Digital Immigrants and Natives (more)

posted by hal….

Last week, as reported here and elsewhere, Lord Saatchi, the Briritsh advertising icon, pronounced advertising as we know it dead.

One facet of his thesis which kept coming up over the weekend was the notion that the brains of Digital Natives are physiologically different than those of Digital Immigrants.

If you recall, Digital Natives are people under 25 – those who grew up with the internet. Digital Immigrants are geezers over 25. We’ve learned the customs and language of this new land, but will always speak with an accent.

So it turns out that the brains of the Natives have developed differently than our own. They are wired differently. This phenomenon is called CPA, or Continuous Partial Attention (sometimes Constant Partial Attention).

Natives are constantly doing three, four five things at once, processing information, making decisions, taking action on many simultaneous levels. It’s beyond multitasking. It’s hypertasking.

Digital Natives hang out on Web 2.0 places like YouTube and Flickr.To be successful in our brave new world, marketers and communicators will need to learn how to blend in with the Natives and communicate without a thick Immigrant accent.

It might require that we re-wire our brains.