The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School

Not to go all nerd on you all... A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of listening to Jeffery Cole from the USC Annenberg School's Center for Digital Future. He heads up the annual Digital Future report where he analyzes the digital usages of broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and social networking habits of countries all over the world. This is a topic peaks my interest and I found this discussion to be eye opening.

There were so many great notes from this but my favorites were from the highlights of a 12-24 year old. I think this is such a great representation of what the world will look like in even 5-10 years.

People who are between the ages of 12-24 year old will...

- most likely print up to 5 photographs in their entire life.

- will only IM and text message. They think email is for their parents.

- never read a newspaper, but are attracted to some magazines. If you consider the money that goes into the paper production most people this age see that as incredibly wasteful. They don't understand why it's worth waiting for when they can get the news real time.

- never own a land line and maybe not a watch. The land line didn't surprise me since most people I know now don't have a land line. The watch surprised me. With cell phones and computers I guess nobody really needs to have one anymore.

- not watch television on someone else's schedule for much longer. No surprise there.

- have little interest in the source of the information and more about the aggregation of the information. Yikes. I find this to be very alarming!

- move everything to mobile. It's obvious that mobile has changed in the last few years and knowing the US is really far behind other countries in their mobile dependence and usage, I can totally see where this one is going.

- be less interested in television than any other generation before.