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Introduction
The notion of children and young people as confident and often "expert" computer users has proliferated popular and political rhetoric in Western societies for the past 30 years. From the 1970s' phenomena of the "computer hacker" and "video gamer" onwards, perceptions of omnipotent young computer users have been instrumental in shaping public expectations and fears concerning technology and society (see [57] Selwyn, 2003). Of course, these stories about young people and digital technology echo earlier representations of children and twentieth century analogue media such as film, radio, television, comic books and magazines ([68] Wartella and Jennings, 2000). Yet, whilst "children" and "childhood" have been long established as discursive sites through which adults can conceptualise and (re)construct past, present and future aspects of societal change, the emblematic role of the child has been especially prominent in debates over the past ten years concerning the societal role of new digital technologies such as personalised, portable computerised devices and so-called "social software" and "Web 2.0" internet tools. Indeed, the first years of the 2000s have been subject to a particularly virulent strain of the child computer user discourse, typified by portrayals of "digital natives" and the "net generation". These simplified understandings remain influential in shaping contemporary public, political and academic expectations of the technological capabilities and demands of those children and young people who were "digitally born" in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries ([56] Seely-Brown, 2008).
The specific label of "digital native" derives from a series of articles written since 2001 by the US technologist Marc Prensky. Prensky described the generation of young people born since 1980 as "digital natives" due to what he perceived as an innate confidence in using new technologies such as the internet, videogames, mobile telephony and "all the other toys and tools of the digital age" ([47] Prenksy, 2001, p. 1). Rather than using digital technology merely as part of their everyday lives, Prensky argued that technology was essential to these young people's existence - depicting young people as now being constantly "surrounded" and "immersed" by these new technologies in ways that older generations were not. Recently, Prensky has argued that this permanent state of technological immersion and dependence is encapsulated in the lifestyles of upcoming generations of "i-kids" ([49]...