Add Culture

By Author: mike bayer
Total Articles: 6
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ADD culture

I find it kind of funny when I hear someone of my parents' age (late 50s) talk about the younger generations having short attention spans. They think we all have ADD! I understand their observation, but I have to argue that ADD has nothing to do with the young folks today having wandering minds.
From my observations, it seems those of us born in the 1980s and thereafter have grown up in a culture of infinite choices. I say infinite, because if a person were to pay attention to all the messages thrown at him in a day, he would have no time to do anything else. For this reason, the youth of today have adapted and become good at selecting to which voices to give an ear.
How will this relate to the world of media?
I think as the younger or "digital native" generations get older and move into the positions of principle consumers, drastic changes in the media will start to occur. Heck, we are already seeing the tip of the iceberg today: try finding a youngster who reads the newspaper or who doesn't know about Craigslist. In fact, we have come to see many changes in the last decade, but ...
... I have a feeling the changes coming in the 2010s will be drastic in comparison.
Visual messages
As a result of short attention spans, I have a feeling that content will be mostly visual in the future. I say this because it is easier to express more in a shorter time span with a video than in long paragraphs of text. I am excited for videos to replace text, as it will be interesting to see all the cool filmmakers emerge from a generation that grew up accustomed to an audio visual culture.
To close, I just want to say that my father is 61 and has ADD. When I am at home visiting him and he is surfing the Internet, he calls me over to explain each item that pops up on his screen. In fact, there have been times when he has phoned to ask whether he needs to renew something he does not even have. My younger brother, who has ADD just like my dad, has never called me once in regard to determining which messages are relevant. This proves that the older generations can't label most of us ADD just because we ignore 90% of what is said to us. Like a virus that is immune to a vaccine, the new generations have grown up with the ability to spot important information and ignore the rest.