Beyond the myth of the “digital native”

Introduction

The explosion of personal computing and the subsequent digitization of all kinds of processes since the 1980s, coupled with the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early part of the following decade, has generated a profound transformation of industrial society. The more recent diffusion of social networks and mobile communication has radically changed not only the way in which subjects relate to one another, but also all kinds of social, educational, cultural, economic and political processes. From its very beginnings in the late 1960s, young people have been active protagonists of this process. According to Castells:

Other young people developed new companies – Steve Jobs founded Apple at 21 years of age, Bill Gates did the same with Microsoft at 20, and Google was founded in 1998 by two young men born in 1973: Larry Page and Sergey Brin – or they became early adopters of digital technologies. In this context, it should not be surprising that in 1996 the Declaration of Cyberspace Independence was addressed to the “governments of the industrial world” and stated, “You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants” (Barlow, 1996). Five years later, Prensky would popularize the concept of “digital native”.

Although it was initially received with great enthusiasm, critics of the “digital native” definition soon appeared (see a summary of the debate in Jenkins, 2007, and Helsper & Eynon, 2010). Although the most outstanding studies carried out in recent years (for example boyd, 2014; Ito, M. et al., 2009, 2010; Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2006; Jenkins, Ito and boyd, 2016; Livingstone, Bober, & Helsper, 2005; Livingstone & Haddon, 2009; Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016) confirm the techno-social changes expressed in the new generations, they all highlight that this territory is extremely complex and varied, as it is possible to find all kinds of situations, profiles and experiences of digital technology use. In the Ibero-American area, numerous studies have contributed to dismantling the idea that young people “come with a built-in chip”. This expression, which Rueda Ortiz and Quintana Ramírez (2004) picked up from a Colombian high school teacher, expresses three fundamental ideas: 1) a feeling of uneasiness and impotence in teachers faced with the new generation; 2) a way of perceiving and thinking about technologies based on a human-machine fusion; and 3) a “strange and transgressive mixture that generates fiction and that places us at a limit where we do not know how real or imaginary an image is” (2004: 18). The only way to push past these mythologies is to dive into this territory and explore the transmedia practices of young people. In this context, the main research questions behind the article are: What are teens doing with new interactive media and collaborative platforms? What skills are they developing in these environments?

The article presents a part of the results of an international research project carried out in eight countries. Among the objectives of this study was to identify the transmedia skills of adolescents aged between 12 and 18 (see section 2). Unlike other sociological research interested in determining how much young people know about digital technology (digital skills) or the Internet (Internet skills) – for example, Livingstone & Haddon (2009) – the present study approaches this reality from an ethnographic perspective with the aim of mapping these skills independently of their unequal distribution within the youth population. In other words, this research does not aim to determine the average level of the new generation’s media and technological skills, but rather to create a detailed “map” of transmedia skills so that, in a second phase, they can be used within the classroom through a specific series of educational activities. The map of transmedia skills presented in this article is one of the most comprehensive to date as it covers more than 200 skills identified in young people from Australia, Colombia, Spain, Finland, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Uruguay. We also propose a taxonomy of these skills based on productive, organizational, aesthetic-narrative, technological, ethical-ideological and preventive criteria.

Theoretical framework

This research is based on a number of concepts and approaches developed from media literacy. To place the work carried out in a clear context, it is necessary to outline the two theoretical-conceptual progressions indicated below.

Methodology

The objectives and scope of the research were to elaborate a map of the transmedia skills detected in young people aged 12 to 18 from eight different countries. For this, the research team developed a specific methodological design that is explained below. In the original project, it was decided to work with nine countries, three located in the top third of the PISA list (Australia, the United Kingdom and Finland), three in the central third (Spain, Italy and Portugal), and three in the lower third (Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay). Due to local administrative problems, Mexico did not participate in the research, but in a successive phase it was replaced by Ecuador. In each country, between two and four secondary education institutions were identified (depending on the structure of each education system), characterized by socially, educationally and technologically opposing contexts, such as public/private, urban/rural, homogeneous/heterogeneous, high technology/ low technology schools, and so on.

We chose to apply the methodology known as short-term ethnography. This way of working is based on an intensive exploration of the subjects’ lives that uses “more interventionist and observational methods to create contexts in which to delve into questions that reveal what matters to these people in the context of what the researcher is trying to discover” (Pink & Morgan, 2013: 352). Other forms of long-term ethnographic intervention – such as that applied by Livingstone & Sefton-Green (2016) in a single school in the United Kingdom for a year – would have been almost impossible to apply in a study carried out in parallel in so many countries. In other words, we favoured the rapid collection of data that was advantageous to the great geographical extension being researched here.

Data were collected in several phases: once the groups were identified and the consent forms signed (of the minors, the schools and the parents), students filled out an initial questionnaire so we could establish their sociocultural background and their media uses, consumptions and perceptions. Next, we ran two participatory workshops in parallel to explore the adolescents’ narrative creation and videoludic practices. These workshops allowed us to identify the most active adolescents in the fields of interest (social networks, videogames, content production, etc.). These young people were then interviewed individually and in depth, and they were asked to complete a media diary to give further insight into their activities in media environments (Figure 1). The last phase of the data collection process was an online observation of teenagers’ favourite websites, celebrities and online communities (netgraphy). 1,633 questionnaires were filled out, 58 workshops and 311 interviews were held, and 8 online communities and platforms were analysed during the fieldwork.

Figure 1

The methodology

We used NVivo 11 Pro for Teams to analyse the data. This is a software for qualitative analysis, and is very useful for organizing, storing and retrieving data from different sources (written, graphic, audio-visual, etc.). This software facilitated the development of descriptive and analytical hierarchies, through its system of nodes that “represent themes, concepts, ideas, opinions or experiences” (QSR International, 2016: 24). Moreover, NVivo makes it possible to combine different types of multimedia materials into observation units (cases), and create analytical matrices by combining and merging previous nodes.

Results

We revised and compared various taxonomies in order to construct the map of transmedia skills, from the traditional classification by Bloom (Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) to the revision of Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). We also considered contributions by Ferrés and Piscitelli (2012) and the aforementioned list of skills developed by Jenkins et al. (2006) to create the map.

The transmedia skills were organized into 9 dimensions, which included 44 main skills each and, at a second level, 190 specific skills. Depending on the dimension, the taxonomy was organized around texts, themes, technologies or processes. Whenever possible, skills were organized following a progression from writing (writing stories) to multimodal productions (filming and editing a video), from simplicity (searching for content) to complexity (managing social networks and blogs to archive contents), from basic techniques (taking photos) to critical and ethical practices (being aware of the risks of self-exposure on social networks), and from cognition (recognizing and describing genres in different media and platforms) to action (selecting or ceasing to consume content based on aesthetic and narrative values). As it is not possible to mention all the skills, Table 3 includes just the main skills, a brief description of each, and a couple of examples of specific skills.

This map of transmedia skills emerges from the data collection and analysis work carried out during the research process. Obviously, the map does not imply that all young people have all these skills; on the contrary, the present study confirms that we are faced with a very varied “topography” where adolescents who excel in some of these competences coexist in the same environment with others who make a simple mass-media use of interactive media and collaborative platforms. Moreover, at an individual level, a young person who demonstrates that they have advanced photographic production skills (creation of memes) or audiovisual management skills (a YouTube channel) can, at the same time, have less developed abilities in, for example, detecting stereotypes or managing privacy.

Conclusions

The transmedia skills revealed by the research cover a wide spectrum of media and platforms in which adolescents and quite a few adults “live”. In certain cases, some skills are very marginal and are only found in a few teenagers (for example, skills related to ideology and values); in other cases, skills are more common (for example, skills linked to production). Any (trans)media literacy action should exploit the skills that young people have developed outside school (for example, production skills), within the classroom, and, at the same time, reinforce the skills that are developed less in informal areas of learning (for example, skills related to ideology and values). There are other aspects that emerged from the research that cannot be addressed in this article for reasons of space, such as those linked to gender bias (the video game world has a strong masculine imprint, while fan fiction production tends to be feminine) (Masanet, 2016), and the evolution of transmedia skills within the media ecology.

To summarize the main findings of this part of the study – the research included other objectives like the identification and analysis of teen’s informal learning strategies – it could be said that even if teens may dominate different transmedia skills, their distribution is not regular. This unbalanced distribution of transmedia skills should be considered before implementing any kind of (trans)media literacy action. But not only the topographical distribution of transmedia skills is varied: as some of the transmedia skills change very little over time (e.g. those related to values), other skills are subject to incessant technological change (e.g. those related to social media and technological devices). Also the temporal dimension should be taken into account in further researches and actions.

The present research confirmed once again that the concept of “digital native”, understood as a young person who “comes with a built-in chip” and who moves skilfully within digital networked environments, shows more problems than advantages. In this context, studies such as the one presented here make it possible to better understand the media world of adolescents, and also to establish a knowledge base from which to improve (trans)media literacy actions in the classroom, founded in the skills that some teenagers already have.

Acknowledgements

This article is an output of the TRANSMEDIA LITERACY project and it has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under Grant Agreement No 645238