Beyond the myth of the “digital native”: adolescents, collaborative cultures and transmedia skills

Abstract

This article presents part of the results of an international research project that aims to map teenagers’ (12–18 years old) transmedia skills. Within a theoretical framework grounded in the concepts of “transmedia literacy” and “transmedia skills”, the research team carried out international fieldwork based on short-term ethnography, an appropriate data-collection methodology that allowed us to answer the central question: What are young people doing with media? We identified more than 200 main and specific skills that were used to make a map of adolescents’ transmedia skills, which is included in this article. The research also revealed that young people’s skills have certain highs and lows, giving rise to a “topography” that includes teenagers with advanced media skills – for example, skills related to technological, aesthetic and ideological uses of content – and also those with less developed skills. The research reveals a very complex panorama that belies both the mythology of the “digital native” and that of the “digital dummy”, and invites us to go deeper in future research.