Stephanie Majors's List: Digital Native

• Digital native
• A digital native is a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technologies and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts. Alternatively, this term can describe people born during or after the 2000s, as the Digital Age began at that time; but in most cases, the term focuses on people who grew up with the technology that became prevalent in the latter part of the 20th century and continues to evolve today
• Other discourse identifies a digital native as a person who understands the value of digital technology and uses this to seek out opportunities for implementing it with a view to make an impact.
• Due to the obvious divide set between digital natives and digital immigrants, sometimes both generations are forced to meet which commonly results in conflicting ideologies of digital technology. The everyday regime of worklife is becoming more technologically advanced with improved computers in offices, more complicated machinery in industry etc. With technology moving so fast it is hard for digital immigrants to keep up.
• The classification of people into digital natives and digital immigrants is controversial. Some digital immigrants surpass digital natives in tech savvy, but there is a belief that early exposure to technology fundamentally changes the way people learn. The actual classification of people into immigrants and natives is tricky as the adoption of digital technology hasn’t been a unified phenomenon worldwide.
• North America, most people born prior to 1980 are considered digital immigrants.
• hose closer to the cutoff are sometimes called digital intermediates, which means they started using digital technology in their early teens and thus are closer to digital natives in terms of their understanding and abilities.
• Digital Natives term is synonymous with the term Digital Inclusion.

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• Neither “Natives” nor “Immigrants” are created equally – and we can place individuals in both “tribes” along a continuum  that is remarkably similar for both groups:
• lso, there are plenty of Digital Immigrants who are “totally tech-savvy”; and quite a few Digital Natives who are amazingly comfortable using Facebook, Twitter and iPads but are “totally clueless” when it comes to fixing html code on a web page or even managing subscribers on a community blog.
• Well, the key point behind this approach relates to the relative size of the communities within each tribe and where they “live” on the continuum – the digital natives have the bigger army of “enthusiasts”, while the digital immigrants have more “reserves” in the “minimalist camp”.

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