The Digital Divide is commonly known as the widening gap between technology “haves” and “have nots” – with “have nots” resulting from a lack of access to technology or lack of money to get “digital.” It’s an important problem that needs to be addressed and there is a lot of attention and effort trying to do just that.
But there’s another Digital Divide that is transforming the world of communications and entertainment that could also have profound consequences. It’s a Generational Digital Divide.
There is a growing gap between the entertainment and communications behavior of the younger generation and the older generation – with “older” being a relative term. If you’re 40, even if you’re online many hours a day, and texting to keep in touch with your children or buddies, you still don’t qualify.
- Multi-taskers: 68% are texting while watching television, 73% are IM’ing
- Texting over voice calling: 13-18 year olds are sending 10,000 text messages a month. That’s 10x what 35-45 year olds send.
- Real-time messaging versus email. Email is for “formal” communications.
- Prolific in their communication and online social interaction, producing 7x the content in Social Networks then 35+ year olds.
- Processing information in fundamentally different ways – typically in smaller chunks – as covered in the Atlantic Monthly’s “Is Google making us Stupid ?“
- Demanding simplicity in how technology works, they’re no longer willing to spend hours setting up their various equipment.
- Expecting multi-screen (TV, PC, Mobile) control over what they want to see and how they want to communicate .
Every company in the entertainment and communication space needs to pay attention to this generational digital divide, or they risk the chance of following in the footsteps of the newspaper industry, plagued with a shrinking audience and shrinking revenue opportunities.
Are you and your company on the wrong side of the divide and unaware of this changing behavior. I suggest you focus someone in your organization who’s on the “other side” of the Divide with the task of intimately understanding this audience – while they’re not paying the bills now, they will be soon. The time to build loyalty is now.
Communication and Entertainment Companies can cross the chasm and bridge the generational digital divide by delivering multi-screen services that let people get their entertainment across any device – TV, PC, Mobile (for example, the “TV Everywhere” movement led by Cable Operators) and even more importantly let people communicate across any device. Because, to quote James McQuivey, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research- ”Communications is even more primal than entertainment.”
And Communication doesn’t just mean voice, it means SMS, MMS, IM, Facebook and other social network messaging services
If traditional companies don’t understand this and act, new companies – with names we might recognize now and many we haven’t heard of yet, will be the winners. Case in point — who would have put Apple and Google in the same category as telcos five years ago?
