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This session saw two teenagers – Dot (18) and Rory (19) take to the stage to discuss their attitudes to and use of technology. Digital natives, each with their individual take and preferences, their immersion in the digital space and creation of digital content was explored with the help of chair William Higham of The Next Big Thing.

Dot was 13 when she started blogging but then, as she moved into adult self-awareness, she realised the stupidity of leaving things up there from when she was younger. Rory has a blog but is more a denizen of gaming environments such as Gamespot. He also helps organize events and advertises across peoples’ forums and blogs. Filling up band nights is a hell of a lot easier this way, he explained.

Multiple digital identities

Dot uses the web more for communications, and is “friends” with a lot of people she doesn’t know offline. She prefers online because it’s free. William wondered if she operated as the same person or discreetly in different groups? She admitted that there are some people she knows only through ICQs and explained she has multiple digital identities and is very sure none of the identities ever collide.

Dot hated MySpace because, she explained, because she’s not in the popularity game of seeing who’s got the most friends, getting the most comments, etc. Rory however does like it for discovering certain types of music nights that he previously would have first heard of word-of-mouth.

TV falling off the radar

Loyalty to any particular social networking platform was thin on the ground. Rory said he would migrate elsewhere and that all his friends move around. He plans to move every 6 months. LiveJournal is Dot’s current service of choice as its better at pulling together people who actually go together with her interests, she reckoned. She is also a gamer, into Creative Commons and a supporter of the Open Rights Group.

Rory is more into mobile and the internet and actively steers away from TV. Dot barely watches TV at all although she downloads some movies and news online. She has an Xbox gaming console and mobile but the web is her primary media domain. Rory said he takes photos randomly and uses the Photobucket on his Mac to post them straight onto his blog.

Migrating around web services

I asked if with all these multiple digital identities and shifting around they were at all concerned about having no continuous records of their content? Rory replied he had no problem with deleting his account, adding that it also helps him get rid of irritating people every so often.

A delegate from a university asked how should we keep in touch with you over a period of time if you’re always migrating around the web? Rory said he likes a formal approach by email, but Dot thought that peoples email addresses change a lot.

What technologies or services are they fans of? With 2,000 blogs in her RSS feed, Dot is a fan of RSS, but she’s not so into podcasts and she doesn’t think there’s enough information about what it is. Rory said he rated things like Wikipedia which is regularly updated.

In terms of paying for a service that lets you download content – music, film, TV, etc – instead of downloading illegally, Dot thought they needed to make it easier and good quality and then she would think about paying.

Web literacy & trusted sources

Are there boundaries between life on and offline, Jemima Kiss wondered. Rory said online and offline are integrated, although he normally meets people first and then becomes their contact on MySpace. Dot said her perimeters are more about presenting her particular online identities.

Tom Watts of Sense Worldwide asked if we should teach people how to re-interpret the content on the web rathe than just cutting and pasting it. Rory said overall he had benefited from plagiarising off the internet and as such he sees reinterpretation as part of that. He also uses Shoutwire that scans all the new sites and highlights and orders them in a hierarchy. Dot said she relied on BBC and outrage in the blogosphere.

Content worth paying for?

Still on the subject of paying – or not – for content and services, Rory commented that paying £30 repeatedly for membership of Habbo Hotel is a bit costly and it’s too boring to justify it anyway. Sam Sethi asked – if your ISP enabled you to have all that content but for £3-£5 a month – would you then pay for it?

Dot said she would, but not in the Napster model where they take back all the content when the subscription expires – she wants to own it.

Broader trends in microcosm

Ben Metcalfe asked if they had ever built anything themselves online? Dot said she used to but stopped when she realised that others do it better. Now she’s more interested in building the community side of things. Rory explained that he trained as a web designer for a while, knows Flash and now does podcasts for his father’s business team in the accountancy and management consultancy firm he works for.

The issue of the risks of leaving a "digital footprint" through blogging was raised, and the earlier discussion about opening up networks and making data available to remix and mash-up was referenced. Balancing the risks and opportunities, is there still a value for walled gardens where people can go and converserse and blog but have absolute control over who can see it? Dot commented that people create their own walled gardens in forms of communities of people they trust. Trying to create them independently wouldn't work, she reckoned. You can only do it through talking to people and your own knowledge of who's there, she added.

Craig Hill of Digital Outlook wondered if, despite the fact that they shrugged off the Generation Y tag, there is still a generational aspect to this. What is the cut off age for your current interests, and, are young people getting older? Rory said it’s purely an interest and an older person can be 20 times better than him at anything on the web, so it’s not a generational thing, it’s about putting the hours in. Dot replied that there is no cut-off age for being always-on, but that people growing up today will find it hard to imagine a time when all this information - whether by web, mobile or mobile web - was not available.

Content 2.0 - 2006 conference Website:
http://www.content2point0.com/2006/

About William Higham:
Higham began his career in the music industry. At Epic he worked as press liaison for artists such as Michael Jackson and Alice Cooper. He moved to the Marketing departments of Virgin and then Polydor, where he co-ordinated advertising and communications campaigns for global artists like The Rolling Stones and Meat Loaf and helped launch the careers of Verve and David Gray. He left the industry in 2001 to pursue a career in marketing research, working with entertainment and media clients and consulting on global research project Breaking Trends. He set up Next Big Thing in 2003. Next Big Thing predicts consumer change and locates new consumer markets across a range of industries and demographics. As well as bespoke consultancy projects, the company runs a popular consumer news website, publishes a bi-monthly magazine exploring key trends and the Next Big Thing blog. Clients include BBC, BSkyB, SAB Miller, Virgin Radio, Universal Music and media agencies Mindshare, Y&R and BBH.

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