The myth of the digital native

Rethinking the prenskyan paradigm

Abstract

Marc Prensky, in his essay published in 2004, “Death of command and control” presented a scenario where we lived natives and digital immigrants. The first are those who are born in an environment already modernize, while the latter are those who have known the previous period and have been introduced in the network society as ICT were coming into their lives. But ten years later, we have enough perspective to determine whether there is or is digital native a myth. After interviewing nearly a thousand in attendance adolescents and digitally analyzing the behavior of nearly 3000, this thesis argues that the digital native does not exist.