Dismissing the ‘digital native’ myth
By Molly FlattI popped along to a very interesting debate at the LSE last night called Digital Natives: A lost tribe? in which four leading academics explained their research and thinking around the behaviour of children and teens online, and basically dispelled the concept of the digital native so casually bandied around (I for one have certainly been guilty of this). Their insights are especially important for those of us investigating where and how the next generation will create and spread their word of mouth, and how the links and delinks between the real and virtual worlds will evolve.
Digital Natives via angermann@Flickr
Professor David Buckingham of the Institute of Education was particularly persuasive on the limitations of the concept of ‘digital learning’. The assumption that young people spontaneously ‘know’ how to navigate technology, rather than having to learn, both exoticises and belittles them, mystifying what remains in reality a predictable process - a mixture of peer skills transfer and trial and error. In fact, his research shows that teachers and their pupils explore the same online channels and content, with no clear hierarchy of taste: in other words, social media is the venue for this dialogue about generational difference, rather than the cause.
This was reinforced by Dr Rebekah Willett, whose observations of various switched-on kids showed that they did not in fact behave online like self-exposing social media brats, but like regular children. Even though they produce and edit videos and photos online, much of their pleasure was in the process of production, not the product; some of them kept blogs and recordings on their phones just to play back to themselves, rather than publish. For many of them, social media is more an instrument of play than a self-conscious platform.
Dr Chris Davies of Oxford University reminded us that, just like adults, so-called digital natives display several subsets of online behaviour; he categorised them as drivers, riders, dabblers and outsiders, in order of their degree of engagement. Their activity is often determined more by socioeconomic factors than by anything sociobiological, and the main generational difference in attitude is that young people see social media as a liberating tool that allows them autonomy. In short, kids tend to behave online just like us.
This fed into a discussion of children’s awareness of brands online. POLIS Silverstone Scholar Ranjana Das discovered that her young subjects had confused and ambivalent attitudes to social networks as ‘big computers in the sky’, sort of non-commercial omniscient behemoths. Few of them had any awareness that ads were tailored to their profiles, and if they did they considered it ‘creepy and weird’; one girl thought that being publicly visible to others via tagging was ‘disgusting, just disgusting’. One boy spent a long time clicking on the cancel button for Facebook ads, thinking he was beating the system, only to find they were replaced by others, not removed - his frustration was palpable.
So what are the implications for marketing? Firstly the reinforcement of the idea that people are people, kids are kids, and that social media in general remains just a reflection and microcosm of our individualistic and emotionally imbued behaviour offline - so we should treat them accordingly, not like viral-obsessed digital drones. Secondly, that young people have the same ambivalence and skepticism towards technological tools that we do: they embrace them for their capabilities but also sometimes feel exposed and confounded by them. Using the resources, expertise and products of brands to give people real, exciting experiences and to help them filter the chaos of social channels so they can connect with others sharing their passion, and grow and showcase their own creativity, will work for Generation Bebo just as it does for Generation Werther’s Originals.
