Mentally, considering that seeing the word native often conjures images of tribes in remote sub-tropical areas speaking some primitive tongue and using spears or bows and arrows, today’s term might inspire visions of polo shirt-clad suburbanites hurling iPhones at unsuspecting victims.
Joking aside, perhaps more than ever before, technology is causing a rift between the people. The rift used to be between people who understood it and embraced it vs. those who didn’t; however, with today’s term, we are looking at people who were born into it vs. those who weren’t.
Looking at the term itself, it comes from the combination of digital, coming from the Latin digitus and originally meaning ‘pertaining to fingers’, and native, coming from the Latin nativus and meaning ‘produced by birth’.
Though the idea of the native stayed the same, the digital, instead of using its initial meaning, is used for the digits that make up coding used in computerised data; therefore, our term is essentially talking about people who were born into the age of the Internet.
Digital native comes from a 1996 paper called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, where author John Perry Barlow (of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) outlines the role of government in the Internet, stating that: “You are terrified of your own children, since they are [digital] natives in a world where you will always be [digital] immigrants.”
Essentially, today’s word deals with an understanding disconnect. Unlike previous times, when people shared the same thoughts and understanding even if there were technological gaps (think of your parents or grandparents asking you to program the TV or hook up a printer), digital native deals with the fact that technology and the Internet are changing the way that people who were born into understanding this technology interact with those who have immigrated into the technology.
Case in point: notice how staggeringly important a 4GLTE or Wifi signal is to someone under 30, while most people over 50 realize it’s not the end of the world and the Internet can wait. Of course, this is not to say that all kids born after the advent of the Internet will be ardent code writers or always technologically literate, but, simply by being around it and aware of it, they will be better placed to have an understanding of it than someone who can remember a time before it.
