Generational change or an age thing?

Image credit: technowannabe @flickr

It’s clear that today’s digital natives use the Internet very differently to those of us who were first online during the dotcom boom. Many public studies show that young people use, and percieve, the Internet primarily as a social tool, whereas we see all around us an older generation that has grown up with the metaphor of the Internet as a library to be mined for information.

For digital natives there appears to be a lack of perception of the boundaries between mediums; they can move seamlessly from real life to texting to IMing to social networks in one extended conversation without any cognative dissonance (note to Microsoft - unified communications is a reality for the digital natives without any great technological integration). Most importantly for the our work, their approach to information discovery is primarily bottom-up peer-to-peer, rather than top-down broadcast.

It is assumed that being a digital native also makes you an modern Internet expert, but this is not necessarily the case. Our experience with young people is that they keep their online activities restricted to a small (<5) number of key websites such as YouTube, Myspace, MSN etc. The idea that they are masters of web2.0 is misplaced, and the majority of what might be called ‘power users’ or ‘early adopters’, are actually an older generation.

These differences are important for us to understand because in ten years, the current crop of teenagers will be becoming parents themselves, and the government will need to deliver information to them in a way they can consume. It’s important for us to plan now for how that might be achieved and understand the channels we need to be building in preperation.

However, I see a dangerous assumption being made; that the way young people use the Internet today will be the way they will use it when they become adults, reflecting a perception that the current generational differences exist because of the rapid advance of the technology and the natives implicit familiarity with it, rather than considering the possibility that the differences may arise intrinsically from their age.

We’ll be releasing some research soon to this site which shares some of our experiences with a small test group in Cambridge, but this kind of point-in-time research unfortunately cannot answer whether this step-change in usage, attitudes and the perception of the utility of the Internet is truly a generational attribute. To pin down this crucial question, we need research to track changing habits as our digital natives age, so we better understand whether our current efforts to prepare for informaiton delivery in their parenthood are going to be effective.