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The Natives are Restless

Are you a digital immigrant or a digital native? Apparently if you are over 30 you are an immigrant.

Why do I call these young computer enthusiasts and organizational activists “digital natives”? Think about the extraordinary cumulative digital experiences of each of these future business, military, and government leaders: an average of close to 10,000 hours playing video games; more than 200,000 e-mails and instant messages sent and received; nearly 10,000 hours of talking, playing games, and using data on cell phones; more than 20,000 hours spent watching TV (much of it jump-cut-laden MTV); almost 500,000 commercials seen — all before they finished college. At most, they’ve logged only 5,000 hours of book reading.

This generation is better than any before at absorbing information and making decisions quickly, as well as at multitasking and parallel processing. In contrast, people age 30 or older are “digital immigrants” because they can never be as fluent in technology as a native who was born into it. You can see it in the digital immigrants’ “accent” — whether it is printing out e-mails or typing with fingers rather than thumbs. Have you ever noticed that digital natives, unlike digital immigrants, don’t talk about “information overload”? Rather, they crave more information.

I disagree with this as I am 40 and consider myself to be a digital native. Not because I have played a lot of video games but because I have no fear over technology and can adapt to it fairly readily. In fact I love technology. So does Mike. However we are in the minority in our age group I think...

However it is an interesting article on how "command and control" management is being bypassed by the digital age. Read the whole thing here.