Article: 44 hours in a day

By Flemming Wisler, Futureorientation February 2008

If you are 25 years old or younger, you probably have special skills that make you a member of an extremely challenging club. This is the club of people under 25 who manage to cram up to 44 hours into a good, old-fashioned analog day of 24 hours. That’s why you have to get up early to be young with the young. Meet the new multimedia generation.

I eagerly kept an eye on the passing bus stops as we crept through the traffic of Frederikssundsvej.

Here it was – just in front of the record store, whose windows were plastered with posters of Willi Jønsson in a cap, with the name of the band “Gasolin” in the shadow.

The band’s newest LP had just hit the streets, and it was going to be a great evening — if only that joker remembered that we were supposed to meet.

I was on my way to visit my best friend, Flemming. He was the first of us to get his own apartment in Copenhagen. And our agreement was that we would go to Montmartre, a club, after having something to eat. But the problem with Flemming was that you could never be certain he would remember the appointment. He didn’t have a telephone, so he called from his grandmother’s, who lived close by. And he didn’t always read his mail, so even if you did send a postcard a couple of days in advance, you still couldn’t be sure.

I pressed the button on the door intercom a couple of times.

“Hello?” came the response.

Yes! The day was saved, and I didn’t need to travel back to the outer boondocks with my red wine under my arm. I went in the door to a happy evening.

This little Copenhagen vignette, anno 1977, would be an unholy nightmare for a teenager anno 2008 – 30 years later. In fact, I tested it on my own two, and the utter hopelessness of the project – of making arrangements, meeting and keeping in touch via obsolete analogue tools such as snail mail and rotary telephones – put the whole scenario in an odious light.

Just the thought of not having hour-by-hour updates about where close friends are, who they are together with and, most important, what they are doing, seemed almost to provoke fear. To that, add no Internet and only one TV channel. We approach the incomprehensible.

A new generation has, indeed, taken the scene.

Only if you deserve it!

Children born in the 1980s became the first generation in Denmark to grow up with a large television channel selection and with advertising as a natural part of the broadcast. Later, in the 1990s, the Internet turned up, along with fast computers with challenging three-dimensional playing surfaces and, not least, the mobile phone. Since the turn of the millennium, the media offering has been extended to easy access to music and, increasingly, to films. And the Net’s social dimensions, in the form of meeting places and virtual worlds, have long since made the Web both two-way and global.

Young people 25 and younger are, fortunately, just as ordinary as the young people before them, with the same strong need for communities and their own identity. But what seriously separates this generation from the one before is the strength of their media tools. They can tailor and personalize everything. They can act “global,” and they do.

Children and youth raised with open media channels from morning ‘til night can increasingly filter messages and information, so that only relevant, entertaining and valuable bytes penetrate their consciousness and receive their attention.

However, if you want reach this group, you can take comfort in knowing that, if you hit the right channel with a relevant message, you will hit them right in the solar plexus.

The acceptance of placed messages in personal online-channels appears, however, to vary by culture. It’s bigger in India and Asia than in Europe, for example, where advertising is mainly expected, and tolerated, in traditional media.

The point, however, isn’t so much the channel, as it is the relevant message. There’s no percentage in forcing access to users, as Rupert Murdoch did when he bought MySpace.com.

Google has apparently shown the path forward by delivering precisely that form of advertising that media sharks under age 25 want to use: the small, diminutive text advert aimed precisely at the situation you are in, right here and right now.

The same applies to both iTune’s and YouTube, which know what you are listening to, or watching, and then recommend more from the same drawer.

Multichannels need multipeople

One of the more interesting sides of the accelerating media- and content offering is what it does to our use of time. Much indicates that young people today simply don’t have the time to attack all the offers thrown their way. That means many of them “stretch” time by training themselves to contemplate and address far more tasks and information than those of us who grew up in 1970s Denmark, when telephone booths were few and far between, and when McCloud was the only show on Saturday night, could manage.

Surveys show that young media users easily handle three-four tasks simultaneously, enabling them to watch TV, listen to music, send text messages and game, all while surfing Facebook. Studies and homework being an extension, understand.

According to American studies, young people can now cram the equivalent of 44 analog hours into a good, old-fashioned 24-hour day. That’s why you need to get up early to be young with the young.

Fishing for information from several media has become a widespread behavior, which, as a result of multitasking, prompts chain reactions and a ripple effect through the news stream, entertainment and communities.

This form of media meshing means, for example, that a news item presented in one medium will immediately be “nuanced” by viewing it in another medium closer to the event, and perhaps supplemented by a Google search, reading a blog, and texting/emailing with friends. Think about how you react to breaking news you see on the Net, or hear about through a text message. You most probably research further and find your own angle on the story.

The same applies to entertainment, where immediate global fame, à la Warhol’s divinely foreseen 15 minutes, can arise, if a string with music, video – or, ideally, both — suddenly penetrates the filter and gains status as a really sick joke. The actual sequence will spread at the speed of light, and the source of the entertainment will be ransacked for more of the same, and discussion about the discussion will finally slip into the mainstream “river of news.” When the event makes it to the printed press a couple of days later, the actual entertainment is ancient history in the fast circles of the Net. At dinner, your teenager looks at you indulgently when you talk about news you read in the newspaper.

The key to everything

The media generation has gone through a kind of instant evolution that has literally changed or strengthened the sensory apparatus and motor function, so that social interaction and navigation in the global digital network can be optimized.

One of the most important tools has become the mobile phone. The mobile phone is such an integrated part of the young person’s character and network that most cannot imagine life without it. It has become a sort of extension of the body and a prerequisite for being able to orient and express oneself.

The compressed spelling that text messaging requires has become a parallel language, where icons – smileys – become indicators of emotional state. While emails were a hybrid between telephone and written letter, texting has become a hybrid between emails and conversation. They are an even shorter, more frequent dialogue form, which act as a sort of social pulse monitor.

The mobile phone long ago left shed its guise as a portable telephone. Today, it is becoming a multimedia channel for receiving, recording, editing and broadcasting. This will present problems for producers of standalone digital cameras, mp3 players and, paradoxically, mobile phone makers, because most people in the future will not want to carry a one-dimensional media platform.

Sony and Ericsson saw this and joined forces in a fusion of telephony, photography, video and music. Apple saw it and has just merged the iPod with the telephone and computer. What will Canon and Nokia do?

Friends

What has the media revolution done to its children? Has it eaten them and changed them into obedient Red Guards equipped with mobile phones instead of the “little red book”? Fortunately, no. One of the common themes of young people’s media consumption is also one of humanity’s: social interaction.

Never before have communities and friends had greater status than right now, when the phenomenon has actually become measurable. Even the Danish prime minister has bragged about where many friends he has on Facebook. The media generation is globally informed, smart, creative, lightning fast and always in dense social relations.

The challenge for the media-conscious young is being able to sort and choose in an almost infinitely large supply of opportunities. There is certainly a limit to how many times it is humanly possible to double the number of hours in a day, and a longing after deep calm will probably lead to islands of offline.

Maybe there will be status in being an old, pre-media oracle from the 1970s, who dares to turn off the power and navigate via analog instruments and undocumented wisdom?

Sources: Joe Uva, OMD Worldwide, Global Media Study, New York

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