When Mark Prensky in 2001 launched the term “digital native” – and as a counterpart “digital immigrant” – the mainstream internet was only about 6 years old and very popular. We used Netscape Navigator to surf through text deserts and broadcast media, especially websites, and there was still comparatively little interaction. The Interent was still mainly hypertext (nothing against hypertext, I love hypertext!). 2001 the first mobile phones were available, but still without touchscreen. The first iPhone was launched in 2007. I remember that in 2001 we mainly talked and texted on the phone. There was nothing more to it. That was 18 years ago now. But today we are at a completely different point.
Other common generalizing terms are Generation Y or Millennials. In German, people born around the turn of the millennium are called Generation Internet in addition to “digital native”. These terms are generalizing, summarizing an age group of the western world. The criterion is the year of birth, the age, not their competence. How could it be? That would not be possible in such a general way. Maybe we can even as if “native” is a genuinely racist term, or at least “colonialist” (Bayne, S. et al. 2019 draft, p. 28), as it has been used by colonialists to describe the people  who lived in the territory first and not by those people themselves to describe their own. Native in Prensky’s sense is on the other hand a genuinely ageist term because it describes a certain group of the population in a certain range of age, and excludes others who simply don’t mach certain criteria of age.

The term Native also implies competence. Similar to “native speaker”, it implies that the person in question is fluent in a language. In the same way, digital native implies that the group of people in question has a fluent command of digital media and can do anything they want to express with it.

In “The Manifesto for Teaching Online” (draft 2019)  the authors criticise Prensky’s concept.

To speak of digital natives is to use a reductive essentialising category to describe entire generations. Ir is a metaphor that has been damagingly formative to the field of digitla education, and it still persists despite the large body of empirical research which has debunked it.

It is fundamentally questionable from a demographic point of view to want to combine whole generations in a single term to a single partial competence. The key word in the quote above is “essentialising”. That is precisely what Prensky’s determinist term does: reduce a range of the population to one quality – and proclaim exclusivity at the same time: An immigrant will always be an immigrant and will never be native. There is no way to improve, to learn, to adapt.

Residents and  visitors

But there are other attempts to describe the population with its gaps in digital competence or skills. David S. White and Alison Le Cornu proposed the alternative  terms of residents and visitorsin 2011 by recognising the “usefulness of these typologies” (White, Le Cornu, 2011). They state that

“His [Prensky’s] Natives and Immigrants were hypothetical children of their time, however, and we believe that as our understanding has developed, it is appropriate to re–evaluate what was previously accepted and to change it to suit the purposes of today.” (ibid.)

White and Le Cornu emphasize that Prensky’s metaphor was launched before the launch of social media, but today, under these new conditions of interactive and social media and the significant increase in complexity, it can hardly do justice to it. They criticize Prensky’s metaphor at length because it has dominated the discussion for years, especially in the non-scientific environment.

In the abrupt cultural shift towards the construction of social networks, we argue that the analogies of language and age cease to function and believe that a metaphor of place is more fit for the purpose of understanding different behaviours and potentially aptitudes. (ibid, chapter III.1)

Starting from the metaphors of place and space, they propose the metaphor of ‘resident’ and ‘visitor’ as two possibilities of identification, which are fundamentally different in certain respects, and which users of the Internet or social networks can give themselves.

Visitors are compared to people who take the tools from the shed they believe will serve the purpose. When they have done the work, they put it back. Then they leave again. Maybe they return and get the same tool, maybe they don’t. Visitors usually don’t leave any traces, they don’t sign up for any list of registered visitors.

Residents, on the other hand, are compared to the inhabitants of a house where various people are regularly involved and with whom they build a relationship. They find their own way through this community, use the tools regularly and share their knowledge. They can even become actors who shape the virtual spaces and procedures.

An advantage of this metaphorical paraphrase compared to Prensky’s static metaphors is the dynamic: You can start somewhere as a visitor and “settle down” and become a resident, or you can leave again. Conversely, a resident has the freedom to leave a virtual place and (re-)become an occasional visitor. Transitions are possible gradually.

Readings

Prensky, M. (2001): Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (part I) (PDF; 135 kB), in: On The Horizon, ISSN 1074-8121, MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, Oktober 2001.

Prensky, M. (2001): Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently? (PDF; 252 kB), in: On The Horizon, ISSN 1074-8121, MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 6, Dezember 2001.

White, D. S. and Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049

Comment by James Lamb (Jan 20, 2020)

Really great blog here, Miriam, particularly your willingness to draw on the research literature.

One of the problems I have found with digital natives and comparable labels is the way they simplify what it means to work with digital resources. I have worked with high school students who can rapidly communicate across different media via Smartphone, but have then been unable to set up a document in Microsoft Word. This is easily overlooked by the idea that ‘kids love tech’.

In fact I recently spent time doing research in undergraduate history classes where I repeatedly saw half the lecture room choose to make notes through paper and pen, while their peers used laptops for the same task. It struck me that, just because students have access and perhaps the ability to use digital resources, we should be wary of assuming they wish to use these resources on every occasion or in the ways we might anticipate. I wonder whether this is an inconvenient truth for those who want to push through a particular emphasis on technology in education?

And of course as David White says in the video, and other have said elsewhere, there’s an important difference between being technically proficient with a computer, and being critical.