The Internet Hits Adolescence: What’s Next?

16 April 2008 | Culture, Internet, Marketing, Media | Comments

This came out in this morning’s ad:tech Daily, and I wanted to share it with you here:

Last year the publicly-available internet turned 13.

If we think of the early banner ad, spam and the pervasive pop-up as interactive advertising’s first baby steps, then we might also think of the pop-up blocker and the spam filter as the young internet learning to read at the local IAB Elementary School, starting in 1996. A few years later, the surge of broadband and Blackberries might be the medium’s first Little League or AYSO season.

Where does that leave us today? We should all start thinking about the near future as the internet’s awkward teen years, with high school, first kiss and the senior prom coming up in before we know it. I realize that this might seem silly at first blush, but please bear with me.

Watching a child turn into a teen you see a sometimes-charming, sometimes alarming mixture of newfound adult stature mixed with social immaturity. Small people turn into big people, but judgment can lag behind. Newfound strength comes along with moodiness, and the impressive adult in possession of her or his full strength is lurking just around the corner. I’m not sure what the interactive counterparts of acne, hormone-driven urges and impulse-control problems are, but the metaphor I’m driving at is one of profound transition and transformation– with all the anxious excitement of a teenager holding a newly laminated driver’s license.

The problem with the phrase “Web 2.0″ is that it implies that the internet has already arrived at adulthood when it’s really just hitting the seventh grade. Yes, what some call social media and others call the “read/write web” marks a significant change from the early years of ponderous content management systems and hand-coded web pages, but we shouldn’t mistake the difference between kindergarten and confirmation or a bar mitzvah for the larger distance between birth and your first job after college.

In the same way that adolescents have wider ranges of movement than children, over the next few years — as the internet makes its way into adulthood and takes marketing with it — we’re going to see interactive media burst forth from the laptop and desktop to land in ever-smaller mobile devices and other appliances. Nobody will need to buy an expensive new “smart fridge.” Instead, savvy supermarkets will give away free RFID readers that will email customers when the milk is about to expire. A combination of RFID, GPS, paid and municipal WiFi will create a ubiquitous computing environment that is ad-supported and locally-focused.

While audiences will be smaller they will also be more engaged. We won’t conquer the challenges of one-box-in-the-living-room media convergence anytime soon (we may have to wait for grad school to get there), but we will see ever-increasing media fragmentation through IPTV and more and more online video.

Today’s teens navigate an overwhelming media universe with grace and agility: it’s clear that they are capable of feats of concentration and input-juggling beyond anything I could have done during my own teen years back in the 1980s (when dinosaurs chased me home from school).

Watching them grow up with the internet, and watching the internet grow up with them, is going to be exhilarating to watch.