A recent study by International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations agency responsible for technology issues, indicates that Mexico is in sixth place among countries with the greatest number of "digital natives" in the world.

The countries that preceded Mexico are China, United States, India, Brazil, and Japan.

In reality, what the study actually indicates is the number of people in each country born in the digital era. "Digital native" is a term made popular in 2011 by education keynote speaker Marc Prensky, making an allusion to the way in which the population adapts to new technologies.

According to the study, these are the 10 countries with the most digital natives in the entire world:

1. China - 75.2 million
2. US - 41.3 million
3. India - 22.7 million
4. Brazil - 20.1 million
5. Japan - 12.2 million
6. Mexico - 9.1 million
7. Russia - 9.0 million
8. Germany - 8.3 million
9. Vietnam - 7.5 million
10. UK - 7.0 million

Mexico, in sixth place, has 9.1 million people born in the digital age, while China, number one, has 75.2 million. The gap between one country and another is important, but even more surprising is that China has almost double the amount of digital natives than the United States; something that can only be explained by taking into account the difference between the number of inhabitants of each country.

The relevancy of this information to a country such as Mexico comes into question when one takes the time to consider that the numbers are undoubtedly thrown off by the gap separating the education and opportunities in development between the more than 40 million inhabitants in extreme poverty and the rest of the population.

As technology cannot achieve stabilizing itself as the engine that drives the development of the countries and equalize the living conditions of all of its population, some can be the first, others tenth, and others don’t even fall into the first 20, and rankings like this will continue to be lack real importance. An example is India, with more than two hundred billion inhabitants only having 22.7 million "digital natives".