Born Digital

Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

It’s estimated that 988 billion gigabytes of digital information will be generated this year. That’s 18 million times the amount of info in all the books ever written, or enough to stretch from here to the Sun – 72 times.

Staggering though those figures may be, if you believe Palfrey and Gasser, they are just par for the course if you’re under 30. If you were born after 1980 you’re one of the ‘digital natives’, brought up in the post-analog world. And if you’re over 30, no-matter how much you embrace technology, you will always be a ‘digital immigrant’, adapting to survive in a place where internet addiction is on the rise and copyright only exists to be broken.

None of this will seem new to the more advanced digital immigrants, and the lessons learnt – primarily that new-fangled cyberthreats are the same ones we’ve always faced, albeit through a new medium – may appear obvious. However, this book is aimed at parents worried about what their child is up to online.

While some of the facts are scary, there’s never a whiff of scaremongering. Jargon is explained, myths debunked and common sense placed firmly on a pinnacle. And, in the hope that these lessons may be read by digital natives too, the text is also available online as an editable wiki. How very post-analog. 

Cavan Scott is a freelance journalist and a writer for Doctor Who