BPN 1014 The terabyte kids

The Dutch present day youth have received 250.000 e-mails and SMSs when they reach 21 years. Up to that age they also have spent 5.000 hours behind their PC, gaming. Besides they will have surfed 3.500 hours on internet. And this is only an average as some of the youths are active on the computer day and night. These are the conclusions of Marianne Hebert of Logica CMG in a study for financial markets. She points out that their behaviour has radically changed over the last two years. On the other hand companies have found new ways to approach them and penetrate in the target group by offering commercial products such as horoscopes, ring tunes, screen savers as well as other gadgets.

The digital 21 years generation now processes on average 80 e-mails and SMSs a day, including a bombardment of spam. The youths will have to learn to handle these spam messages as they will not decrease, but increase. According to Albert Benschop of the University of Amsterdam youths are able to handle more. They can filter enormous mountains of e-mail, SMSs and select chat sessions via MSN. They protect themselves and are very inventive. They can process more matters in parallel than we thought a few years ago.

These characteristics and their flexibility in filtering the mountains of information are worthwhile for companies. The more you can filter out, the more valuable you are as an employee of a company.

Logica CMG is not convinced that the new employee, who lives in the digital world, is already welcome in companies. The companies do not know how to handle these digital life employees and how to get the most out of them. The problem for the companies is that they do not know what is possible and how to optimise the knowledge of digital life employees.

IMHO, it is clear that a dichotomy is growing between the generations of PC and internet pioneers, the early adaptors and the contemporary PC, games and internet adepts. For the PC pioneers the pc was a large typewriter and calculator. For the internet pioneers internet is still a medium which produces information, including user generated information. But they do not maintain a blog, write micro-blogs or twitter. So even in a young company a divide will show.
Just think of the next generations, which will come onto the market every five years from now. My young grandsons will have a terabyte of multimedia information, mails and SMSs by the time that they reach 21 by 2025.

Blog Posting Number: 1014

Tags: HR