Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in certain cases also recorded as digital video or films, as digital holograms and on the World Wide Web or Internet.

A significant portion of current publications of poetry are available either only online or via some combination of online and offline publication. There are many types of ‘digital poetry’ such as hypertext, kinetic poetry, computer generated animation, digital visual poetry, interactive poetry, code poetry, holographic poetry (holopoetry), experimental video poetry, and poetries that take advantage of the programmable nature of the computer to create works that are interactive, or use generative or combinatorial approach to create text (or one of its states), or involve sound poetry, or take advantage of things like listservs, blogs, and other forms of network communication to create communities of collaborative writing and publication (as in poetical wikis).

Digital computers allow the creation of art that spans different media: text, images, sounds, and interactivity via programming. Contemporary poetries have, therefore, taken advantage of this toward the creation of works that synthesize both arts and media. Whether a work is poetry or visual art or music or programming is sometimes not clear, but we expect an intense engagement with language in poetical works.

Not everyone agrees with the language and underlying connotations of the digital native. It suggests a familiarity with technology that not all children and young adults who would be considered digital natives have, though some instead have an awkwardness with technology that not all digital immigrants have. It entirely ignores the fact that the digital universe was conceived of, pioneered, and created by the digital immigrants. In its application, the concept of the digital native preferences those who grow up with technology as having a special status, ignoring the significant difference between familiarity and creative application.

Crucially, there is debate over whether there is any adequate evidence for claims made about digital natives and their implications for education. Bennett, Maton & Kervin (2008), for example, critically review the research evidence and describe some accounts of digital natives having an academic form of a moral panic. Using such a terminology is rather a sign of unfamiliarity and exoticism in relation to digital culture. Of course, nobody is “born digital”; as with any cultural technology, such as reading and writing, it is matter of access to education.

It considers that all youths are digital natives in the modern age. However, this is not the case. It is primarily based on cultural differences and not by age. According to Henry Jenkins (2007), “Part of the challenge of this research is to understand the dynamics of who exactly is, and who is not, a digital native, and what that means.” There are underlying conflicts on the definition of the term “digital natives” and it is wrong to say that all modern age youths are placed in that particular category or that all older adults can be described as digital immigrants.

Marc Prensky coined the term digital native in his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants published in 2001. In his seminal article, he assigns it to a new group of students enrolling in educational establishments.[1] The term draws an analogy to a country’s natives, for whom the local religion, language, and folkways are natural and indigenous, compared with immigrants to a country who often are expected to adapt and begin to adopt the region’s customs. Prensky refers to accents  employed by digital immigrants, such as printing documents rather than commenting on screen or printing out emails to save as a hard copy. Digital immigrants are said to have a “thick accent” when operating in the digital world in distinctly pre-digital ways, for instance, calling someone on aa telephone to ask if they have receive a sent e-mail. A digital native might refer to their new “camera”; but a digital immigrant might refer to their new “digital camera”.

The analogy of the digital native was also used by Josh Spear and Aaron Dignan (Spear’s business partner in the Manhattan-based agency Undercurrent) who talked about people who were “born digital”, first appearing in a series of presentations given by Josh Spear in 2007. First, at Google’s Zeitgeist Europe Conference in May 2007. A different version of this presentation was delivered again in December 2007 at the United Kingdom at the Internet Advertising Bureau Engage 2007 Conference. A Digital Native research project is being run jointly by the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Gartner presented on the term at their May, 2007 IT Expo (Emerging Trends) Symposium in Barcelona and,  more recently, Gartner referenced Prensky’s work, specifically the 18 areas of change comprising the Work Style of Digital Natives, in their “IT-Based Collaboration and Social Networks Accelerate R&D” research paper published on January 22, 2008.