Digital Immigrants & Digital Natives

Maurice Saatchi’s essay last year in the Financial Times of London about The Strange Death of Modern Advertising was a seminal event to all of here at OCDC.

To everyone in the blogocracy, it was probably like “dude, you just catching up with this?” But to those of us who got our start in the era of traditional advertising, it ain’t so ’til Lord Saatchi says it is.

Briefly, his thesis is this:

If you are under 25, your brain is actually wired differently then those of us who grew up prior to the digital age.

…the digital native’s brain is physically different as a result of the digital input it received growing up. It has rewired itself. It responds faster. It sifts out. It recalls less.

Saatchi’s essay pulled together scientific research from psychologists, physiologists and other really smart people.

“This, apparently, is what makes it possible for a modern teenager, in the 30 seconds of a normal television commercial, to take a telephone call, send a text, receive a photograph, play a game, download a music track, read a magazine and watch commercials at x6 speed. They call it “CPA”: continuous partial attention.”

Turns out that those of us who lugged a Smith Corona to college are Digital Immigrants. We’ll find a way to get along in the new world, but we’ll always speak with a thick accent.

Wow - what a gestalt moment! No wonder we didn’t know what was going on half the time. We thought it was creeping Alzheimers, but it turns out we’re living in a foreign country. The land had shifted beneath our feet and we didn’t even notice. When did Ozzie become an actor?

Quickly, we paid a 14 year old to teach us HTML and stole a book from the library on Dreamweaver. The rest is history.

Lord Saatchi helped shape a part of our mission - to bring over friends and kin from the Old Country. Give them a bridge to the New Land. Show them that the New Land is cool and that they can Digg it.