The New York Times has this extensive piece slated for Sunday’s edition that focuses on the media and digital communications habits of what marketers call the “millenials,” people born between 1980 and 2000. And the article, penned by Tom Zeller, Jr., is a real eye-opener to anybody who doesn’t already hang around one of these hyper-connected, always-communicating youngsters.
The bottom-line is that these millenials are always connected — via cell phone, Internet, social networking sites, blogs or text messaging. Not surprisingly, they don’t consume media the way more mature people do.
The preceding generation may have thought that e-mail, newsgroups, Web forums and even online chats accelerated the word-of-mouth phenomenon. They did. But they are nothing compared with the always-live electronic dialogue among millions of teenagers and 20-somethings.
The piece profiles actual millenials and I suspect it’s exhausting for oldsters to even read about this group’s frenetic communications activities. Highlighted in the piece is the incredible “feedback” loops that millenials live in — a typical twenty-something can poll friends, colleagues, old classmates in a dozen different ways every day.
The article digresses into a discussion of whether this feedback loop is creating a generation of group-thinkers, afflicted by “hive” mentality. Silly discussion if you know a group of active millenials, who are, if anything, more individuated than any preceding generation.
This age group does, however, move quickly from phenom to phenom.
“The period of rapid change we’ve been experiencing, it’s just been that much more dramatic,” said Vicki Cohen, a senior vice president at Magid and one of the leaders on its millennial strategy team. “I mean every time you turn around there’s something new on the horizon. And this group, as we’ve been noticing, is kind of the arbiter, quickly determining whether things are hot or not. “And it’s much more accelerated,” Ms. Cohen added. “With the technology, the Internet - in terms of being able to facilitate the social networking, which is a big part of this younger group - there’s just so much ability to quickly transfer information.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 6:53 PM|Comments(0)
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