A digital Native.

They interact with the peers across the globe: This impacts employers, brands, teachers, parents, as this first generation enters the workforce.

Always online: By age 20, kids will have spent 20,000 hours online –the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practicing Urs Gasser, paraphrased
Multiple identities, personal and social, shared online and offline (blurring): Online representation is the same as physical representation: what your clothes, friends, vehicles say about you.

Dr. Urs Gasser of Harvard’s Berkman Center coined the term Digital Natives.

2 Comments leave a comment below

  1. The most…oddly challenging thing I’ve had to do was introducing my online life, to my physical life.

    It was when my physical childhood friends “met” my online friends, who I shared completely different hobbies, persona’s and social groups with, that I realised I could never go back. I was 20 at the time, with an online persona of 6 years (starting in 1999).

    I wonder about the generation following me, who will have never had that distinction. Am I really part of the last generation to grow up without the internet?

  2. there will always be a “last generation” to know what life is like without something.

    …to never know what the “old country” was like, to grow up not having to work a farm every day, to know what it’s like to have to walk everywhere, to grow up without a phone, to grow up without (color) TV, to grow up without cell phones, to go to college without facebook, to grow up without instant gratification of communication…

    i don’t know that it is necessarily a harbinger of decline, but progress (and it seems, especially of the technological kind) always means a departure from the previous. And, while one can argue the variable “severity” of those deficits, the truth is that lives with and lives without any one of those things are discretely different experiences.