Way back when, in the early days of the blog, in March of last year, (the fourth post actually) I wrote a post defining somebody I called the Digital Inhabitant. I updated it in May. My idea was that I wanted to give a definition of somebody who had a digital life that wasn’t dependent on age, in the way Digital Immigrant, Digital Settler and Digital Native seemed to be. I still think that’s a reasonable thing to do even though the old post is a bit creaky now – hey, it was the fourth post. Here’s the definition of Digital Inhabitant as it stood in May last year:

Digital Inhabitant: A person who has had a personal web presence for more than x days (choose your own x – me, I choose 30).

A personal web presence is an individual space on the web which can be updated at any time (like twitter or Facebook or a blog), coupled and completed, at a minimum, with the person’s real name, photograph, contact information and About Me section.

The definition talks specifically about the web. Having a presence on the web is what the definition is about. It doesn’t talk about age or when digital technologies in general were introduced, so it doesn’t clash with any of the three previous terms. It’s a useful term on the blog and I think it perhaps has the potential to be a useful term outside the blog. So we’ll see.