In this presentation, Jeremy Kirshbaum defines "digital natives" as anyone 19 years old or younger in 2015, contrasting them with "digital immigrants" (older generations) and "digital expatriates" (those who adopted technology later in life). He argues that digital natives will be highly disruptive to markets, workforces, and education because they have grown up immersed in visual interfaces, early social media, and cloud computing. Kirshbaum introduces the concept of continuous partial attention—coined by Linda Stone at Microsoft—as a more accurate description of how natives process information, distinguishing it from the myth of superior multitasking. He cites neuroscience that multitasking is rapid task‑switching, not true simultaneous focus, and presents evidence from a high‑school research project in Oregon showing a small subset of "high‑medium multitaskers" who actually perform better when multitasking. Real‑world examples (motorcycle texting, stock trader monitoring multiple streams) illustrate the behavioral shift. The talk concludes with implications for businesses: current offerings serve digital immigrants, and companies must anticipate the rising curve of digital natives in hiring, product design, and education to stay relevant.
Chapters
The next force that we're gonna look at is the digital natives. So, the digital natives is anyone who is 18— sorry, 19 or younger this year. And so, we are not digital natives. We're maybe what you could call digital expatriates, and then our parents are digital immigrants, depending on how— exactly how pithy you wanna get with it. So, they're going to be very, very disruptive. So, we have our declining curve. Digital immigrants, and the ascending curve of digital natives. So, your business right now is serving digital immigrants. When are you gonna jump? Both for your workforce and for your customers. If you're 30 years or less, the definition of a generation is 6 years and shrinking. So, we're actually a full generation away from these people, even though they're only a few years younger than us. And so the younger you are, the stronger your effect. So what are they exactly? In sociology— oh, go ahead.
I thought you mentioned something.
Oh, okay, yeah, what's your—
People who are completely fluent in all digital transactions and they can't imagine a mechanical or standard item like that, so they're just like instantaneous everything, trending everything, popping from one bad idea to the next.
Great, yeah. In sociology, there's like a fundamental tenet that the media ecology you grew up in, radically shapes how you live out your life. So we grew up without the internet for part of our life, and then in about the 1990s we started having personal computers and maybe interacted at a very young age, and then eventually dial tone started happening. And so we were close to it, but we weren't natives in it. These are the first people to grow up with highly immersive highly immersive visual interfaces, early-stage social media, and the beginnings of ubiquitous cloud-served supercomputing. You guys might have seen this video. It went viral for a second, but this is kind of a cute representation of what we're talking about when we say digital natives. So, this baby playing with an iPad, having a great time. It's very intuitive and fun. Then comes to the magazine, and is having trouble. So the digital natives are an entire generation of people for who magazines are iPads that don't work. So digital natives are not just people that are better with computers. There's actually mounting evidence that many of them will think differently, although we're not entirely sure how. But we think it has to do with continuous partial attention. So continuous partial attention is a term invented by Linda Stone during her research tenure at Microsoft, and she studies the kind of philosophy of how technology affects us as people. She has a great blog, I really suggest checking it out. There's a video of her talking about it right here, but I won't show it. So, if you go to a neuroscientist and you say that digital natives are going to be better at multitasking, he'll tell you flat out that you're wrong. Because neuroscientists consider multitasking to be very fast switching between tasks. And multitasking, they'll say it's impossible. They'll say multitasking is impossible, and they're right. What is possible is focusing on a single task while monitoring other things around you. So here's some— why is that happening? Yeah, OK. It's a VUCA world, folks. And so here's some examples. This man in Uganda is riding a motorcycle while texting. Not safe. It's not as good as focusing on his driving, but he's making it work.
That's a good point.
I know I've texted on my bicycle before. Don't tell my mother. This is a stock trader. He's focusing on trading stocks, you know, while he's monitoring many different streams of information that are coming at him through different media interfaces, through numbers, through spreadsheets, through the people around him. And then, of course, here's the classic continuous partial attention: try to do your homework while watching TV. This is a— We have a video of some researchers that we spoke with. They're in high school in Oregon, and they did some studies on their classmates.
Yeah, so our school, OES, has a program for science research, and so we've been working on this ever since freshman year. And we really, really wanted this year to see how media, becoming such a prevalent part of our lives, is really shaping our brains. So we've actually continued this project, and this is our 4th year working on it, but Our multitasking findings are really, really awesome to us, and so that's how we got here.
Okay, so what we found is that on average, most people will perform best while they're focused on just one task. However, there was this small group of people in our study who we classified as the high-medium multitaskers who were actually apparently able to kind of cope with this multitasking and were able to perform these tests of task filtering and task switching very well. And interestingly, these These high-medium multitaskers also performed the best while they were actively multitasking, whereas their performance decreased dramatically when they were made to focus on just one task.
So we discovered this, and we talked with them about their research. It was really interesting to us. It was just a small subset of people. It was just one school. But it did fit our forecast. And we wondered why this was happening, and the interesting factor for us was that the high media multitaskers, as they called them, or what we would call people using continuous partial attention, performed worse when they weren't multitasking. We weren't sure why that was until we found this study published in the Harvard— sorry, it was published by Brown University. There's a great article about it in the Harvard Business Review. And this was a study, it's a little bit complicated, so bear with me. They had 2 groups of people and there's 2 different tasks. One was moving a cursor on a screen in a really complicated way. It's like you couldn't connect the dots because it was going at like a 45-degree angle. It was like hard to do. And then there was another task which was this series of flashing letters and numbers which you were supposed to pay attention to and mark when some particular sequence happened. So one group was tested on their efficacy with the tasks when in a focused setting, one task at a time. The other one was tested while doing both at the same time. And they found that when they had people learn the task and then tested them, the people that learned in a multitasking setting performed worse when tested in a focused setting. And the people that were tested in a focused setting performed worse in a multitasking setting. And not only that, over 4 different iterations of the study, the multitasking group actually performed only very slightly worse than the focused group. So this gave us an explanation for what was happening in that group. These were people at that high school that had learned these tasks while they were multitasking. So then when they were assessed in a non-multitasking setting, they weren't performing as well. So this suddenly expands our mind on, like, when you're at work and you're in a meeting, you see someone on their cell phone, or someone— you tell kids that they can't, like, watch TV while they're studying because If they're going to be assessed in a different environment than they're learning it, it can actually hurt their scores. So what does all this mean? First of all, continuous partial attention is not as efficient as focusing on a single task. But in a VUCA world, we sometimes don't have the option. Remember our soldiers here. They have no option to focus on a single task. They can't be like, all right, wait a second. Stop shooting. I'm going to make a call. It's a little bit different for us, but we deal with the same things. And so continuous partial attention is different from multitasking. We're not sure how. And because of the Harvard Business Review study, it looks like it can be learned, because over iterations they get better, almost to the same level as a focused task. And the digital natives are likely to be better at this. So how does that affect our workforce in, in 5 years when we're hiring them? How does that affect when we're engaging with them as customers? How does that affect how we teach our kids? By 2025, everyone on the planet who is 29 or less, rich or poor, will be a digital native. They'll be connected in ways that we cannot imagine. To reach them, you'll have to gainfully engage with them. They will have great global reach and empathy, and if digital natives have little hope, some of them will be very disruptive and even dangerous. At the Army War College, when they see this last one, They think about ISIS. Would they like being called consumers or employees? Probably not. They'll probably want to be called people. All right, so again, foresight. Hopefully that's bringing you to some insight, and then you'll turn it into actions.
