On Adapting …

Excerpted from a report I wrote a couple of months ago …

The transition towards a digital era will not be accomplished without pain and difficulty, especially on the part of established industries.  Many will suffer as they try to adapt.  Shifting from an economy based on material objects to one in which work and production is dematerialized means new products, new markets and new segments within those new markets. And in addition, this phenomenon will in some cases (telecommunications, radio, and probably television) transform the actual structure of existing industries, which will in turn redefine the balance of power and alter the principles upon which current perspectives about competition are based.

So, to understand better, it’s useful to look at the ways different generations of consumers are adapting … or not.  Who are the young people, the *digital natives*, who seem to have grown up with these new technologies under their skins ?  And, above all, how do the rest of us understand and interact with them ?

They are between 10 and 20 years old (an approximate range), born into a world that was being transformed into a sense-surround digital environment. They resonate more than they reason, they are fickle consumers who focus on brands … they multi-task (see Homo Zappiens in the Report “The Time Is Now”), and above all they are not shy about questioning the major foundations of established society.  Napster, iPods and iTunes, RSS, P2P, BitTorrent and MySpace have had rapid and far-reaching impact on the logic of the media and entertainment businesses. Meet the “Digital Kids” or “Digital Natives”.

Ever since birth, these digital era children have bathed in screen-based images, in digital sound, and in digital video, and have been using remote controls and computer mice.  Their universe is based on immersion in information technology, of one sort or another.  It’s an interactive universe consisting of more and more consumer electronic products such as game consoles like the Xbox 360 or the Playstation, computers, portable phones, and listening-and-viewing devices like the iPod.  Their world is one with a network-based interactive culture based on sharing and building common knowledge.

In his study titled “The death of command and control”, the researcher Marc Prensky notes these young people have experienced an accumulated 10,000 hours of video-game playing, have sent and received more than 200,000 emails or text messages of all sorts, have spent more than 10.000 hours speaking to their friends on portable phones, have more than 20,000 hours of watching television under their belts whilst having been exposed to more than 500,000 advertising messages. On the other hand, these digital natives have spent less than 5,000 hours reading what we call “real” books. 

But  …   these numbers don’t state conclusively that these young people do not read at all.  On the contrary, this simply signifies that their sources of information are other than the traditional ones printed on certain sizes and types of paper in conventional formats.  And i think that’s an important distinction.

In the past, the transition from oral distribution of information (speech) to text and writing, and then to the widespread use of printing followed long, slow cycles of adaptation over many generations.  However, never since the beginning of human civilization have we traveled through such and intense period of rupture between the meaning-making tools, processes and capabilities of different generations.

Over the past century, each generation has had its own new mode (medium) of communication: telegraph, cinema, radio, television, computer, and today the Internet and all things digital.  And each of these periods has changed our uses of language (and thus the shaping of our culture).  Perhaps more fundamentally, these dynamics of adapting quite rapidly to a succession of ways to communicate ideas have helped change the way(s) we use our imagination and probably the fluidity and plasticity of our individual brains.

The ways we are adapting and will adapt to these changes will not occur in the same rhythm or time frames for everyone. It’s likely we will have to wait several decades before we all live in a society that has been stitched back together, in a cultural sense.  For the immigrants to a digital world, this will mean that they will have to face up to a continual re-organization and re-shaping of their existing habits.

This will depend much on the individual and the extent to which she or he is willing and able to experiment and learn.

For digital natives (the new generation who will soon increasingly inhabit positions of influence, power and decision-making), their habits and practices will continue to be built around the possibilities that have been and are being offered to them.  For the rest of us immigrants, doing so is likely to get easier and easier from a usability-of-products perspective, as well as being helped by the growing ubiquity of services which require some adaptation (look at how many older people use online banking, or paying bills, or using email to stay in touch with distant relatives or friends).

Much of the last twenty years has been about technology - gadgets, software, bigger chips, the Net - whilst many of us who are not geek-inclined have learned only how to open Word, send an email, and develop rudimentary spreadsheets or presentations.  If we’re advanced average users, we will have learned a few basic html commands and how to change the passwords, etc, on our personal computing machine.

As things get easier to do, easier to use, more available and more connected, the next twenty years will see unusual and rapid sociological adaptation … and not all of it will be kind, supportive or beneficial.  But it will be real.

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