Bridging the digital divide in a connected world
A typical 16-year-old nowadays wakes up for school using the alarm on his mobile, checks his Facebook messages using his smartphone as he eats his breakfast and waits for a missed call from the bus driver to know that it’s time to leave home. The days where one had to excitedly wait to go back home to tell his parents about the ‘A’ they got in biology are long gone. A simple text message now does the job.
This is just an example of the first few hours of the day. For today’s digital natives, every aspect of the day and every activity has now been mobilized and digitalized; from listening to music on a music player to conducting research by accessing school library on the go to making weekend plans with friends through email.
Digital natives are those who are born into digital technology. Armed with their smartphones, digital media players and tablet computers they are used to the immediacy of chatting to dozens of others simultaneously and have access to more content that their parents ever did at the same age. They are posting opinions, pictures and video online and networking with peers across the world, while downloading songs, games, video and software.
Anyone born post 1980 though will have spent a large amount of their grown-up life enjoying Facebook, Twitter, virtual worlds and 24×7 connectivity. A recent study by Ericsson found that these people could be appropriately labeled ‘Digital Natives’, while their parents, teachers and managers born prior to 1980 are more ‘Digital Immigrants’ having immigrated to this world, or rather that this world came to them.
Those of us older than 30, are old enough to remember life before the Internet, when connectivity meant plugging in your hi-fi. The older ones amongst us will also remember when Technicolor was, quite literally, the greatest thing since sliced bread and a computer was something that filled an entire room.
While some are already adapting to today’s connected world, the “digital immigrants” are mindful of their privacy and aren’t as keen to share their lives’ details online. They still value conversations and connect with their friends offline, gathering their news and information from more traditional sources such as newspapers and television in addition to online media. Their online forays are often driven by a combination of curiosity and necessity.
At Ericsson we’ve predicted that in the future everything that will be benefit from being connected will be connected and that by 2020, the world will have 50 billion connections. The number may be staggering but as digital natives start to drive industry their openness to applying technology will be far more natural than previous generations.
An increasingly connected world may well belong to the digital natives, but connectivity is no longer their exclusive domain. As the older generation becomes more digitally active, we’re seeing lines being blurred between the digital natives and the digital immigrants and this is a trend that will continue until we evolve into a single cohesive digital society.
Aided by the evolution of technology, the world’s digital immigrants will continue to make the effort to bridge the divide with the natives. However, it is still important for the media and marketers to continue to address both audiences, generating innovative content that appeals to both demographics.
Isil Yalcin heads Ericsson in the North East Africa Unit.
