Digitally Passive Digital Natives

You could be forgiven for thinking all youth were early-tech-adopters, tweeters, geo-location updaters, and 24/7 ‘Facebookers’, on the hunt for the newest digital fix.

It’s easy to see why – so much has been written about younger generations being enamored with new technology, adopting it early and using it proficiently.

It’s true, digital does provide lots of compelling creative activities, and enables almost anyone to ‘make it’ these days (as argued in the ‘Press Pause Play’ trailer) – but let’s not forget that this only applies theoretically – in practice most people aren’t digital creatives.

On one level we all know this – and pay lip service to the 90/10 rule - but recent research workshops with young people brought it home to me just how digitally passive and reactive 20-somethings can be.

It’s worth pointing out that these young people weren’t hunting for digital content, branded or otherwise, and instead were typically prompted to interact with digital content by more ‘traditional’ media like TV and radio.

Much digital activity seemed also to be under the radar – the majority of our mainstream youngsters were struggling to spontaneously name any online activities they’d participated in.

In the workshops we looked at a number of digital engagement ideas and it was striking how important it was to our young consumers that these activities were not time-consuming or in any way difficult to access.

On the other hand our youngsters could welcome being part of a creative project or supporting a cause – as long as they didn’t have to make much of an effort. And there was certainly room for brands to act as facilitators here – as long as they acknowledged consumer passivity and did most of the hard work themselves!

So it’s clear brands have to work quite hard to make digital engagement ideas effortless for youth - particularly as quite a few youngsters are more digitally passive than anyone might assume.