With the adoption of new information technologies on a global scale, cyberspace has pervasively entered the lives of more than half of the world’s population. The incidence and persistence of digital code seem to have no boundaries, impacting every aspect of human existence and translating it into data reserves potentially available for indefinite uses.

Is the digital infosphere a new form of environment that hosts our interactions in a dimension outside the space-time continuum, where the boundaries between what is virtual and what is real fade away? Or is it, simply put, just the latest technological articulation of Homo sapiens, a species that has been capable of detaching from the actual and of transcending it through language since its inception? Regardless of the answer, the evidence of our daily lives shows that, by providing us with unprecedented operational capabilities, digital technology has reshaped our notions of reality and led us to fully inhabit its syntactic structures.

Currently under studies of experts without previous knowledge about them, the digital natives are those humans emerging from the global digital revolution who have developed social and cognitive dynamics through the use of connected devices since birth: living both offline and online the two dimensions are thus no longer separable for them and both constitute the hybrid support in which their life is inscribed. In this project, Lorenzo Maccotta explores the impacts of digital code on contemporary youth.

By focusing on primary activities such as gaming, learning, sexuality, work, defense, religion, and socialization, the project has been carried on over a disseminated geography – currently covering 15 countries – during the first decades of formation of the so called Homo digitalis.