What do you call someone born into the age of the internet and web—that is, from around 1990 onward? Inspired by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X, some plump for “Generation Z”—the “Y” generation having been born in the 1980s. Perhaps the most popular term out there, however, is one with a nicely pseudo-anthropological ring: a “digital native.”
Digital natives, as the name implies, are the first generation born into a world where the internet, world wide web, and their associated digital technologies were not only to be taken for granted, but were also older than the people using them.
The word native itself originates from the Latin nativus meaning something innate or produced by birth, and it’s interesting to speculate what it means to possess once-radical technologies as a birthright. What’s also interesting, though, is the sense in which words like native implicitly cast digital technologies as a landscape, or even a land, into which it is possible to be born as a kind of citizen: technologies that are not so much mere tools as a space within which living itself occurs.
This sentiment is equally evident in a term complementary to digital natives that describes the generations preceding them: “digital immigrants.” The metaphor of technology as a physical environment is the same, yet its implications are rather different. For it is the elder generation—the immigrants—who are the interlopers and who, implicitly, must adapt their ways if they are to survive.
Although similar metaphors had been in use since the mid-1990s, both terms were popularized by the same person: the author Marc Prensky in a 2001 article entitled “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” which framed questions of new technology in the context of education. “Today’s students,” Prensky argued, “are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” For Prensky, those who have grown up in the new digital era “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.” Small wonder, then, that their digital “immigrant” instructors “speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age) [and] are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”129
What’s most interesting about Prenksy’s thesis is not whether it’s an entirely accurate summary of intergenerational relationships with technology, but its enormous success in propagating its terms. The idea of technological progress as a yawning divide between generations has struck a powerful chord, together with the notion that it’s the older “immigrants” who are today struggling to keep up and must either learn new customs or risk irrelevance.
Another intriguing aspect of the native/immigrant argument is its emphasis on language itself; and on the ways in which language change around digital technologies can involve the fundamental reconfiguring of old habits and associations. The simple act of watching a video, for example, exists in two different conceptual worlds today: one reflecting the traditional twentieth-century model of sitting on a settee in front of a television; another reflecting the rising twenty-first-century norm of streaming a video in one window on a computer via Wi-Fi while sharing your responses to it live via social media.
The same could be said for most other forms of media consumption—from what it means to “read” or “look up” something, to the associations surrounding “listening to music,” or the notion of “media consumption” in the first place. Immigration pains may prove an unfortunately accurate metaphor.