One of my colleagues just commented that people are frequently telling him to act his age. Another Californian colleague once remarked that one of the great things about growing up was that you could roller blade around your kitchen without anyone complaining. This started me thinking about age; we do a lot of surveys looking at how mobile behaviour changes with age, but the problem is – which age? It seems to me that we all have several ages:
Chronological age – the tragic number you reluctantly admit to when filling in forms.
Physical age – the age you appear, which depends on how hard you’re trying on any particular day, and the amount of botox and plastic surgery you can afford.
Subjective mental age – how old do you think you are? Most of us seem to freeze in our teens or twenties which explains why I still fantasise about becoming a rock star.
Objective mental age – how old do you seem to external observers? The colleague whose comment triggered this thought seems to be under-achieving here.
Technological age – it used to be that techno-habits such as IM and social networking were the prerogative of youth, but now they’ve spread way beyond their early adopter age groups. We see silver surfers, tweeting grannies, middle-aged fashion-phone users, and 10 year olds playing games on their parent’s iPhones. Anyone who’s been a parent will remember those times when you’d risk your treasured technology just to get a few minutes of peace. There’s still a lot of technological ageism however, a while back I was depressed by one of our young focus group subjects who remarked that “mobile email is for middle-aged men”.
What fascinates me are the massive mismatches between these different ages. I can think of people with a chronological age of 50, a physical age in their 30s, a self-image frozen in their teens, an early-adopter technology mentality, and an apparent mental age that oscillates between 10 and 60. So I guess the message is that you need to be cautious when interpreting the results of surveys that correlate mobile habits with age. And as for me, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Saqib Ali // Oct 28, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I think we need to add a new question to the surveys:
“Digital Nativity Age (i.e. Years since you became a Digital Immigrant):”
I recently did a survey where I asked number of years on Facebook etc. to determine “Digital Nativity Age”.
2 Nick Jones // Oct 30, 2009 at 11:09 am
Good point, but where does digital nativity start? Your first Facebook identity? Your first tweet? Your first blog? Maybe your first avatar?
And what about those “digital ancients” as well as the digital immigrants, e.g. those people old enough to have played dungeons & dragons on an ASR33 teleprinter. (for younger readers the definition of ‘teleprinter’ can be found on wikipedia).
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