Why my kids will be the death of traditional media
28Dec08

For the last few years many Gen X pundits (like myself) and rising Gen Y influencers have been predicting the imminent demise of the traditional media. While these two transitional generations are witnessing the steady move to a more digital future there is another generation that is oblivious to the change and will wonder what we were ever debating.

Millennials are history’s first truly digital generation and over the next two decades they will increasingly influence the future of media. Bad news traditional media – you are not even on their radar.

This wasn’t a planned post. I am writing this during my Christmas holidays on a brilliant sunny morning whilst watching my 6 year old son play with my iPhone. He does it intuitively, in a way that would frustrate Boomers, and many Gen X adopters of new technology.

My two sons, 9 and 6 years old, are part of a generation that accepts new media and technology as a natural extension of their lives. They don’t really consume traditional media and are increasingly entertained and informed by new media.

Look at what is in their household digital armoury (not all theirs but available to them):
iPods
iPhones
Blackberry
HP Laptop
MacBook
Nintendo Wii
Nintendo DS
Pay TV

They rarely watch free-to-air TV because Pay TV stations are their default choice, be it for cartoons, music or sport. They can navigate their way rapidly around the 70 odd stations available to them on Pay TV in seconds.

They have their own virtual world and social networks set up via a childrens site called Webkinz World (www.webkinz.com) which refers to plush toys they have purchased that they then create online environments for. They can use Webkinz world to email and chat with online friends around the world.

They source music and games online with ease.

They create slideshows, stories, and art on the household computers.

They do some homework tutorials online and source information for projects rapidly via online search. My 6 year old is an old hand at Google searching and finds what he needs without much assistance, ever. Wikipedia has long replaced the heavy books that sat in family book cases. Yes, safe search and parental controls have been switch to maximum protection at our house due to the amount of time our kids spend online.

It’s only a matter of time until our children want and receive a mobile phone, in fact my eldest already has asked. But I doubt they will want one for something so archaic as making regular phone calls. Twitter for kids is a more likely application. Plus they’ll want to play and share their music, photos and games with their friends. So I believe they will want application friendly devices, not old-fashioned phones.

The Wii is a very new addition to our household but, naturally, the kids have taken to it like ducks to water. It can be connected to our wireless Internet at home in order to download more games, get news, mail and updates. For our children this is considered normal.

Millennials are natural social networkers. They will be using the next generation Facebook, Twitter or MySpace as a matter of course. It won’t be some novel new concept to rave about. It will just be a normal part of their lives.

Meanwhile, newspapers, magazines, radio (what’s that dad?) and free-to-air TV are not part of their media diet. They just aren’t interested. And of course, traditional media is doing very little to attract them. It’d probably be a waste of time.

So we digital elders can argue, debate and predict al we want. The future of media is in our children’s hands, and for them there is no debate at all.

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11 Responses to “Why my kids will be the death of traditional media”

I’ve written about this a lot over the years. Personally I think newspapers etc will mutate to become 24/7 web based rss style news feeders. How we consume that news…who knows!?

The thing that really needs to change is academia. Schools and to a much bigger extent universities are just not set up for digital natives.

Your average academic says kids are lazy because their idea of research is searching on the internet. Unless academics can find a way to get with the 21st century we are heading for the biggest generation gap the wrld has ever seen. What then?

Comment by Stan Lee on December 29th, 2008

true, that.

but… i’m a bit sceptical of the conclusions. how much traditional media were you consuming at 6 (or even 16)?

teen/20-somethings are doing diy magazines/printing/publishing with at least as much passion as prev generations. they’re just doing more – social networks, print/online publishing, online environments.

Comment by matt on December 29th, 2008

Stan
I totally agree. At a primary school level I am impressed at the early exposure my kids are having to computing, but am yet to see how far that translates through the education system. Certainly, the education system must look at change. If its affecting trad media and publishing, then why wouldnt it also affect education.

Matt
I know what you are saying, but when I was a kid these options weren’t available. I have personally been a heavy media consumer, even from a young age. TV, radio and press were a big part of my childhood. I believe that Gen Y will be the last substantial consumers of the old media, and thats at substantially diminished levels compared to my generation. I am not saying kids will totally ignore trad media, but they will consume it in such a small way that it will not be viable as a business model without massive reinvention.

Comment by Craig Wilson on December 29th, 2008

Yup, our behaviour is only going to change so much. Although I’m only 19, the next generation is basically going to inherit a completely different set of media and consumption.

Stan’s right, education, particularly towards University is disgusting, and possibly won’t change for another 20 or so years.

Comment by Zac Martin on January 1st, 2009

You know, I had exactly the same conversation with an 80-year-old on Christmas Day. He was tech-savvy enough to own a laptop and a GPS system for his car, but he nearly wet his pants when I let him play with my iPhone. He moaned that it took his grandchildren 8 seconds to learn how to operate the gadgets in his house that had taken him 8 hours of research and practice to figure out. I consumed almost no traditional media when I was a kid (hell, we didn’t even get a colour TV until 1988) but I can remember every now and then in the late 80s my Dad would bring a work laptop home, one that ran DOS, and I’d pretend I was sick so I could stay home from school and play chess on it and write things in the very first versions of Wordperfect. While I’m sure your kids are merrily standing back and refusing to give traditinal media CPR, I’d like to think it was Gen Y who pulled the life support plug out in the first place!

Comment by Matt Granfield on January 3rd, 2009

I am far from sure about this, your argument. My kids are 19 and 21. They grew up with this stuff. To them, the technology is a means to an end.

The critical issue is that there are just 24 hours in a day. Competition for those 24 hours has always been a major issue. More forms of technology means more time competition, but does not change the dynamics.

Now it may be that there has been a shift between my kids and yours, but I think that this needs to be teased through. Over the next day or so I will do a post on my personal blog and link back.

Comment by Jim Belshaw on January 3rd, 2009

Thanks Craig,

That’s a very valid point, gen-Y and millennial-s have changed the way media is consumed. Is it time to practice the eulogy? We still have books, handbills, movies and radio. We seem to have lost the man on a soap box in the Domain on Sundays (however).

Taking a longer-term view of things I believe we in a transition state, trying to figure out just what all this stuff is about. The media channels that prove that they can be trusted will stay. It is worth looking at Fran Molly’s “The End of the Web”,

http://www.fastthinking.com.au/site/page.cfm?u=334

Right now so much of what is available is opinion, without intrinsic authority. Time is needed to develop a following and trust. The Wikipedia is a fine example of a long-tail trend to ‘authenticate’ web2 content.

‘Media’ will likely settle into clumps like a ‘tabloid’ web, ‘infomercial’ web, quality press, etc. The real policy issue is ‘sense-making’ — There is an old ICT saying, “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO).

The medium that provides you good garbage-in will have the most impact. I don’t think we need information on dead-trees (paper). I do think we need systems to authenticate and verify personal ‘garbage-in’ consumption.

That can be traditional via media structures and it can be through new innovations like the reviews of Wikipedia pages. May be we are looking at a new tradition!!

w.

Comment by Will on January 5th, 2009

I can agree with your post.

I’m from Hungary, that means the environment of our socialization was a “bit” different. :-)
When I was a child in the seventies and in the eighties, we had only a b&w tv (only 2 channels, no broadcast on monday), we didn’t have any telephone (landline) until the early nineties. I got my first “computer” in 1987. It was a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive wich made me a rockstar in the circle of friends who had only a Commodore 16 with a tape recorder.
When our relatives from Brisbane visited us in the middle of the 80s, they talked about Apple wich was for me a fruit and didn’t understand why are they using an apple in the school.

And now my older son is 6 years old, the younger is 2.5.
Both of them can handle the tv, dvd player, the antique vhs video player.
My older son opens the laptop on my desk at home, starts the system, types the login and password (of course they are very basic) of my wife and types his favourite url’s into the browser without doing any mistake. Important: he can not read/write.
He starts the web based games (old school Mario versions or Lego games) and plays.
When a mobile rings at home he answers the phone without any tehcnical problem (we never teached him how to use a phone).

New media and technology as a natural extension of their lives and they don’t really consume traditional media.

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