What are Digital Natives? We explain the term

In times of digitalization, life without computers, in whatever form, is hardly imaginable. In the course of this development, the term digital natives has emerged. Our guide clarifies.

For digital natives, using digital media is completely natural.

Digital natives have a clear advantage in many situations, as they instinctively know how to deal with new technologies.

What are digital natives - and what distinguishes them?

Digital natives are people who have grown up with a direct connection to the digital world.

• First and foremost, this includes the generation born in Western countries from 2000 onwards. This experienced already in elementary school or earlier the introduction of the iPhone as well as the widespread distribution of DSL.
• Also social networks such as Facebook already existed at the birth of this generation, just like the boom of online shopping.
• Because of the early access to the digital world, digital natives move there with natural ease and have little, if any, adaptation problems with new innovations.
• Many digital natives are even one or two generations older: Born in the eighties and nineties, they were still young enough at the beginning of digitization to witness the development and be shaped by it.

A possible analogous translation would therefore be "digital natives": Just as if there had never been an everyday life without computers and the Internet. The opposite, by the way, are digital immigrants: these are people who grew up without the Internet and came into contact with it in later stages of life, so first had to "immigrate" to an initially foreign world.