Digital native
The term "digital native" was coined by Marc Prensky, an American writer, speaker and technologist who wrote several articles referencing this subject.
Individuals from these demographic cohorts can quickly and comfortably locate, consume and send digital information through electronic devices and platforms such as computers, mobile phones, and social media.
Due to their upbringing, this digital generation of youth became fixated on their technologies as it became an ingrained, integral and essential way of life.
[1] Prensky concluded that due to the volume of daily interactions with technology, the digital native generation had developed a completely different way of thinking.
Native–immigrant analogy terms, referring to age groups' relationships with and understanding of the Internet, were used as early as 1995 by John Perry Barlow in an interview,[8] and used again in 1996 as part of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
[4] His article posited that "the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decade of the 20th century" had changed the way students think and process information, making it difficult for them to excel academically using the outdated teaching methods of the day.
Contextually, his ideas were introduced after a decade of worry over increased diagnosis of children with ADD and ADHD,[12] which itself[clarification needed] turned out to be largely overblown.
[13] Prensky did not strictly define the digital native in his 2001 article, but it was later, arbitrarily, applied to children born after 1980, because computer bulletin board systems and Usenet were already in use at the time.
The idea became popular among educators and parents whose children fell within Prensky's definition of a digital native, and has since been embraced as an effective marketing tool.
[27] The everyday regimen of work-life is becoming more technologically dependent with advancements such as computers in offices, improved telecommunication, and more complex machinery in industry.
[28] This can make it difficult for digital immigrants to keep pace, which has the potential to create conflict between older supervisors and managers and an increasingly younger workforce.
[28] Similarly, parents of digital natives clash with their children at home over gaming, texting, YouTube, Facebook and other Internet technology issues.
One preference to this problem is to invent computer games to teach digital natives the lessons they need to learn, no matter how serious.
[35] Gamification as a teaching tool has sparked interest in education, and Gee suggests this is because games have special properties that books cannot offer for digital natives.
[36] For instance, gamification provides an interactive environment for students to engage and practice 21st century skills such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, and digital literacy.
Furthermore, online gaming seems to provide an interactive and engaging environment that promotes the necessary skills digital natives will need to be successful in their future.
Self-perception also plays a role: individuals who do not feel confident in their use of technology will not be considered a native regardless of the formally mentioned factors.
[42] Applying skills, whether it be in a game, program, creating a blog, etc., provides digital natives with first-hand experiences of events, observations, and manipulation of natural processes.
[43] This type of engagement gives natives a chance to be creative, to explore, research, and increases their ability to explain, elaborate, and evaluate what they have done in a meaningful way.
In 2017, in the USA, evidence had been provided to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that a test case needed to come before the courts to consider the lawfulness of recruiting for "digital natives".
On 17th May 2023, in a voluntary agreement announced in a press release issued by AARP, the corporation confirmed that they would not exclude applicants based on "adjectives that describe people in relation to their age (such as “millennial” or “digital native”).
"[47] On 18th January 2024, a 51-year-old in Germany brought a case in the ArbG Heilbronn 8th Chamber which ruled that the wording “digital native” in the job advertisement discriminated against them on the grounds of age and violated the prohibition set forth in Section 7 of the Equal Treatment Act (AGG),[48] Germany's law created as a result of the Equality Directive 2000.
