Beyond the myth of the "digital native" Adolescents, collaborative cultures and transmedia skills

This article presents part of the results of an international research project that aims to map teenagers' (12-18 years old) transmedia skills. Within a theoretical framework grounded in the concepts of "transmedia literacy" and "transmedia skills", the research team carried out international fieldwork based on short-term ethnography, an appropriate data-collection methodology that allowed us to answer the central question: What are young people doing with media? We identified more than 200 main and specific skills that were used to make a map of adolescents' transmedia skills, which is included in this article. The research also revealed that young people's skills have certain highs and lows, giving rise to a "topography" that includes teenagers with advanced media skills - for example, skills related to technological, aesthetic and ideological uses of content - and also those with less developed skills. The research reveals a very complex panorama that belies both the mythology of the "digital native" and that of the "digital dummy", and invites us to go deeper in future research.