Part 5: Generational literacy and the broadening of the internet demographic (psychographic?)
SHAHAR: Just one more thing, you mentioned before about literacy, it’s a funny thing, because there’s a generation out that is totally networked. How do you see education—like we are going to give a talk next week in a high school in a web design class, and I was thinking about the talk and how do you really approach that? Because you have a whole change in behavior and a whole different audience coming to this market, so how do you see—?
JIM: That’s a very good question. Well I personally see, and I’m probably a little eccentric on this one, but I believe that it’s literally a different species of human. I believe that there is a generation gap between most of people in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, 70’s and the kids growing up networked is so profound, that literally it goes back to McCluhanesque kinds of dynamics—like that media affects cognition… literally rewires the brain. And so that’s sort of the first level. The second is that I feel like young people almost are a transparent generation. They pretty much know that if they do something it’s going to end up on the internet somewhere. Whether they write something or create something or if they behave somehow, they’ve grown up in this environment that they’re cognitive of the fact that it very may well end up out on the web in text or video or image out on the web.
But it’s interesting that you asked that because we’ve done a few focus groups in the 16 to 26 kind of age group, and we asked them a lot of questions, but one line of questioning we asked was “how many here think they could make a movie?” And pretty much all of them raised their hand and the ones that didn’t wanted to raise their hand. And we asked them about a T.V. show and writing a book, you know, a novel and so forth, and they all raised their hand. And then we asked how many here could make a Facebook or a MySpace and somebody invariably asked “You mean make a profile?” and we said “No, make a Facebook. Make it from scratch, you know, build the engine.” Not a one, right? So the older generations don’t know how to make them on purpose, and they don’t really use them. Though they’re starting to use them more and more, and more and more are being *made* for them. But the younger generations use them like a fish swins in water and most of them don’t know how to make them either. So, there is this kind of disparity that they use them but don’t know how to make them. They’re literate in usage, but not in creation. There are multiple literacy’s. There’s one that’s usage literacy and the other one is a—for lack of a better term, a production literacy. How do they make these things that they’re using? And some of the kids naturally do it, like the kid that created Facebook. And some of them just don’t. I actually think the approach is more like harnessing a natural resource or a wild energy. Because these kids aren’t really about articulating in a linear fashion. So it’s more about creating frameworks for them to sort of be chaotic and to allow them to bounce off the wall within some confines. And that’s essentially what enginetworking is. You know, I don’t know what’s going to come out of this, and the kids don’t know, but if you create an environment that channels this non-linear energy and this non-linear thinking that they’re doing, then you may actually have a chance of harnessing it, because they don’t actually think in steps of one, two, three or in fuzzy logic kind of methodology. Does that make any sense Shahar? I’m just riffing at this point. I had never thought about that.
SHAHAR: It’s awesome. Do you think that it’s easier to engage the younger people online?
JIM: I know exactly what you mean, so I actually think it’s harder to engage them or attract them to what I’ll call “traditional media.” But if you hit it right, I think it’s easier to get them into places where they feel more comfortable. There are so many kids now that prefer to rent a movie or order a movie and watch it at home or online than they would to go to a movie theater. Well, that’s different than me—you know, the movie theater’s like going to church, you know, I love that thing. But they don’t necessarily look at it that way.
SHAHAR: They don’t need the ritual of going to the movies that we grew up with—
JIM: Exactly, and often when they’re doing their media experience, they are multi-tasking. And we grew up in the religion of film, if you multi-task in the theater you’re going to get pounded. So if you’re in a theater and you’re on the phone or texting or talking, it’s just not acceptable behavior, but young people do it. They do it all the time.
SHAHAR: Now they don’t know how to respect—are you familiar with Blendec?
JIM: No, what’s that?
SHAHAR: Well Blendec is a local company that produces blenders. It’s a 30 year old company in Provo actually, and they started to make some videos. And they started to make some youtube videos.
JIM: Oh really?
SHAHAR: Yes and they created a website called “wicked blend” and they blend anything there. They blend iphones and ipods and whatever.
JIM: Oh yeah, I’ve seen that on the web, sure I’ve seen it—
SHAHAR: Well they’ve gotten more than 10 million viewers just on youtube—
JIM: That’s awesome!
SHAHAR: Yeah from a business prospective, what’s happening now is that they sell in one weekend what they used to sell in their best month out of a year.
JIM: That’s incredible! I love that story.
SHAHAR: Now people say “only the young people are watching youtube.”, but, the blenders are not bought by those young people. So how do you see this connection here, and why it did work so well with blenders for example?
JIM: Well, first of all, I think that’s a— I don’t know what the latest stats are for youtube or that, but I know in general video viewing is not at all is confined to youth. I mean my mom who is 74 is watching videos on the web now. Like I said, I don’t have the stats for that right now, but anecdotally speaking I know that that’s—the generation gap for web usage is rapidly disappearing. So no matter what the tastes of other people that are coming on to the web, they’re going to find that the distance between creator and consumer is so short and so I’m not at all surprised—it’s ironic, you know, I’ll use my mother as an example again. Ten years ago, you know, when my colleagues and I all got on the web, we’d forward anything that we thought was funny or clever, and even the chain mail —the chain letter kinds of things where “you have to forward this to 10 people or you’re going to have bad luck” kind of thing. So we did it…now 10 years later I’m seeing my aunt, my mom and all of them…I’m getting more junk mail from them. So they’re going through their own “teenage years”.
SHAHAR: It’s true. It’s their “phase” I have an uncle that also did that every single day.
JIM: But you remember when you did it don’t you?
SHAHAR: Yeah, but way, way at the beginning—
JIM: Exactly, so now we’re transitioning into a broader demo—the internet is no backwater. The internet is anybody—well anybody that can get on a computer. So I don’t think there is—from general web usage—from blogging, watching video, sending email and that kind of thing, that’s a very broad behavior now, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that a company that sells blenders to sort of established “married with children” people now resonated really well. By the way, it was hilarious, it was funny and that was one of the key things. Diversion is one of the key motivators to get people to do things. And it was creative, fun and entertaining, and it just so happened to entertain people. It resonated with everybody, it just so happened that people with disposable income chose to dispose it with them I guess.
- more –> Part 6: Get beyond the buzzwords– build enginets that will weather the times.
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