Digital natives in the scientific literature: A topic modeling approach

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The term “digital natives” was introduced in 2001 to describe a generation that has grown up surrounded by technology and the internet. The accompanying claims of a new way of thinking among digital natives were influential in shaping educational policy. Still, they were challenged by research that found no evidence of generation-wide cognitive changes in learners. Yet, the digital natives narrative persists in popular media and the education discourse. This study set out to investigate the reasons for the persistence of the digital native myth. It analyzed the metadata from 1886 articles related to the term between 2001 and 2022 using bibliometric methods and structural topic modeling. The results show that the concept of “digital native” is still both warmly embraced and fiercely criticized by scholars mostly from western and high income countries, and the volume of research on the topic is growing. However, the results suggest that what appears as the persistence of the idea is actually evolution and complete reinvention: The way the “digital native” concept is operationalized has shifted over time through a series of (metaphorical) mutations. The concept of digital native is one (albeit a highly successful) mutation of the generational gap discourse dating back to the early 1900s. While the initial digital native literature relied on Prensky's unvalidated claims and waned upon facing empirical challenges, subsequent versions have sought more nuanced interpretations. Notably, a burgeoning third mutation now co-opts the “digital native” terminology for diverse purposes, often completely decoupled from the foundational literature and its critiques. This study explains the concept's persistence as dynamic evolution of the digital native discourse in contemporary academic and public spheres.