Get On the Bus

Remember the days when you'd call to talk to a business and a real person answered the phone? Remember when you used a credit card and they'd swipe that heavy contraption back and forth making a carbon copy of your card or when your old LP's were traded in for new-fangled tapes? Well, if you can remember it, it's almost certain you've gotten the look from a "Digital Native" when you've talked about it, as if to say, "Oh, my god! How old are you?" In a book summary from John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, David Hornik takes you through a comical example of what Palfrey is eluding to.

If you have not yet experienced "Digital Natives" in their natural habitat, come on over to my house on any weekend. When I wander down stairs on a Saturday or Sunday morning, the scene is always pretty much the same. The TV is on and yammering away. But my kids are far more engaged in their respective laptops than they are in the TV making noise in the foreground. My 6 year old is likely buying a new go kart for his Webkinz monkey. My 8 year old is busy shooting balloons on Addicting Games. My 11 year old is blogging about some great new Japanese rock band video he found on YouTube. My 13 year old is reading the latest news about his favorite performers on Broadway.com. And, amazingly, while "watching" TV and voraciously consuming the Web, my children are more than capable of fighting with each at the same time -- digital multitasking at its finest.

Digital Natives today may be a small group of non-voting, non-credit card holding kids. But soon Digital Natives will be the predominant consumers of media, goods, services. And as such, they will expect their experiences to be inherently digital. Analog experiences will be viewed as quaint -- perhaps they'll trigger nostalgia for the good old days of board games and books -- but, in the end, the expectations will be one hundred percent digital. Companies will need to think differently about how they market to Digital Natives. Governments will need to think differently about how they engage Digital Citizens. Doctors will need to think differently about how they treat Digital Patients. It won't be an evolution -- it will need to be a revolution.

I already see this revolution when I'm pitched on businesses whose customers are kids. Businesses focused on children or Millennials (the next big group of consumers being chased by the advertising world) have no interest in the historically analog world. Their products are naturally digital. They acquire customers digitally. They interact digitally. Indeed, any analog byproduct of the digital experience (you know, like meet real humans in person) is just that, a byproduct. Kids want their media consumption, their shopping, their communications to be digital. Webkinz is a great example of this phenomenon -- who would have thought that stuffed animals could prove to be the gateway drug to a digital experience? Yet that is precisely what they have become.

In light of all that, it was great to read the timely new book by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser called "Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives." John and Urs look into the opportunities and challenges posed by this digital revolution. Those of us with kids are living in and among the Digital Natives and certainly can use all the help we can get to navigate this brave new world both for ourselves and for our kids.

When I was about 6 or 7, my family got our first VCR. Every time the electricity would go out my Dad would have me reset the clock because he could never figure it out himself. When I moved out on my own my Dad gave me that VCR. He said that the blinking light drove him crazy (without me around the clock was never set and just flashed 0:00). Now he has an MP3 player that he loaded with songs, and figured out how to play it through his car stereo. I rode in the car with him the other day and I noticed the dashboard clock was blinking the "0:00." When I asked him about it he said, "I can't figure it out," as he clicked from Carly Simon to The Beatles on his Mp3 Player. Some things don't change, but he is learning the new technology to suit his needs, which I'm sure a lot of you are having to do. As for telling time? Right now, my Dad's content wearing a watch.