Making the Distinction Between Young and Early Adopter

Originally published on: 9/20/2005 6:38:49 AM

I see a scary trend where an assumption is made where, because something is adopted by the 13-21 year old crowd, that becomes a de facto prediction about the future distribution of that technology. What bothers me about it is that no distinction is made between which of those technologies are adopted because the group is willing to try new things versus how much of it is because they *are* 13-21.

For instance, that group has always favored synchronous communication. In past generations it was obsessive phone use and now it's IM. However, each generation has left much of that behind when they grew up. Do *you* spend 4 hours on the phone 6 nights a week as an adult? Yet, somehow, because 15 year olds spend more time on IM than on email, *that's* the future being predicted.

One of the presenters of the BlogHer conference made a good point (one of the few speakers where I didn't want to argue against them) about checking to see how much of the current trend in soul-baring-blogging is because the groups in question (young people) are in an identity-finding phase of their life and how much is the actual platform for communication.

I just think we all need to be careful when making predictions about technology trends to see what actual problems it solves and opportunities it creates for everyone before jumping on the bandwagon.

Comments

Elisa Camahort
commented on 9/20/2005 I agree. Plus I think it's also dangerous to assume that, for example, Silicon Valley geekdom habits and rates of adoption are early indicators of rates of mass adoption.

When I hear people say that they think blogging and RSS are now "mainstream" I'm kind of amused. I'm not saying it can't get there, but the tools would have to be streamlined and improved enormously before someone that I really consider "mainstream", like my mother, would consider it part of their daily life.

J Wynia
commented on 9/20/2005 Exactly! I've been listening to lots of the conferences on things like blogging and podcasting (from IT Conversations) and there is *so* much of this going on right now. How the "rough sound" of podcasting *is* what podcasting is "all about".

What it often comes down to is a large group of people who associate mostly with people just like themselves and lose sight of the fact that even a group of 100,000 people when looked at worldwide is the kind of niche that disappears into the noise.

This isn't to say that you won't find an audience with an interested population of 100,000, but don't pretend that it says anything about the group as a whole.

Of course, since I live in Minneapolis, I probably have a pretty big anti-NY and anti-California chip on my shoulder to begin with and this just makes it worse.

Elisa Camahort
commented on 9/20/2005 Oh, don't get me started on podcasts :)

Not everyone in CA and NY is unaware that we live in a bubble. I am willing to buy that as the coasts go or silicon valley goes EVENTUALLY goes the nation...but we seem to want to compress the time frames into weeks, and that's just not reality.

Worker Bees Blog
commented on 9/24/2005 media-focused seminars and events. The latter are certainly terrific for networking, but the former keep me grounded in the reality of where we are in terms the evolution of this technology's adoption into the mainstream. I recently commented on a post at J Wynia's blog on this very subject of "mainstream." I had a conversation as early as this past February with an industry bigwig who believed I was totally wrong if I didn't believe that blogging had gone past the mythic Gladwellian "