«Comunicazioni sociali», 2018, n. 2, 117-123 © 2018 Vita e Pensiero / Pubblicazioni dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore MARIAGRAZIA FANCHI* - ALEXANDRA SCHNEIDER** - WANDA STRAUVEN*** iGENERATION AND CINEMA Genres, Spectatorship, and Mediascape 1. a new generation of digital natives In comparison with the generation of the so-called Millennials, born roughly between 1980 and 2000, the Post-Millennials could be said to be the frst “true” digital natives of human history, since they are exposed to computers, electronic tablets and smartphones from the very frst days of their lives. Today’s children are submerged in a continuous fow of digital moving image consumption. From an early age, they make video calls via Skype with distant relatives. They watch clips on YouTube before they can walk and talk. They are making their own cinema, both as improvised flm programmers and as amateur flmmakers, often before their frst theatrical flm experience takes place. Touchscreen tech-savvy toddlers explore rather intuitively all kinds of apps and func- tions of smartphones and tablets, not because they are more genius than their parents, but just because they grow up with these devices and learn the digital (mostly touch- screen-based) language often well before they know how to write and read in their own mother tongue or, more generally, before they go to elementary school 1 . Originally, the term “digital native” was coined to indicate children born after 1980, who grew up with the arrival of computers and learned to speak the new digi- tal language without “accent”, in contrast to their parents who were at that point, as theorized by education consultant Marc Prensky, the “digital immigrants” 2 . The term “digital native” has been criticized by Henry Jenkins, among others, for masking the digital divide that exists among today’s youth in terms of access as well as the different levels of competence and experience that would point to a much less uniform group of young users 3 . Moreover, according to Jenkins, many adults catch up and learn to speak without accent. We believe that the metaphor of the digital language as a native tongue can still be helpful as a conceptual tool, especially in order to distinguish between Mil- * Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano – mariagrazia.fanchi@unicatt.it. ** Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz – a.schneider@uni-mainz.de. *** Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main – wanda.strauven@gmail.com. 1 See the telling anecdote with which Paolo Ferri opens his book Nativi digitali (Milano: Bruno Mon- dadori, 2011). Ferri narrates how, on a summer day, he went for a bike ride and trusted his notebook to his 5-year old son, who was still illiterate at that time but who managed nevertheless to go online and created his own little video game with Ben 10 Game Creator. The boy even tried to put the game online to share it with all his friends in the world. This last step, however, he could not complete on his own, since he needed a valid e-mail address. All the other operations he was able to perform without the help of his parents and without any technical training. Ferri identifes today’s children, age 0-12, as “pure” digital natives. 2 M. Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Part 1”, On the Horizon, 9, 5 (2001): 1-6. 3 H. Jenkins, Reconsidering Digital Immigrants, December 2007. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/12/ reconsidering_digital_immigran.html.