Have you seen the movie 21 Jump Street? We rented it over the weekend and had to laugh at the generational differences facing the police officers as they went back into the high school environment. Channing Tatum’s character kept shaking his head, wondering what kind of parallel universe he entered where the cool kids completely changed the way they act and think. And Jonah Hill’s character was upset because if he had been born 10 years later, he would have been “cool”.
And while there were many hilarious lines throughout the movie, I loved the one where Jonah Hill called and talked to the main girl he was pursuing, asking her to his party. She stared at the phone ringing, answered it kind of awkwardly, and told him “nobody calls me except old relatives once in awhile – we text”.
Yep, that’s right here in the US. Things have changed fast over the past few years. And they will continue to change just as fast here and around the world in the coming few years.
If you head over to different parts of China, they use smart technology even more than we do.
If you head to other parts of the world, they may be lagging behind. We noticed more smart phones and similar mobile behavior when we were in Spain, yet in Italy, most people were still using standard cell phones for talking only – no smart technology yet.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming. We had a lively discussion with our cousins when we were in Lucca, Italy one night. It’s a generational thing. The 70-somethings and the 40-somethings were amazed at the smartphone concept and what we were currently doing here in the US. The teenagers pretty much knew it even though they didn’t have the technology in their hands. They’ve been online and have a friend or two with enough knowledge that they understood it – and had it on their “gift” lists from mom and dad.
So even though certain places and people may not be using technology at lightening speed now, they will. Very quickly.
It’s easy to stay with old technology – an old website – because your clientele is older and isn’t accessing things through mobile technology. It’s easy to tell yourself that. But it simply may not be true. [Read more…]