"Immigrants and Natives"
The New York Time reports that in 2012, the Urban Dictionary was used by Courts to define terms like iron ("handgun"); catfishing ("the phenomenon of Internet predators that fabricate online identities"); dap ("the knocking of fists together as a greeting, or form of respect"); and grenade ("the solitary ugly girl always found with a group of hotties").
That Courts around the U.S. are using the Urban Dictionary to understand the vernacular used by their younger defendants is no surprise to Aaron Peckham, its founder. When he began the site in 1999 at California Polytechnic State University, it was meant to be a parody. "Friends and I would sit around and make up words," he said. With the expansion of the Internet, however, contributors from around the globe began to join in and enforce a kind of democratic evaluation of the words. Urban Dictionary currently gets 110 million monthly page views and receives about 30,000 proposed new definitions each month.
A vast percentage of the global population, though, is not a "digital native" (a term coined by U.S. author Marc Prensky in 2001). Middle-aged people did not grow up with the Internet. I did not grow up with the Internet. We did not even start using it as teens. We are not native speakers. Many of us remain, as CNN's Olivery Koy would have us called, "digital immigrants".
Although it is the digital immigrant who has invented the actual technology that defines the digital native, Prensky believes we are further, Prensky insists the differences run a lot deeper than merely our typing speed. There is a significant difference in the way we process information, with digital immigrants taking it in linearly instead of switching from source to source at warp speeds as natives do.
"A relic of a previous time… Old world-settlers, who have lived in the analogue age and immigrated to the digital world.”
Figure 2 - Digital Native from http://www.greenbookblog.org/2013/08/29/market- segmentation-for-digital-natives-vs-digital-immigrants/
Management Consulting Firm Deloitte quotes a 2012 study by Time Inc which, biometrically monitored both digital natives and immigrants for 300 hours to determine emotional engagement and visual attention. Interestingly but not surprisingly, natives showed a lower emotional response to content, because they experienced it briefly and simultaneously. Cnce boredom sunk in, they moved on.
"This study strongly suggests a transformation in the time spent, patterns of visual attention and emotional consequences of modern media consumption that is rewiring the brains of a generation of Americans like never before," said Dr. Carl Marci, CEC and Chief Scientist, Innerscope Research, who performed the biometric monitoring for the study. And while this poses serious challenges for storytellers and marketers in this digital age when it comes to successfully engaging consumers, there is no denying that experience with technology can turn older people into digital natives.
And in fact, it already has. The generational digital gap is narrowing. In some places.
Recent research has shown that baby boomers comprise the fastest growing segment of smartphone owners in the US and they make up a third of all Internet users, with a third of those boomers describing themselves as "heavy Internet users." Google's study of more than 6,000 boomers and seniors confirmed that:
• 78 percent of boomers and 52 percent of seniors are online
• The two groups spend an average of 19 hours on the Internet each week, more than with TV, radio and magazines/newspapers
• 71 percent of boomers and 59 percent of seniors use a social networking site daily (the most popular being Facebook)
• 82 percent of viewers say YouTube is their preferred online video watching site with three in four online video watchers have taken action -- such as searching on the Internet for more information -- as a result of an online video.
• 77 percent use their mobile device simultaneously with another screen
• 82 percent of them use a search engine to gather information on a topic of interest,... and to broadcast their opinions not unlike these very savvy, very cheeky older internauts:
The figures and quotes above, however, are representative of a population of over-45s only in certain countries and do not necessarily reflect the reality of middle age and older citizens in other nations as these graphs indicate:
The Digital Agenda Scoreboard published by the European Union stated that around 120 million European citizens have never used the Internet.
Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal have the highest rates of non-users, age being the principal factor limiting their ability or willingness to use it. Around two thirds of Europeans aged 65-74 and about half of those aged 55-64 have never used the Internet. When asked about their reasons for not having an internet connection the respondents cited:
We can only expect these quantities to reduce as a more Internet savvy generation takes place but what is more concerning is that only 13% of individuals living in a household with income in the fourth quartile (or higher income earners) have never used the Internet, against 45% in households with income in the first quartile (or lower income earners).
This situation has led to a discussion on the need to give incentives to the take-up of internet access by low-income families through special tariffs, not only in the EU but also in the United States. Yet, the overall expenditure in information technologies by the EU represented only 2.4% of European GDP in 2008, far beyond the 2.8% of Japan and the 3.3% of the United States.