Digital Natives.
No doubt you have heard the term.
I kind of imagine pixelated caricatures dressed in feathers and palm fronds – who were downloaded rather than born and who were recharged rather than nursed.
Or worse, the Natives, as seen in Gangs of New York, and we know what they did to the immigrants….
Seems, though, that many Digital Natives take themselves very seriously—very, very seriously indeed. In their minds nothing existed before digital – meaning themselves. In fact, I had one such denizen recently tell me that music in any other form really isn’t music…so it goes. Tell it to Beethoven or the Beatles or any YouTube band trying to be a phenomena group, not to mention the savvy Digital Natives who crave vinyl records – not for the Luddite factor – but rather because the music sounds more authentic, real, warm.
Here is what I find astounding and ridiculous in the whole notion of Digital Natives – worse, here is what I fear and loath – not to mention what I believe is antithetical to the entire age we live in:
To begin with, there is more than a hint of Lord of the Flies here – and the ignorance that often attaches itself to those who believe themselves “natives” – of anything – frankly frightens me.
Far from this being a world of Digital Natives, we live in a world where age compression on one end and longevity on the other have created – for the first time that I know – a continuum of purpose and value between the oldest and the youngest. Both my two-year-old grandson and my 85-year-old father-in-law have iPads, both are proficient in its use and frankly, both use it the same way – if not for the same things.
We live in a time defined not by Digital Natives and Immigrants but by Generation World. A universe where age, borders and demographics mean less than shared values. An epoch where traditional segmentation means little as communities and interest groups form and coalesce in a multi-hued tapestry never before seen – generation gaps are being eliminated in social movements and culture – unlike the 1960s when being over 30 was considered traitorous and there was little if no age or other heterogeneity in anything.
We share, we shop, we read, we watch, we listen – sometimes digitally but almost always with some digital enhancement that links our flesh-and-blood world to the digital enablement we now have – Digital Exponential – our ability to bridge all our worlds: to shop in an Apple Store in person or buy online 24/7, to go to a movie theater or download or stream our favorite shows or movies. Buy the book, cover and all, or just buy its content; go to the concert live or watch it online (well, that really predates the Natives…see The Last Waltz for one).
And we still go to new restaurants – proliferating by the way – and use Pinterest to share our favorite dishes, we crowd the aisles of UNIQLO, and help sell out concert after concert around the world.
I have written much about the Waldorf Schools, but one thought stuck in my mind when one of the Digital Elite said that his kid would learn to use a computer in minutes. (“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste. At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older,” says Alan Eagle, an executive at Google.)
We have made it that simple (catch this experiment as detailed in Wired‘s print edition: Researchers from Tufts University and the MIT Media Lab this Spring dropped off a few solar-powered tablets to kids in a small Ethiopian village, where there is no electricity and essentially zero literacy. With no instruction, the twenty children ages 4 to 12 began using the devices within 18 minutes. After the first week, the kids were using 47 apps.) – but that he needed to learn to think and reason. Being a Digital Native doesn’t make that a slam dunk…not even close.
So rather than basking in the pride of being born into a digital age that was, by the way, created by immigrants (sound familiar?), Digital Natives should be leading the way in taking the best of what we know and turning it into the best of what the next generation will need to develop the next big thing.
And then, my dear Digital Natives, you will be mere immigrants as well…unless….
Windows emulates MAC, Amazon emulates the old Sears Catalog, Facebook emulates our DNA- driven behavior, You Tube and whatever else emulates TV, Pandora and Spotify emulate radio, all try to emulate (old-fashioned LOL) advertising in order to exist and we should all try to emulate Steve Jobs…listen:
“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. “
Steve Jobs
Don’t get me wrong – before all the emails come pouring in – I love Digital Natives – my children, my grandchildren, and in truth all the people I learn from….
But I want to learn from people who are not unidimensional – who define themselves by today’s technology – I want to learn from people who can teach me about today’s technology but who can also share and teach me about values…and who themselves want broad and diverse experiences so that they can – in fact – create the next big thing.
What do you think?
Also appeared on The Huffington Post
Getting a job today requires you to be on facebook, I interviewed at Linkedin for a Project Manager position and was asked why am I not on facebook. I said because it is a waste of time looking into other peoples’ lives for social entertainment and is very unproductive. Sitting in a conference room and getting bombarded with a range of questions about advertising from five young account managers who did not have the experience of an old office environment, I was told I would not be the right fit in their culture where it is understood that everyone follows each other on twitter, facebook, linkedin, pinterest, and reads their blogs regularly, things that I told them I refuse to do because I have a real life and refuse to live like an avatar.
I can both agree and disagree with Shah’s comment.
It’s a waste of time to look into other peoples’ lives online. Or offline, seated in you window and chatting with your neighbor. It’s more productive to discuss physics, or philosophy, or literature, or whatever you like, with people you like. No matter what they are.
It’s hard to be a project manager that has to do facebook apps, activations or whatever it is if you don’t know how facebook works. But not everybody needs to do it.
If you’re against the digital world, that’s a point of view. But the digital world is essentially human, and nothing human should be foreign to us.
We should define ourselves not by the tools we use, but what we create with them. Each generation will continue their fascination with their techonology, and each generation after that will continue to be amazed by the pace and direction of change of the tools we create or use. But at the base of it all lies a simple human truth, the desire to communicate and interact- that I predict will never change.
Jerome, i couldn’t have said it better myself.
David, I liked your comment about Lord of the Flies. We live in a post-revolutionary era, where digital immigrants or anyone who who prefers anything analog is considered a counterrevolutionary. For many so-called digital natives, technology is being used as the thin edge of the wedge designed to separate the older generation from their jobs. Every successive generation comes up with a new way to convince the world that the old guys need to be replaced. This is theirs. You note that both your grandson and your father-in-law use iPads — great point! Everyone loves the new technology. So how come anyone in advertising who’s over 40 is told we couldn’t possibly understand the new digital world? Reminds me of the Chinese Cultural Revolution — leaders toppled, professors imprisoned, re-education camps (Hyper Island, anyone?). I don’t think the issue is technology at all. No one really cares if an ad appears online or on TV … it’s about power.
@Jerome-yes, you said it best. Technology is an enabler of our human connections, not an end in and of itself. I think that the “Lord of the Flies” or Chinese Cultural Revolution aspect is actually a function of two very different ways of working. In the tech world, you must try many things and fail at them very, very quickly, then move on. The cost of trying, of failure and of moving on is relatively low, while the reward for success is enormous. In the brand or ad world, there is more at stake — a brand — the reputation that allows a thing (product or service) to command a price beyond its intrinsic value. The story-telling, the human connection, remains essential but that speed at which it is able to move is ever-increasing and I believe this is often at the heart of a digital native / non-native disconnect. Most of the digital natives tell me that there is no need for strategy – we should allow consumers to drink from a fire-hose and let them sort it out. Most of us on the brand value side believe in understanding and crafting prior to putting something out there. If we are to be successful, we must take the best of both and meet somewhere in the middle of the ether!
This isn’t about age, it’s about acceptance (indeed, embracing) things that are new AND USEFUL. I’m in my seventh decade, and I think of myself as a digital native. I was building intranets and web sites when you had to learn to code in HTML and Java to do so, because there weren’t any tools. I download movies and TV shows for my iPad. I text, but only to a select few people. Do I have a facebook page? Yes. Do I visit it every day and wait breathlessly for something new to appear on my wall? Nope. I have real work to do and a real life to live. But I visit my LInkedIn page way more often because it gives me something to help me do that real work.
We’re gonna getcha. We are going to get you where you may not even know when, where and how we gotcha. We get you when you’re driving (radio ads and billboards). We get you when you’re watching tv. We get you when you’re on your laptop, tablet or smartphone. And if you try to avoid us by switching us off and not signing up through our social media campaigns, we’re gonna get you in bed while you are asleep, because we are working with people who have developed the technology to infiltrate your dreams, our messages will appear alongside your thoughts just like products are placed in the backgrounds in movies and video games. When you wake up and walk into that coffee shop, you’ll know we gotcha!
From Wikipedia (extract): “A digital native is a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technologia and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts. Alternatively, this term can describe people born during or after the latter 1960s, as the Digital Age began at that time; but in most cases the term focuses on people who grew up with the technology that became prevalent in the latter part of the 20th century and continues to evolve today.
Other discourse identifies a digital native as a person who understands the value of digital technology and uses this to seek out opportunities for implementing it with a view to make an impact.”
But does ‘qualifying’ as a digital native imply we’ve excluded all other areas of expertise when it comes our profession? Does it by default state that you don’t know you’re way around Direct Marketing, offline Advertising or Public Relations? And that you are not a broad enough thinker to deliver the right communications solution? I think not.
As the next generation comes in, tech savvier, and grasping technology and how to best apply it faster than ever -at least, faster than me- I console myself with a comment from a friend of mine who reminded me that all these young people still need to be managed… there is a role for everyone.