I was born in 1988 into a middle class family. I recall my father owning an early personal computer (if I recall correctly, a Timex Sinclair), and we obtained a used Commodore 64 when I was very young. It was used almost exclusively for the incredible electronic games that came with it, but it was a computer nonetheless. My first taste for an updated, more modern visual OS came with a Packard Bell running Windows 3.1, which we must have gotten around 1993. A few years later we got AOL, which was basically the definition of the world wide web at the time, and the rest is history.

I consider myself among the earliest cohort of the digital natives. Sure, for a decade before me there were people on computers, and in the decade that followed there were more children born directly into this new technological age, but I didn’t need to come out clutching an iPad to be comfortable around technology.

The term for those that came before this time is digital immigrant. These are the people who are not natively fluent in computer technology, and are often seen as disadvantaged in this regard. Indeed, one of the issues that is most pressing now (though fading) is the instruction by these digital immigrants of natives, who often pick up new technology quicker and in a more in-depth fashion than their teachers. Social media and collaboration, for instance is a tool more heavily used by younger generations, with immense power for educational transformation, yet the usage isn’t always clear to those that do not participate.

The terms themselves are a bit controversial, in that they attempt a dichotomy between the “haves” and “have nots” of information fluency in the digital age. This is a much more complex issue than age alone, but as a shorthand rule, can serve as conventional wisdom. More important is understanding that a divide exists between a portion of the population that routinely uses digital technology to communicate, and those that do not.