Digital Visitors and Residents: A review of current and past terminologies

With the internet providing myriad new ways to spread information, advertisement and services, both corporations and individuals should attempt to understand how users of the web can be categorized and therefore catered to individually, to provide the best experience to the widest demographic of web-users possible.

In trying to initially approach categorization for how people approach using the web, Marc Prensky in 2001 first made use of the terms Digital “Natives” and “Immigrants”. He describes Digital Natives as those who have grown up with this new wave of technology, and that because of this early and extensive exposure (1):

“…it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up.”

By making the distinction between native and immigrant, Prensky theorizes that despite how someone not born into the digital age may adopt this new technology, that they will always retain an “accent” from their old way of life, making the internet a secondary tool to be used after paper and print may have failed.

However in this evaluation, Prensky did not factor in the possibility that this difference in use of the internet may occur within these two groups themselves, therefore partially invalidating the idea of Natives and Immigrants, and making way for “Visitors” and “Residents”.

White and Le Cornu (2) use these new terms to describe different attitudes towards using the web by individual psychology, rather than focusing on difference in generation; a Visitor being someone viewing the web as a “tool shed” which contain tools to assist in reaching an end goal, with social networking aspects of the web being avoided or even feared as possible locations for breaches of privacy and data. A Resident, on the other hand, views the internet more like an integral aspect of life and socialization. They will also use tools from the “tool shed” like visitors, but this will be a secondary function of the web.

Another important distinction in this article is that these two extremes are on a continuum, and that users may find themselves using some aspects of social media, yet not wanting to fully integrate their day-to-day life onto a digital bank. With the growth of the internet, there also comes the spread of hacking groups and viruses, and it would be unreasonable to believe age to be the only distinction in how we view and approach minimizing exposure to these risks whilst getting the most out of the web.

(1) Marc Prensky. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” from On The Horizon (2001)
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf?PHPSESSID=9495c51e566190013ef48c600a46a13a

(2) David S. White and Alison Le Cornu, “Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement” (2011)
http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049%20https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~tefko/Courses/Zadar/Readings/Selwyn%20dig%20natives,%20Aslib%20Proceedings%202009.pdf

(3) Jens Buhler, (2012)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jensbuhler/with/7932634638/

(4) David White of the University of Oxford
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI