Less Than a Third of the World's Teenagers Are "Digital Natives"

If recent news articles are to be believed, everywhere you look, there should be a baby drooling on an iPad.

And while that may be close to the truth in yuppie areas of the United States, a new report suggests that the ubiquity of "digital natives" hasn't quite caught on worldwide. Less than a third of people between the ages of 15 and 24 have five or more years of experience using the Internet, according to the latest report from the International Telecommunication Union.

Of course, those numbers are much higher in the United States, other western nations, and places like South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan. But overall, the numbers are much lower than experts would have expected.

"The term 'digital natives' has been bandied around for 10 years or so, and a lot of excitement has been generated around the prospects of a worldwide economy where youths are born into the digital age," Michael Best, a Georgia Tech University researcher who worked on this part of the ITU report, said. "It's not the case that every young person has an appliance attached to their body or is born into cyberspace."

As you might expect, impoverished and war-torn nations have the lowest proportion of digital natives, a fact that could make the global economic playing field even less even going forward. Digital natives make up less than  5 percent of the youth in Afghanistan, Nepal, Iraq, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and many other countries across south Asia, central Africa, and parts of the Middle East.

"This is fundamental to a country's economic and social development and their participation in an information network society," Best said. "In these conflict-stressed and developing countries, the report suggests that further attention to Internet infrastructure and capacity are critical to their economic development."

The United States comes in sixth worldwide, with 95.6 percent of all youth having had Internet access for the past five years. As a whole, digital natives make up 13.1 percent of the population, which is pretty good when you consider how the country fares on other youth measures such as high school math (31st), science (23rd) and reading (17th) attainment.

The United States fares the best of any large nation in the study, which ranked nations by the percentage digital natives make up in the overall population. By that measure, some of the country's biggest competitors such as Brazil (37th), China (89th), Russia (84th), and India (139th) lag far behind. Iceland, New Zealand, South Korea, Malaysia, and Lithuania make up the top five. Nearly 100 percent of all young people in South Korea are digital natives, by far the highest percentage in the world. Best says that though the U.S. comes out near the top of the rankings, the country could be doing better with regards to things like broadband availability.

"Sixth is OK, but then if you dive in deeper and look at what these kids' experiences are, when you look at how connected they are, whether they have broadband, we don't perform as well as the Icelands and South Koreas of the world," he said. "My sense of that goes a little outside the scope of this report, but I'm hesitant to applaud the U.S.'s performance."

There is some good news for countries that didn't fare so well on the report: Most people who are online in developing nations are young people, meaning that they are showing interest when Internet access is available.

"If someone happens to be online in one of those countries, more likely than not it's a young person," Best said. "In countries across Africa, for every adult online, there's three young people online."