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All the kids are right

On the drive home the other day, my friend Rhys and I got to talking about when we first discovered the internet. He mentioned that he started using the internet in high school, when he was about 15. (Rhys is one of those funky young, talented hip marketing guys that software companies love to hire because they make them a bit cooler.)

Okay - so that just made me feel old. I can't really remember seeing a web browser until I left college. And it dawned on me in a moment of horrible reality that there are kids arriving in the workplace today who were born in 1987. These guys started high school after the .com boom. The internet is to this generation, what TV was to mine.

These are kids who have grown up with the web - and not just the old style, "hey look! It's just like a library but packed into a tiny beige box!" kind of internet - but the communicative chat, publish and discuss kind of internet. According to the Pew Internet project, More than half of the US kids online today have created digital content - added blogs, posted or tagged photos, remixing internet content. That's about 6.8 Million kids, and that's just in America.

Content now is more nebulous than ever - it's becoming as free as conversation. Maybe someday soon the government is going to have start handing out grants to journalists, in the same way they do to sculptors or musicians...

I guess where I'm going with this is that this read/write web hooplah is actually a thing. The internet isn't just being written by big media and consumed by the public, it's being edited by the public. It is the public. How does your organization communicate with this all reading, all writing public? How will it relate in the next three years? (Because by then, the kids born in 1990 will be arriving to help run your organization...eek!)

Local H had it right...

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