It was supposedly Marc Prensky who coined the term digital natives, a euphemism for the generation born after 1980 that grew up with computers, mobile phones and the Internet. On the other hand, there should be the digital immigrants, i.e. those who were not born in the digital country, but immigrated later, because their birth took place when the digital country did not even exist.
First of all, it is indisputable that the use of the computer alone can change people, not to mention the use of the Internet (see, for example, Sherry Turkle’s works “The Wish Machine” from 1984 and “Identity in the Age of the Internet” from 1998). And as Walter J. Ong wrote in 1982 in “Orality and Literacy”, the written word is a technology that was subjected to the same accusations when it was introduced as the computer in the 1970s and 1980s: thinking is externalized, and at the same time it reshapes thinking. The Internet is also reshaping people’s thinking. Just as we can’t imagine the word “nevertheless” without having a letter structure in mind (would the word even exist in an oral language?), we can’t go back in time and imagine a life without a search engine, email, video chat, and free software.
So it is certainly true that those who grew up with the computer and the use of the Internet have a different approach to these technologies than others who have worked for a long time with the tools of the pre-computer era and are now confronted with digital networking.
But let’s look back to the age in which writing was invented. Not everyone could read and write. Those who learned it had the chance to restructure their thinking as a result. But no one was born with the ability to write.
It is no different today. No one is born with computer and internet skills. Everyone has to learn it. Some can do it in their childhood, others were born before a computer became affordable and have to do it later. No one was born digital, and so everyone is a digital immigrant. The only advantage that those who grew up with computers have is that they don’t have the knowledge of the world that was already spinning before the Internet. The question is whether this is really an advantage, because if you have never stood anywhere else, you cannot judge where you stand today. Last but not least, it was the so-called digital immigrants who created this alleged land of digitality.
Worse still, not everyone can expect the digital world to open up to him or her in the digital age. According to heise.de, 69% of households today have an Internet connection, it is not guaranteed that the rest will be able to use the Internet in other ways. We don’t live in a digital country, and so not everyone born after 1980 can claim to have eaten digitality with spoons. And even if everyone had a computer with Internet access, that doesn’t mean that everyone uses these tools in the same way. The saying “Television makes the clever smarter and the stupid dumber” is said to have come from Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and it also applies to the Internet.
The concept of digital natives requires a black or white, either digital native or digital immigrant. This approach is too simplistic. There are actually people born after 1980 who can no longer imagine life without the tools of the computer and the Internet, regardless of whether they use them in a productive way or not. But there are also people born before 1980, those born before 1970, those born before 1960 who can no longer imagine a life without digitality. And there are still enough people who have no connection to this world at all and may not get it anymore. Not black or white, but many shades of gray, from white to black.
Let’s go back to the age of the invention of writing. Almost everyone in our Western society has access to Scripture. Does this mean that every literate (non-illiterate) person also claims to see this understanding as the basis of a demand that the world conform to him? This is exactly what the self-proclaimed digital natives demand: their needs should be taken into account, because after all, they have a different capacity to absorb information than those who were not born into the digital age, at least that’s what they claim. We’ll see if this hyped extra capacity to process multitasking information actually benefits productivity. Yes, the intelligent use of writing could be an advantage, and so will the intelligent use of computer and Internet tools. But this does not apply to everyone who has access to it. Not everyone starts a new Napster. The life of the future will not be determined by the digital natives, but by “doers” who have existed in every generation who know how to use the tools of the time. And these tools go back to a time when the self-proclaimed digital natives weren’t even a thought in the universe, when people had a vision that has come true for some today.
The concept of digital natives is a simplified view of things that does not solve the problem it is supposed to describe.