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.