As Prospect went to press, the papers were breathlessly reporting a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley work experience student's analysis of teenage media habits (according to the Times, "the PC is a radio, the games console is a telephone" and, most shockingly of all, "no one uses Twitter.") Why such slack-jawed fascination? Part of the answer, I think, lies buried in a phrase I've started to see increasingly often: "digital natives." Coined in 2001, it describes that recently-discovered sub-species born into a world of digital technology (previously known as teenagers). Rarely has generational angst had such an anthropological flavour. The word "native" itself was first used in the early colonial era; and, while that past is behind us, I worry that the kind of us-and-them analysis that "digital natives" implies will generate about as many lasting insights as most 17th century tracts on why "they" were a race apart.
