27/06/06

Screenagers

In an FT from last week, Lord Saatchi comes up with a nice little conceit,

Today, social scientists divide the world between digital natives and digital immigrants. Anyone over the age of 25 is a digital immigrant. He or she has had to learn the digital language. The digital native learnt it like you learnt your mother tongue, effotlessly as you grew up. The digital immigrant struggles and forever has a thick, debilitating accent. […]

the digital native’s brain is physically different as a result… It has rewired itself. It responds faster. It sifts out. It recalls less.

He then goes slightly mad and claims that the outcome of this is death of advertising and the rise of ‘one word brands’. i.e. Google owns ’search’ (shouldn’t it be ‘find’?); apple has taken ‘innovation’ from Sony, Tony Blair won three elections with ‘New’ and America has ‘freedom’. The first idea - the death of advertising and recall - is perhaps fair enough, but the latter is a bit of a stretched idea. What does he own?

In some ways, this relates to the views of Don Tapscott, who talks (I think) about Screenagers in the video I linked to last week. Basically, that the yout’ is growing up, as Mr Saatchi says, fluent in technology and multi-threaded communications.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Podcasts, Publishing, Quotes.