Back in December 2009 I attended two-day a user experience workshop in a Chateau near Paris. It was a great session where pay-TV executives from across Europe looked at user interface issues and discussed solutions to challenges they faced.

This workshop was the first time I had been presented in-depth research on digital natives. The research looked at their changes in behaviour and their changing relationship with media. I was captivated by this very real shift in human behaviour and the impact it was going to have as these digital natives joined the workforce and gain purchasing power.

The term digital native, is assigned to people who have been born into the age of digital technology, people who were native speakers in a digital land. The term was popularised by Marc Prensky in his 2001 article: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. I am certainly not a digital native. I grew up with access to just three TV channels with no recording ability (my family couldn’t afford a video recorder). My music consumption was BBC Radio 1 and vinyl singles bought for 99p from Woolworths.

In 2010, when I started blogging about the impact of digital technology on media and the wider world, I wanted a name for the blog that reflected, that while I am not a digital native, I am fluent in the language of digital technology. I picked the name DigitalRefugee and have used it ever since. Back in 2009 we didn’t have the refugee crisis that we have today and term was not intended to be disrespectful to those who have lost so much due to conflicts around the world.

For anyone who is interested, the main outcome of the workshop was an agreement that the future of the TV user interface was not on the TV itself by on a smartphone. This was quite radical, as in 2009, we were only at the start of the smartphone revolution. Most of the people in the room would still have had a Blackberry in their pocket.