Language Learning & Technology http://llt.msu.edu/issues/october2012/review1.pdf October 2012, Volume 16, Number 3 pp. 35–39 Copyright © 35 REVIEW OF DECONSTRUCTING DIGITAL NATIVES Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology, and the New Literacies Michael Thomas (Ed.) 2011 ISBN: 9780415889964 US $ 39.95 (paperback) 216 pp. Routledge New York, NY Review by Mark Evan Nelson, Deakin University, Australia Deconstructing Digital Natives is a volume much needed and a long time in coming: ten years, to be precise. This book, edited by Michael Thomas, is an unprecedented assemblage of critical scholarly perspectives on the digital native, a concept contraposed to the digital immigrant within Marc Prensky‘s bipartite formulation for ―describing the differences that many people observed, around the turn of the twenty-first century, between the attitudes of younger and older people regarding digital technology‖ (p. 15) as Prensky explains in his own contributed article to this collection. In his first published discussion of these ideas ten years ago, a short two-part essay in 2001, Prensky identifies digital natives as ―‗native speakers‘ of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet‖ and digital immigrants as ―[t]hose of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by or adopted many or most aspects of the new technology‖ (Prensky, pp. 1–2). Since its introduction a decade ago, this metaphoric distinction has penetrated seemingly every scholarly, professional, and even political conversation on digital technologies, youth, and education; virtually hundreds of thousands of pages of internet real estate are now dedicated to discussion of this particular ―discontinuity‖ or ―singularity‖ (Prensky, 2001, p. 1). More, this and similar conceptions—a notable example being Tapscott‘s (1998, 2009) net generation—have incited widespread, heated debate: fervent support of its explanatory value in understanding the peculiarities, needs, and preferences of supposedly distinct younger cohorts of digitally networked cyber-citizens, as well as acerbic criticism of the purportedly reductive, if not also potentially harmful segregation of youth from their elders on opposing sides of a yawning digital generation gap, among other hotly contested positions. Deconstructing Digital Natives presents what is arguably the most comprehensive, nuanced treatment to date of these complex, impassioned debates. This edited volume features an insightful foreword by David Buckingham and twelve chapters, among whose authors are some of the most notable contributors thus far to the international scholarly conversation on digital natives and education. The chapters are divided into three sections, titled Reflecting on the Myth, Perspectives, and Beyond Digital Natives, respectively introducing and examining the varied interpretations and significance of Prensky‘s ideas; reporting on research that empirically grounds and tests the digital natives/digital immigrants formulation; and attempting to reconcile heretofore entrenched oppositions and move the conversation in productive new directions.