Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Teach the world to twitch (20 Dec 2003) Prensky draws the line at 1974 - born after it you're a Digital Native - immersed in the culture of digital technology. Born before it and you're a Digital Immigrant, with a foot in the past, and a persistent 'accent' revealed through peculiar behaviour such as printing out e-mails. Prensky believes, and this is backed up by scientific evidence, that inputs such as computer games, television and mobile phones change the way we think and behave. Digital Natives make decisions faster - at 'twitch speed' - and they can parallel process and multi-task, simply because they've been practising. For hours. "The average American has played 10,000 hours of video games by the age of 21 compared to 2 or 3,000 hours of book reading," he says. Article URL: http://www.nestafuturelab.org/viewpoint/art11.htm Read 76 more articles from NESTA Futurelab sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: '99% Bad = 1% Good!     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy