On a visit to India in the 1960s fashionarati Gloria Vanderbilt declared that "Pink is the new Black". In the heavily marketing spun 2000s with journalists and bloggers struggling to carve out breaking or new space the cliche that X is the new Y, or once an X always an X, or X is from Venus Y is from Mars, is carted out ad nauseum.  This phenomena has recently been termed a "Snowclone" or a neologism for a formula using an old idium in a new context. 

In academic blogging we might find: Once a digital native, always a digital native ... or when it comes to technology Teachers are from Venus, Students are from Mars. But recent surveys indicate that the Web is not the newspaper for youth in the UK and that while young people may be more comfortable generally than older people at navigating the social softwares of Web 2.0 they still lack the critical thinking skills constituting social practices of literacy. Once a human, always a human?

"Those in academia have long suspected that while college-age students can use technology, they don't necessarily know what to do with the content the technology provides," said Irvin Katz, a senior research scientist at ETS. "Our preliminary findings show that, in large part, those suspicions are well founded."