A very common question arising in the last few months is what do I see happening in our culture from the perspective of a corporate anthropologist and an observer of American life?  

Apart from the economic transformation we are going through, there are clearly other changes taking place in our society---related and unrelated to the busted bubble. How do we make sense of all that is happening as consumers blog away, discover Twitter, enjoy Facebook and really build social media communities in entirely new ways? And for how long will what last? My Space is hot, then cool.  Are these trends that emerge, surge and purge? Passing fads?  Or are they important trends that are going to stick for awhile. So Inc readers, the big quesiton is should a business pay attention? Or is it mostly noise that is irrelevant?How do we make sense of this new world? We tend to see blogging or Twitter out of a context of how young people today have grown up and come of age. I was recently at a Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter boot camp sitting next to folks from traditional advertising agencies. They had sent their new creative talent to help them survive in a new age where the old media was clearly not the same if not truly gone. The new was changing quickly.  How were they going to tweet, re-tweet and thrive? For this posting, let me begin by setting the stage with some insights about the Net Generation—a good deal of which comes from research about this group of 11-31 year olds from Don Tapscott’s work, Grown Up Digital.  I don’t know if you might have read his Growing Up Digital published in 1997. Grown Up Digital is a new $4 million research project done on 6,000 Net Geners and is well worth digging into.The research is very important if we are to get beyond what might seem like the "fad of the moment." These fads reflect some very important changes taking place in our society as a generation of young people enter the consumer space having grown up in an entirely new world. Their world is one in which computers, iPods and video games aren’t new technology.  It is more like the air they breathe — stuff that is part of everyday life. From a cultural perspective, this is at the core of their existence.  Not much different than refrigerators or television sets.  It isn’t New Media—it is the media. And the old stuff, like TVs and newspapers are simply no longer as relevant for the Net Generation.

Just think about it:

• The rest of us shop online, use our Blackberries and read those blogs. But the Net Generation multitasks five activities at once, watch movies on their little iPod screens and text incessantly. Some tell me they read 50 blogs a month.
• You talk on the phone and check your emails. Email for the Net Geners is for business, and a bit passed its utility curve.
• They use the phone to surf the web, find directions, take pictures, make videos and collaborate. You can’t even imagine what they have created on Facebook. They IM and their Skype webcam is always running and they often play multiuser video games for hours.
• You watch TV news; they have RSS feeds to their favorite sources. You sometimes listen to music; they have their iPods going all the time.
• You consume content on the web. They create it.
• You visit YouTube occasionally to see a video that was recommended. They go to YouTube all day long to see what’s new, and they make videos to show you how they put Chapstick on with their toes, in the car going to Arizona.

We think it is just kids growing up. But it is not their age that is so important. It is their culture.

They see, feel and think and ultimately behave differently. Enough for now. Give it some thought and we’ll be back this week with the next observations on our changing culture to share with you.