Meet the digital natives and understand why you can never become one of them (disclaimer: reading this might make you feel old, stupid or both). By Ola Ahlvarsson .
“The future has already happened, it is just unequally distributed!” The quote by William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace in 1982, describes what is happening at warp speed around us without most of us having the foggiest idea what is going on.
Hanging out on the web is more popular than television in many countries. The online game Counter Strike is becoming one of the largest sports in more and more markets (the third in my native Sweden after football and ice hockey). Dating is increasingly done online and user generated content such as blogs are more read than regular newspapers. Visa awards points for collecting gold coins in the fantasy World of Warcraft and more and more people are becoming real money millionaires by buying property or trading Linden dollars in virtual worlds like Second Life.
It seems as though behaviour is changing but let us look at numbers instead. My Space has more than 180 million users, Facebook over 40 million and is growing by 200,000 per day, 250 million people have downloaded Skype, 30 million people are members of the online ‘swingers’ site FriendFinder, YouTube was sold for $1.6bn after 11 months, the typical 15-20 year old spends 40 minutes per day on online networks (and, by the way, they do not use e-mail, they only use instant messaging).
If any of this feels strange or far fetched there is only one possible explanation – you are, just like me, a digital alien. If you see the above phenomena as the most normal things, then you are most likely a digital native. For a digital native this is just how the world is.
Online generation
Digital natives are people who have grown up with the evolving digital society, using the internet with the same ease as you were flipping between Dallas and Starsky & Hutch when you were a child. They do not make distinction between being off or online, which is a very alien concept for most of us. They do not distinguish between their good friends they have known for a long time online but have never met and their neighbour’s son, which is even stranger.
Most digital aliens frown and think that their world is a lot more mature and stable and that all these new things are fads that if they ignore they will go away. This is similar to the attitude that BT had towards Skype until it realised the online phone service had picked up 100 million users without any marketing.
Other digital aliens try to adapt by trying to walk the walk and talk the talk. But just like a Saudi moving to the UK or a Brit moving to China, the fact that they are not natives shows even after many years of trying to understand the peculiarities of their adopted lands.
Today most people are digital aliens, tomorrow they are not going to be. Your future clients will be digital natives. The most valuable companies will be built and valued on principles different to those now used and based on products and services that the digital natives like.
So what can you do to survive as a poor alien in a strange new world? Well the first and most important realisation is that there really is a huge difference between the natives and the aliens. Comments like “but I still think it is important to meet each other in real life” are missing the mark completely. The digital natives like seeing each other too. They just do not understand why the aliens need to make a distinction.
Building services without understanding how consumer behaviour is changing might also be a recipe that will disappoint ambitious CEOs trying to second guess an audience that is thinking very differently than themselves.
In the future, private bankers might have to move away from picking up clients by chit chatting at the golf course and instead offer virtual banking services in Second Life or realise that for digital natives, the 182 million people trading on the auction site eBay (a digital exchange where supply and demand meets and where more than two million people make their full-time living) is not too different from trading at the New York Stock Exchange.
Another probable development is that the underlying assets will change from biotech or commodities that the natives often know quite little about to music or other forms of entertainment that the digital natives love.
“I’ll go short on Britney Spears’ Facebook launch,” could be a lucrative strategy indeed in a future that has already happened but is now hopefully a little more evenly distributed.
Ola Ahlvarsson is CEO and founder of Result, a telecom, IT, media and entertainment company.
