数字原住民（英语：Digital native）指的是从小就生长在有各式数字产品环境的世代；相对的概念为「数字移民」（Digital Immigrant），表示长大后才接触数字产品并有一定程度上无法流畅使用的族群。这两个用词出自于2001年马克·普伦斯基发表的文章《Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants》。另有延伸用词「数字难民」，指的是与卢德份子一样拒绝学习使用数字产品的族群。

The term digital native was coined and popularized by education consultant [Prensky] in his 2001 article entitled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, in which he relates the contemporary decline in American education to educators' failure to understand the needs of modern students. His article posited that "the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decade of the 20th century" had changed the way students think and process information, making it difficult for them to excel academically using the outdated teaching methods of the day. In other words, children raised in a digital, media-saturated world, require a media-rich learning environment to hold their attention, and Prensky dubbed these children "digital natives". Contextually, his ideas were introduced after a decade of worry over increased diagnosis of children with ADD and ADHD, which itself turned out to be largely overblown. Prensky did not strictly define the digital native in his 2001 article, but it was later, arbitrarily, applied to children born after 1980, because computer bulletin board systems and Usenet were already in use at the time. The idea became popular among educators and parents, whose children fell within Prensky's definition of a digital native, and has since been embraced as an effective marketing tool. It is important to note that Prensky's original paper was not a scientific one, and that no empirical data exists to support his claims. He has since abandoned his digital native metaphor in favor of digital wisdom. More recently the Digital Visitor and Resident idea has been proposed as an alternative to understanding the various ways individuals engage with digital technology.