Digital native

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A person of the social generation who grew up in the digital world is referred to as a digital native (German: “digital native”; plural : digital natives ) . The term digital immigrant (German: “digital immigrant ” or “digital immigrant”) exists as an antonym for someone who only got to know this world in adulthood.

etymology

The term native appears for the first time in a technological context in the 1996 Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow . In this one paragraph says:

" You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. "

The term digital native was coined by Marc Prensky , a trained educator and manager with activities in the field of e-learning . The origins are the article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants in the magazine On the Horizon in October 2001 and the follow-up article Do They Really Think Differently? in December 2001. "[the] digital natives", "[the] digital natives", "[the] digital natives", "[the] digital natives" and the like are used to translate "digital natives" into German.

A synonym is the term born digital (“digitally born”), which was used earlier for media and art that were created purely digitally. A designation with a different focus is Generation Internet or Generation C64 . More generally, they can be referred to as Generation Y or Millennials .

description

In 2001, Prensky used Digital Natives to describe all students from kindergarten to college . John Palfrey and Urs Gasser draw an even clearer line in their book Born Digital, which was published in 2008, when they were the oldest generation of digital natives . It is the first generation that grew up with the new technology of the digital age from an early age. Computer games, e-mails, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives, and they were socialized with them early on . This ubiquitous equipment and the massive interaction with it lead to different thought patterns and to a fundamental difference in processing information. They are used to receiving information very quickly, they love to work in multitasking . They love direct access to information (as opposed to serial), prefer graphics to text, and work best when they are networked. They thrive with immediate and frequent reward.

While digital natives are attested to be well versed in the Internet and with new technologies, a study from 2016 shows that they are often not yet able to differentiate between credible and untrustworthy content on the Internet. The 2018 ICILS study shows that only 2% of all tested students have the ability to critically analyze information from the Internet. Digital skills are more dependent on socio-economic background than on age. These results are in line with the research area on the digital divide .

Digital immigrants are not familiar with these technologies from an early age; they adapt their environment in order to work with them. Prensky gives the following examples as a characteristic: You tend to print out an e-mail or let the secretary print it out. They're more likely to physically bring people to the office to show them a webpage than just send the URL . To revise a text, print it out beforehand. They cannot imagine that while listening to music or watching TV, one can learn because they cannot do it themselves because they did not do it in their teenage years. The group primarily refers to those born before 1970.

There is a gap between these two groups in terms of IT and computer usage. The students are no longer the same as they used to be. According to Prensky, this means that the teaching methods and the content have to be adapted.

Since his book Net Kids (1998), management professor Don Tapscott has dealt with the effects and changes that the growing up of the generation of digital natives has on all areas of society. In the bestseller Wikinomics (2006), he particularly describes the consequences for the economy. For his book Grown up digital (2008) he asked 11,000 young people about their behavior on the Internet.

According to Moshe Rappoport from IBM Research, the young generation is also characterized by a willingness to take risks and act quickly, analogous to computer games, where you can quickly achieve your goal with risky behavior or simply start over after a game over . In the past, when a business idea stopped working after two years, it was considered a failure, today it is more about trying out ideas, implementing them and, if necessary, discarding them again. The acceptance of the introduction of technical innovations in companies would also be important. Therefore, when the digital natives enter the management level, there will be a radical rethink in corporate management.

Studies on the concept

Various studies by public, academic and private institutions on the media usage behavior of young people have dealt with the identification of typical patterns in the behavior of digital natives, for example:

  • ARD / ZDF long-term study of the mass media (1964–2005)
  • Federal Statistical Office: Information and communication technologies in private households (2002-2006)
  • Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan: Changing Times of American Youth (1981-2003)
  • Kaiser Family Foundation : Kids & Media @ the New Millennium (1999)
  • DIVSI : Children, Adolescents and Young Adults in the Digital World (2014)

The DIVSI study found that in the age segment examined (under 25 years of age) there are hardly any offline people (over 98% use the Internet) and the distinction between online and offline is increasingly disappearing. However, it also became clear that there are distortions in the representation of the behavior of digital natives:

“The importance of Facebook friends is obviously mostly misrepresented. According to our study, respondents differentiate very clearly between online friends, personal acquaintances and real close friends. "

- DIVSI : U25 study

Criticism of the concept

Rolf Schulmeister , among others , considers the definition of terms such as “digital natives” to be wrong. Classification as “Digital Native”, “Generation Y”, “Millennial” or the like is therefore rejected by several media scholars because there are hardly any differences to previous users in terms of actual usage behavior (i.e. for which activities the media are used) therefore no new generation in the sense of the term has emerged.

Furthermore, a pure classification by age is not realistic, since it is not uncommon for members of the digital immigrant generation to deal with the new media as if they had grown up with it. There are also members of the younger generation who prefer more traditional forms of communication and collaboration. Accordingly, the term digital native should be defined by the way in which media and technology are dealt with and not by age.

Media educator Philippe Wampfler also rejects the term and points out that it makes the “ digital divide ” invisible in particular .

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eva Windisch & Niclas Medman: Understanding the digital natives. In: Ericsson Business Review. 1/2008, pp. 36–39 ( 217 kB )
  2. ↑ a b Peter Marwan: PC workstation of the future: This is how companies set the course - Part 2: Digital natives , zdnet.de, February 18, 2008
  3. ↑ http://www.marcprensky.com/
  4. ↑ Lothar Rolke , Johanna Höhn: Media Use in the Web Society 2018: How the Internet will change the communication behavior of companies, consumers and the media in Germany , BoD - Books on Demand, 2008, ISBN 3-8370-3162-4 , p. 144
  5. ↑ Christian Stöcker: The C64 generation strikes back , Spiegel Online / Netzwelt, June 2, 2009
  6. ↑ Gry Hasselbalch (Danish Media Council for Children and Young People): Do you teach internet skiing? , September 12, 2006, Version: August 5, 2007, Insafe (European Schoolnet)
  7. ↑ Born Digital - Not without my offline self ( Memento of the original from July 18, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , sueddeutsche.de, October 14, 2008 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sueddeutsche.de
  8. ↑ Christian Bütikofer: What the Internet generation has ahead of their parents , Tagesanzeiger, November 3, 2008
  9. ^ John Palfrey, Urs Gasser: Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives , Basic Books, 2008, ISBN 0-465-00515-2 , p. 1
  10. ↑ a b c Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (PDF; 135 kB), in: On The Horizon , ISSN  1074-8121 , MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. October 5, 2001
  11. ↑ STANFORD HISTORY EDUCATION GROUP: "Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning" . November 22, 2016 ( stanford.edu [PDF]).
  12. ↑ Anant Agarwala: "We bury ourselves in our prejudices" . In: The time . No. 51 , December 11, 2016 ( zeit.de ).
  13. ↑ ICILS 2018 Results. International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement , accessed November 16, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Bernd Kramer: Every tenth student with poor digital skills. Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 5, 2019, accessed on November 16, 2019 .
  15. ↑ a b Press release: Digital immigrants - IBM locates a divided technology society ( memento of the original from October 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , September 24, 2008 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.channelpartner.de
  16. ↑ Jan Free: "Internet-born people can do it better" , ZEIT online, September 16, 2009.
  17. ↑ a b DIVSI "U25 Study: Children, Adolescents and Young Adults in the Digital World"
  18. ↑ R. Schulmeister: Is there a net generation? Refutation of a mystification. In: S. Seehusen, U. Lucke , S. Fischer (eds.): DeLFI 2008: The 6th e-learning specialist conference on computer science of the Society for Computer Science eV 07. – 10. September 2008, Lübeck. Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), Vol. P-132. Gesellschaft für Informatik Bonn 2008, pp. 15–28.
  19. ^ Simson Garfinkel: The myth of Generation N. Not all kids are tech-savvy; how will they handle wired future? In: Technology Review Aug. 13, 2003.
  20. ^ Scott Carlson: The Net Generation Goes to College; The Chronicle of Higher Education, Section: Information Technology, Volume 52, Issue 7, Page A34; October 7, 2005.
  21. ↑ www.digitalnative.org → About → Are All Youths Digital Natives? (Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Cambridge, MA), accessed June 19, 2010
  22. ^ John Palfrey: Born Digital , accessed June 19, 2010
  23. ↑ Philippe Wampfler: Please refrain from using the term digital natives , accessed on June 25, 2015.