Old people online

MY HOUSE -- We ran a "social media" session for the newest people into our company today.  We call them grads.  All the boys were called James and the girls were German.

We expected them to teach us something... But they were technologically clueless.  Or maybe too cool for school. 

So, these kids who were born in the 1980s, when I had a Flock of Seagulls haircut.  They are what we call digital natives, not digital immigrants, like me.  And yet they hadn't heard of Second Life, they read no blogs, they hadn't a Facebook account and they wondered, boastfully, what kind of losers spent so much time online?!

Har-har.

Then when I got home tonight, my lovely widowed neighbour Dorothy asked me to come by and fix her PC.  Dorothy, shall we say, would remember the last coronation.

What was the problem?  She couldn't physically install her new flat screen on her Windows Vista-enabled computer.

Dorothy who once welcomed an exciting new gramophone into her house as a child, is flying down the information superhighway in a Masserati.  My colleagues -- the children of the information age -- are proudly polishing their Robin Reliants.

What does it all mean?

/df

Published 24 October 2007 08:09 by David Ferrabee

Filed under: social media, Technology, etc.

Comments

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  Fiona Blamey said:

  That's interesting, David. I'm wondering if it's just people who choose PR as a career who are less familiar with online life?  PR has traditionally been what I think of as a 'talky' profession, full of extroverts who like actually talking to people face to face. Whereas the people who've lived an extensive online life have tended to be a) geeks (I mean that in a very non-pejorative sense) and b) introverts, neither of whom have traditionally hankered after a career in PR!  

  Of course the nature of PR is changing rapidly, and an understanding of social media is now essential, but is this filtering down to school and university students making their future career choices?  I think there might be a couple of years' lag there.

  October 24, 2007 10:25
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  Peter Murphy said:

  I think we also forget sometimes how innately conservative the young can be. They can be remarkably wedded to what their peer group does, and in my experience posh young PR-types called Jemima and James aren't usually mavens, but connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell would have it.

  rgds,

  peter M.

  October 24, 2007 14:29
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  Niall Cook said:

  Maybe they spent too much time studying (and, conversely, we have too much time on our hands to play with this stuff)?

  October 24, 2007 14:55
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  Sean Mulholland said:

  As one of those early-80's born geeks who *does* know about all the tech fanciness going on out there, I must admit I follow it more out of professional interest than personal interest.  I really don't care to spend all day on social networks, blogs, and whatever-is-trendy-for-geeks-right-now-no-matter-how-useless-it-is (*ahem*Second Life, Twitter*cough*).

  Many of the fantastic predictions about how this-or-that will 'change the face of communications forever' often forget that many, many people are far more 'normal' than we would assume.  24/7 connectivity isn't a prerequisite to being born in the late 80s or 90s.  Sure, they email/txt/IM/social-network like mad, but not necessarily because they love technology.  

  It's like how previous generations called people on the phone.  They may have spend hours using it, but it wasn't because they loved the telco networks or were fascinated by the ability to project one's voice over great distances through copper wire.

  Passion is reserved for people who make careers out of this stuff, but we must not forget that huge numbers of people are content to be much more disconnected and 'normal' than we might assume.

  October 24, 2007 20:37
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  Richard Bailey said:

  David

  I thought I'd commented yesterday (did I forget to submit it? did you moderate?).

  I am often puzzled by the same (I teach digital natives). My guess is that your Jeremys and Germans are all engaged in social networking (though probably not blogging) - but they don't associate their chatter with friends with professional public relations work. So they were too embarrassed to admit this in public.

  Your task and mine is to help make connections. We're in public relations, so which bit of communications and relationships can we ignore? Which tools are off-limits?

  October 25, 2007 09:13
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  David Ferrabee said:

  Richard,

  Let me reassure you that I don't moderate.  But we have had a few bugs on the comment posting front.  Someone's been trying to comment on the previous post for a while.  So Niall is looking into it.

  I think I was being deliberately provacative in this post, and I am bit disappointed that all the comments have been very level-headed so far...!

  A few points that have really caught my interest though:

  1) Are PR people (of which I apologise for not being one) naturally NOT pre-disposed to Social Media?

  2) Do we expect too much homogeneity from digital natives, when it comes to technology?

  I'd say NO and YES.  But would struggle to find any good arguments to back that up!

  /df

  October 25, 2007 12:58
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  Ian Buckingham said:

  you're being deliberately provocative but I do think you've captured something about the innate pioneering spirit of generations past. David  I talk about the implications of Social Media in my new book Brand Engagement - How Employees Make or Break Brands:

  http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=281268

  and I believe there are some very interesting  creativity and survival implications for the 80s generation who have been spoon-fed by brands for so long!

  Check it out!

  Ian

  October 30, 2007 00:19