Left: Dr. Urs Gasser of Harvard’s Berkman Center, who focuses on Digital Natives.
I’m live blogging from Corporate Social Networking Conference in Amsterdam, and listening to Dr. Urs Gasser of Harvard’s Berkman Center, his website and twitter account (works with friend Doc Searls) who coined the term “Digital Natives”. In my opinion, the Berkman Center is the leading think tank in academia focused on the internet and impacts to culture.
[By age 20, kids will have spent 20,000 hours online the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practicing –Dr. Urs Gasser]
The kids born after 1980 are often thought of as Digital Natives but age doesn’t always matter as the generation is defined on: access to digital technologies since birth, age, and have the skills to use the digital technologies. Those who come before these digital natives are referred to as digital immigrants. For what it’s worth, I’m right in between both, giving me a perspective of both worlds.
Key Characteristics of Digital Natives:
They interact with the peers across the globe: This impacts employers, brands, teachers, parents, as this first generation enters the workforce.
Always online: By age 20, kids will have spent 20,000 hours online the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practicing Urs Gasser, paraphrased
Multiple identities, personal and social, shared online and offline (blurring): Online representation is the same as physical representation: what your clothes, friends, vehicles say about you.Extensive disclosure of personal data: 35% of girls in US are writing a blog vs 20% boys. Opportunity for HR departments to learn more about their employees, but guess what? They Google you too.
Culture of sharing: The default behavior is information sharing, not only do they have the right to speak, but to be heard. Risk: breach of confidentiality is hip, digital natives are fans of wikileaks.
Creators, no longer passive users: This generation creates their own content and shares their opinion online, see the Forrester’s social Technographics to learn about the data.
Information processing habits: Pointed out that the second most popular social network was YouTube. They often ‘graze’ the headlines and don’t often read the full article. (I guess few natives will read this far? Prove me wrong in the comments). Opportunities: companies should allow natives to increase creativity to rip, mix, burn content to encourage interaction.
Peer collaboration, online activism: They often experience work with community builders, and are responsive to intrinsic motizations.
Learning through browsing: Yes wrestles with amount & quality of information, generational “multitakers”. They may not be able to identify qualified and expert sources. “If it’s online, it must be true!”
On a related note, this month, I’m starting a research paper on Social Behaviors of Generation X, which is a bit older than Generation Y, if you’re a brand or agency that has case studies of how you’ve reached Gen X using social technologies, I want to know. Email me at jowyang at Forrester.com
Pics from the event, at a converted industrial complex westergasfabriek “Western Gas Factory”, extremely hip venue.
Born 1967, I am solidly Gen X aka the “MTV generation” implying short-attention spans from all the video jumpcuts. Gen X has got nothing on the Digital Natives described by Dr. Gasser – scanning content, multi-profiles instead of a deliberately cultivated sense of themself, sharing everything naively believing they control who sees what via privacy settings, taking things at face value b/c they’d rather hop to their next multi-task than stop to analyze. [Yes, extreme over-generalization to make my point.]
I lament the lack of critical thinking skills in people in general, but I really fear for this generation nutured on information overload via Moore’s Law in this immature info age. How are they to cope and govern and lead when they are raised on constant change? They don’t make purchasing decisions based on ‘what are my needs & what best meets those needs?” They buy the latest, coolest iPhone knowing they’ll toss it next year for whatever is newer,cooler, & loaded with feature they can brag about. Without the experience on smaller matters, they will have a tough time learning to weigh pros & cons of complex business & personal dilemmas where the decision isn’t made for you by the next big thing coming along. How will they choose the long-term care facilty for an ailing parent or commit to a billion dollar, multi-year contract w/ a global IT vendor for their corporation?
They will learn & cope & even thrive, but only after a host of mistakes they should have made with lower stakes. We failed as a society to balance their education b/c we got too caught up in the ‘cool’ too.
Celia has a point. There’s definitely a small generational segment who fully understands and can feel like a native in the digital world but wasn’t brought up in it, and so isn’t as dependent on it or obsessed with social networking. I was born in 1983, didn’t have the internet until I was 13 or 14. I’m a web designer, love what I do, but I have no desire to carry the internet everywhere with me on a smartphone and stay away from things like Twitter because I feel like they’re a complete waste of time 🙂
I agree with some of the other comments that the true digital natives are the post-1990 crowd. Born in 1985 myself, we didn’t have a computer at home till I was about 10 and no internet until age 13 and not having that technology accessible as a child lets me remember “The Land Before Internet.” I’m a software engineer/web developer so I can’t escape technology even if I wanted to, and I see the great benefits to utilizing these things in society.
But the kids who have grown up with internet their entire lives scare me a little. My wife is a high school teacher so I get to hear how dependent they are on technology and how incompetent they are without it. Knowing your way around social media sites, and the web in general ,is great but are they just replacing actual social interaction with virtual social interaction?
This is quite depressing. You could have become a professional piano player in your spare time but instead you know how to use the internet.
@B Macias on May 14th, 2009 at 5:57 am
You’re a typical example for someone from Gen X. You just don’t get it (no offense).
I’m from 1984 myself and I can only speak for myself, but what’s wrong with changing phones every year? We (I) just don’t care about those gadgets in itself, they serve a purpose and if something else serves you better, change! That’s the way you run a business, right?
That being said, everyone makes mistakes and you learn from it. That’s the way it has been and that’s the way it will be, at least for some time to come 😉
There is certainly a cultural change resulting from online communications, and if you’re an older person who sits on the edge, it’s quite apparent. I’m a Gen X’er, born in 75, did the grunge and apathy thing, but I also spend loads of time online, often while I’m out and about using my iPhone, and sometimes a netbook. The thing I most frequently notice? Very few people my age to talk to online, or network with! Whenever I look around for other Gen X friends on a new site or medium, they’re not there. It’s frustrating, trying to explain the benefits of twitter to someone who only uses the Internet for email, and the occasional Facebook message. I can see it being a real challenge for older people in marketing – perhaps they’re going to have to import young talent pronto to make the new media work for them..
Great post and as always enjoyed it.
One interesting fact which I think worth noting is “….access to digital technologies since birth, age, and have the skills to use the digital technologies…”. I think many of us take certain things for granted that really does not apply to another part of the world. I am a GenXer in body and GenYer in mind :-), and totally agree with the comment that when you were born is a secondary criteria to where you were born in terms of being a “Digital Native” (I guess this debate is analogus to nature vs nurture’ debate in social sciences).
Great post. I am also Gen X and I agree that our generation sits at a very pivital point in history. The generations on either side of us can learn a lot from each other, and we can provide a unique perspective to help bridge the gap.
Pretty good article, though I disagree about the whole “if it’s online it must be true!” thing. If we’ve spent 20,000 online, I think we can start to learn how to tell if something is BS on the internet. Yes, we diginatives all love Wikipedia, but we know how to spot a cited source and how to verify information.
Besides, there’s always searching Google Books if we can’t find reliable information on “normal” sites. 😉
I was born in 1987, so i’m pretty native. I went through university without once taking out a book from a library and I am a straight-A student. Wikipedia, YouTube (to watch a video of an author explaining his books main points), Google, Torrents (for ebooks, audiobooks, documentaries/videos, textbooks) are my starting points for research in my professional and academic career.
I even used Facebook to start a discussion group with my friends to get ideas for a report I am writing: Digital Natives in the Workplace. They confirmed my views about the subject and give me more confidence when I make generalizations about Digital Natives.
Natives are just as capable as immigrants, if not more so, of identifying reliable sources from unreliable sources. There will ALWAYS be people who are “gullable” or just don’t care enough to check the facts (this is where schooling comes into play). But even unreliable sources are useful, because they can give you a different perspective from the mainstream and perhaps direct you towards the facts you want to display. This was the purpose of my post.
I would never use this website or its comments as a source for facts, but if something intrigued me, I would do a search for more evidence that the particular piece of information is true – either from the original source, or a many reliable sources.
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Have you considered approaching the discussion from an open course ware perspective? The impact of open course ware has increased university enrollment.
Additionally, digital natives want to be “in control” of their experience. They want to have an active voice in the flow of information. Making information available in the format they are most comfortable would seem the ideal teaching aide.
I was born in 78, learned programing on Apple II when I was 6, using Internet since 90s. My mother, who is in mid 60s now, can use all the stuff on internet, we chat on msn, skpye and email. My dad do online shopping all the time.
the digital natives are just using the technology previous generation had created, nothing special. just like how people adapted to other “new” media, radio, TV, etc. Internet is just the “new” media of this generation. As a matter of fact, generation Y is late adopters, as internet has been in public use since early 90s and is a mass media now.
Have you considered approaching the discussion from an open course ware perspective? The impact of open course ware has increased university enrollment.
Additionally, digital natives want to be “in control” of their experience. They want to have an active voice in the flow of information. Making information available in the format they are most comfortable would seem the ideal teaching aide.
Have you considered approaching the discussion from an open course ware perspective? The impact of open course ware has increased university enrollment.
Additionally, digital natives want to be “in control” of their experience. They want to have an active voice in the flow of information. Making information available in the format they are most comfortable would seem the ideal teaching aide.
I was born in 78, learned programing on Apple II when I was 6, using Internet since 90s. My mother, who is in mid 60s now, can use all the stuff on internet, we chat on msn, skpye and email. My dad do online shopping all the time.
the digital natives are just using the technology previous generation had created, nothing special. just like how people adapted to other “new” media, radio, TV, etc. Internet is just the “new” media of this generation. As a matter of fact, generation Y is late adopters, as internet has been in public use since early 90s and is a mass media now.
I am a Digital Native, and probably the youngest one yet on these comments. I'm a 1992'er. I'm one of the ones that hasn't gone to college yet. I've been online since we had our little dial-up connection when I was 8, and I can promise you that in those ten years, I've spent much more than 20,000 hours on the internet. And I'd like to address a few points.
Yes, I read through to the end. And I read through all the comments. Does this disprove your point? Not in the slightest. I get many articles in my Google reader every day, but do I spend time reading all of them? No. I graze. The same way you graze the newspaper. I read the articles that interest me. Now, fine, this might not be true of all “Digital Natives,” but your comment is probably less so.
In terms of the “reliable sources” argument: I do believe that's true–I judged a 9th grade debate the other day that cited many of their sources as opinion sites/wordpress/etc. It's just something that needs to be taught at a really early age. I think it will be learned more easily in time. But, as someone else suggested, you will always have the people who don't care. These are the people who think Rush Limbaugh is “news.” To be honest, all of that has a lot more to do with the changing face of journalism and the rise of opinions in the news and on the internet. And seeing as the majority of the Digital Natives aren't even old enough to have much sway in the media, I don't see exactly how it's our fault. The searching is just naivety that comes with being a kid. I'm sure you had it in similar form.
What I think is ridiculous is the people who are “scared” for our generation and the changes that we bring. Yeah, we're different–just like the generations before us were different for their new TVs and even their microwaves. It's just change. We won't bring the government tumbling down.
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I was born in 1953. Much of the ‘vocabulary’ of digital natives is confusing to me and probably always will be. In that sense, I’m like an English Language Learner (ELL) – Did you infer my profession from that clue? I consider myself a DLL (Digital Language Learner) I think I just coined that term and if so, I expect my ‘copyright’ to be respected. (How very old-fashioned of me). My “accent” if you will, is likely to remain. I’m inefficient with new technology but not afraid of it. As you can see, I do participate in forums. But I don’t have a Facebook account and never will. I enjoy and protect my privacy. I share a circulatory system with my laptop. I don’t have a smartphone. I still wear a wristwatch. I visit Youtube daily. I email frequently but I don’t see myself ‘tweeting’ anytime soon. If somebody could show me how to blog I’m sure I would. In my down time, I play on my DS or read on my Kindle. So what am I? A digital settler or a digital immigrant?
I was born in 1953. Much of the ‘vocabulary’ of digital natives is confusing to me and probably always will be. In that sense, I’m like an English Language Learner (ELL) – Did you infer my profession from that clue? I consider myself a DLL (Digital Language Learner) I think I just coined that term and if so, I expect my ‘copyright’ to be respected. (How very old-fashioned of me). My “accent” if you will, is likely to remain. I’m inefficient with new technology but not afraid of it. As you can see, I do participate in forums. But I don’t have a Facebook account and never will. I enjoy and protect my privacy. I share a circulatory system with my laptop. I don’t have a smartphone. I still wear a wristwatch. I visit Youtube daily. I email frequently but I don’t see myself ‘tweeting’ anytime soon. If somebody could show me how to blog I’m sure I would. In my down time, I play on my DS or read on my Kindle. So what am I? A digital settler or a digital immigrant?
I am a digital native (1998) and I just want to prove a point. Being a digital native, I am not ignorant of the existence of google, wikipedia and all other fast giving information sites and as a lazy cat, I, being too tired of walking in the library and flipping books, I obviously use them. But I am a living testimony proving you that not all Dnatives are too lazy and dumb to just believe that everything in the internet/online articles are true. If