In an essay published in 2001, Marc Prensky coined the term "Digital natives" to describe a new generation, born typically after 1980, who are inherently familiar with and competent in using new technologies and feel at ease in the ”digital" world.

This term caused a lot of excitement amongst politicians and companies, believing that this new generation would reconcile our fatigued economies with growth by innovating with their natural ICT skills. Many actors, especially NGOs advocating for more child protection online, found out to their dismay that this term was instrumental to block many potential actions (regulatory or self-regulatory) by governments or businesses.

Indeed the term is present in the "Digital agenda" which calls for listening more to these "Digital natives" and is discussed in articles and blogs on the EC websites. Some people have pointed out the oversimplification of such a term, but the recognition that this term is misleading has not lead to any policy implications.

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Who is a ”Digital native"? What skills should he/she typically have?
by Martin Schmalzried, Policy Officer and "Digital native"

It was back in the early 1990s that personal computers started to enter the households of many families. The arrival of operating systems such as Windows 3.1 made these computers more user-friendly and accessible to more than just tech-savvy people.  In these days, there were some games running in Windows but most games, including the coolest ones, still ran on DOS.  DOS... a black screen with only a "C:\”to welcome you and a flashing white cursor "_” waiting for a command manually typed on your keyboard.  If you wanted to run a game, you had to learn the commands and more often than not, even if you managed to find a way to access the right directory and run the game, an error message would say that you had not enough memory, or that the sound card was not configured... And there you were, a 12 year old kid, finding a way to open and edit the "autoexec.bat” file or the "config.sys” to add a line to make sure that the soundcard would work under DOS.

After all this struggling, the effort would pay off. The first game I managed to launch on DOS was DOOM I, one of the first First Person Shooter games, and boy did I enjoy it...  After that experience, I got curious, started to explore menus and sub-menus, settings, options and still today, my first reflex when I install a new application or sign up to a new service is to check the "options” and "settings” tabs.  I crashed the computer twice by clogging it with too many games on one occasion and by infecting it with viruses on another one and had to format and reinstall it twice as well since no one was tech-savvy in my family.

By the time I had reached the age of 15 and a second computer entered our household, I was in charge of everything that was related to ICT: setting up a LAN network, installing devices like printers, scanners, webcams, routers, installing software...  And with it, I actually did develop this set of "skills” that digital natives supposedly have. For instance I can now easily recognise whether a link on a web-page is actually ever going to let me download something or whether I will end up being kicked around from link to link eventually falling victim to a virus or a malware of some sort.

All in all, I could be a so called "digital native” but I'd rather be known as a geek since I believe the "digital natives” term experienced a "paradigm shift” in the last decade or so.

While users never expected applications or devices to work on their first try just a decade ago, by the time we reached the turn of the millennium, operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS went out of their way to make things simpler for users.  "User friendly interfaces” translated in applications running after a simple click, devices began to be much more "plug and play”. This trend actually nipped the nascent digital natives in the bud.  On the other side, programming and coding became increasingly complex and difficult.  Back in the 1990s, it wasn't rare to find programmers come up with a game all by themselves.  Nowadays, programmers split their work into many teams handling different aspects of a game focusing on the physical engine, the AI, the gameplay, the sound etc...  Programming alone can only work for relatively small projects such as a mobile phone app, but only pure geniuses armed with patience and a lot of time can manage programming everything from start to finish.

A new digital divide has therefore developed between the "super” geeks who actually know the code and programming language, the "geeks” who understand how things work and can solve most ICT related problems but do not know programming, the "users” (supposedly digital natives) who enjoy playing around with all kinds of new devices (smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks,...) and consume content online (stream videos, surf on websites, take part in social networking) and the digitally illiterate who don't understand anything.

With the new glossy interfaces on smartphones and tablets, children born in this millennium representing the "new” generation have become for the most part pure "passive consumers”. They play, chat, post pictures but when they fall victims of clickjacking on a social network they are clueless as to how it happened or what to do about it.  Options and settings menus are to them a "last resort” only when things don't spontaneously "work”.

"Digital natives” therefore do not really exist. They can "use” everything digital but not necessarily in a responsible way and don't understand, even remotely, how most of the things they use work. The term "digital naïves” suits them best.

With this in mind, it is clear that we need to scale up policies meant not only at protecting children but also to "push” them to go beyond the glossy interfaces in order to guarantee that they really will develop the digital skills they are supposed to "naturally” learn.

As a conclusion, I invite any sceptical reader to present the following picture: http://xkcd.com/742/ to a minor see if they can explain the meaning of it. I personally doubt that many will be able to deliver any convincing response.