Beyond Digital Natives
Far from being a uniquely generational issue, the challenges of living in today’s digital environment affect us all. Rising loneliness, mental health struggles, the erosion of autonomy to opaque platforms, and the spread of misinformation are not the preserve of young people but shared problems across society. At the same time, young people bring valuable perspectives to these debates that are too often overlooked. Their lived experience of growing up immersed in digital environments provides insights that policy makers frequently fail to capture, and this gap makes it harder to design effective responses to today’s socio-technical challenges. Young people recognise not only the scale of these problems but also the potential for digital technologies and AI to drive positive change if harnessed responsibly.
The narrative of the digital native has, for too long, shaped assumptions about young people and their relationship with technology. The widespread belief is that growing up with digital platforms means that young people are automatically equipped to navigate the complexities of our poorly regulated, at times manipulative digital world. This notion has seeped into educational policies, workplace strategies, and even political discourse. Yet, as the research assembled in Beyond Digital Natives makes clear, this assumption is unhelpful.
Beyond Digital Natives offers both a framework and a provocation. It redefines digital literacies as integrated cognitive, technical, and social capabilities that enable individuals to navigate, evaluate, and create in environments increasingly mediated by AI systems. These literacies extend beyond platform familiarity, encompassing areas such as information evaluation, privacy management, human-AI collaboration, and ethical integration. By interrogating twelve common myths about online behaviour, the publication highlights how our understanding of technology use must be evidence-based and inclusive rather than reliant on convenient labels.
This concern is no longer abstract. We live in a digital theatre where each interaction is simultaneously a personal performance and an algorithmic data point. The lines between life and its documentation have blurred, while the mainstreaming of generative AI intensifies our reliance on opaque systems that reshape how we learn, work, and participate as citizens. To sustain agency and well-being in this environment, digital literacy must be understood as a continuous and collective endeavour, not a one-time acquisition or generational trait.
Read and download the primer here. Check out a podcast on Beyond Digital Natives, found here.
