. Use the arrows below to navigate each slide.
