What's age got to do with it?

In the afternoon today, I got a full primer on PlayStation from Neo(age 6)(who lectures me regularly on mobile and video games, thinks am way behind on the learning curve...) and then a lil later my father(age 65) wanted me to help him install skype!! My younger brother is quite a blogger and a web 2.0 expert!! Quite a digital savvy family balanced only by the combined tech-unsavviness of my mother and mil:-)

As the Internet turns 40, our one preoccupation that all technology products and services will only have the youth as early adopters, practitioners and evangelists will be put to test regularly...Just when I was mulling over these thoughts over a crazily busy fortnite, my planner buddy Meraj sent me this NYT link - Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens. Worth a read and some reflection...

Archiving some nuggets from the article..

1. Surprisingly(actually not so surprisingly, if you pause to reflect) many teens in the US(do we have data for India as well?) are not that heavy users of twitter. As one of them says - "I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life". Well am not teen by a wide margin but have similar thoughts about twitter...

2. Though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for just 14% of MySpace’s users and only 9% of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success is now proving to be largely a myth.

3. Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.

If I look around at my digital habits and behaviour and many of my friends, the digital adoption curve doesn't always co-relate to our age in some simple linear fashion...On the other hand, India will be different because we are crazily young in age and outlook(as far as statistics go).

On another note, this reminds me of my interview with Javed Akhtar in Bombay when he brushed aside all this fanatical obsession of marketers with youth - "Aap logon ne youth ko hauaa bana rakha hai. Youth ko yeh chahiye, youth ko woh chahiye. Arrey saheb, youth ko toh khud he nahin pata ki usko kya chahiye:-)"

My Son's Father : 5 Things I Re-Learnt From Neo

I was a bit apprehensive how my son, Neo would adjust to this city shift - Bombay to Delhi. He took less than 24 hours!! Children are that adaptive...I have tried to spend more time with him these last two months...It's amazing how you can learn/ unlearn/ re-learn tons of stuff from your kids. In their innocence and curiosity they often make profound comments and observations....Here's what I picked-up!

1. Look beneath/ look around. I remember it was one of the first few weeks in our Gurgaon house, he ran upto me to show something, Dragged me to the 'backyard' and asked me to look at 'the thing'. With my well trained planner eyes I kept searching for 'a thing' a 'big physical thing' while Neo wanted me to show how tall the grass had grown!!

He often stops me and shows me an unusual flower, the full moon, a bird on the wire, ants in the bathroom...

2. Play and learn. Like all kids, he has an insatiable appetite for play. Kids want to play in the morning, while eating, while studying, before going off to sleep...In play they learn. Playing UNO, snakes and ladder, cricket, ludo and Monopoly has made me wonder how we can inject more play at work. Increasingly a lot of work that we( at least I do) is conceptual and creative. Being too serious and working like a factory shift has diminishing returns beyond a point. It's the play value at work that adds that extra bit!

3.Do you know my friends?It's important for him that my wife and I remember all his friends names(often I fail miserably)- Bombay school friends, Bombay Ashiana building friends, Gurgaon school friends, the colony friends, the school bus friends...

What I feel is in all the lip service that a lot of marketing pays the DM mailer often reads - Dear loyal customer, the call centre guy often calls up from your mobile company to find if you are a post-paid or a pre-paid customer!!

If it's a relationship you care, remembering names is important. Period.

4. M and H.The other week-end I had taken Neo to the Qutab Minar(achcha tower hai he kept on saying), he suddenly points out to some similarity he found between the Hindi letter 'mm' and the English alphabet - 'H'. I wondered why this thought never came to me.

Is it because our analytical minds have been trained to spot the differences more than focus on similarities...Kids are good at recognising patterns. And it would help if we could learn to relax our grey cells and hunt for patterns in unlikely places.

5. Deliver-what-you-promise. It's very important for Neo that I walk the talk. If you have promised a bedtime-story, it must be told. Neo would wait upto an hour with sleep-filled eyes to hear a 'Ram-aur-Shyam' story from me.

Kids I have realised can teach us an awful lot...Next time before we brush them aside - Accha chup raho, abhi tum bache ho - maybe it would make more sense to lend them a ear!

P.S. The picture is that of a 'digital drawing' that he made on my laptop:-)