Digital natives

As technology advances, a range of terminologies have been created to refer to various situations, people, users, pages, devices , among others. Which make it easier for us to understand it. For experts, technology generates important advances but delays in other areas, we can see this explained in the following way: advances in technology have managed to develop mechanical prostheses for the disabled. While on the other hand we see that experts in the field have determined that from a generational point in history , the generations that were born in the well-known era of technology, have problems when interacting socially with others due to Internet addiction or it may be video games. All these generations have been given names like millennials, generation Z but they all start from a central term: digital natives.

Definition

The term digital natives is defined as people born in the digital age and therefore is fully understood on the subject. It does not contemplate the people who had to study and become familiar with the subject, they are known as digital immigrants. These terms are established in the 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

Because the technological age began to develop in the mid-1970s, all people born after this date who had access to a technological device at the time were considered digital natives. The easiest way to understand it is to see young people handling technology without any problem, they do not even need to be trained for it, they use this tool in a fast, easy and simple way.

Characteristics of digital natives

The main characteristics of digital natives are:

• Any type of information that digital natives need is usually wanted immediately, and without setbacks.
• They tend to seek to do different activities at the same time because they do not like to do the activities in part. Feel a certain attraction to parallel processes .
• They prefer to search for everything through digital media than conventional ones (books, newspapers , magazines).
• Digital natives tend to search for information randomly and not in a set order; that is, they prefer accesses randomly.
• When they work with the network they develop more efficiently than when they work without access to it.
• They constantly stimulate their intrapersonal intelligence , understanding that each step they take is an advance in their life, which will bring them a reward or benefit, either immediately or in the short term.
• They prefer to seek non-conventional methods of study than to use unorthodox methods for the same purposes.
• They usually demand a reward for each job.
• Digital natives do not understand when a person does not have the same understanding of technology that they have.
• In some cases it causes them annoyance to instruct others in the management of them, since they consider that it is something innate (with something that is born).

Origin of digital natives

Its origin is established in the Declaration of the independence of cyberspace  of 1978, however, it is Marc Presnky who gives it a greater meaning when he includes it in an essay published by CNN which was called “The war between natives and immigrants ended, native won ” . It was a conflict without closure of blood and fought not with bullets and spears, but with iphones and floppy disks .

Prensky establishes digital natives as a demographic that dominates much of the world, leaving the digital immigrant who is trying to understand the advances of the world, as a ” relic of the past .”

It goes on to define digital natives as the “new culture” and refers to the adult population as settlers who will go down in history if they fail to adapt to this time in which they are living.

Education

In the area of education in all countries of the world, realizing the innate talent that young people currently have and that it is something that obeys a generational gene, he decided to develop programs in which his students felt comfortable, with the in order to seek to increase students’ passion for their studies.

Within these programs there are platforms where their evaluations are loaded , which have multimedia parts; at the same time they present the information in a more practical way, as audiovisual elements .

Other programs are based on the inclusion of devices and servers to keep students connected to a monitored network. The most seen so far is the inclusion of tablets that have an operating system adapted to each need of each institution.

How it differs from digital immigrants

The difference between immigrants is totally noticeable due to the fact that while digital natives each advance develop more their skills with respect to digital areas.

Digital immigrants are those who have not yet managed to engage properly with the continuous and exponential development of current technology , they must be continuously in search of training and education to master it, otherwise they will be swept away by it.

Curiosities about digital natives

Although for many it is surprising that the new generations have these skills for another large number of the population represents a great generational delay. All this is due to the fact that certain studies that have been done have shown that young people currently have a low IQ to a large extent and that it generates a great demotivation when it comes to performing difficult or complex tasks that do not include the use of the Internet .

The articles that deal with these topics end up generating some concern and controversy in parents because they fear that their children, the future professionals of the world, will be disinterested people in what they call “real life” , bringing with it as consequences a wave of confrontations between parents and children who cannot establish a point of consent regarding the use of technology.