On the Internet, Age STILL Beats Youth (or why Paris Hilton won't surf the web like Hugh Hefner)

David Heath
Monday, 13 October 2008 16:36

Business IT - Networking

At the recent Global Information Industry Summit (GIIS), a presentation outlined how grown-ups are better prepared to ‘skim,’ ‘bounce’ and ‘view’ on-line material than are their children.

A number of bloggers (here for instance) have commented on a presentation by Professor David Nicholas at GIIS which originally intended to look at the success of eBooks as a means of providing study texts to university students but ended up learning something very different.

As it turns out, Nicholas’ researchers learned a number of interesting things. 

Firstly, that around 40% of people who visit any website never return.  I guess this means that they don’t necessarily find that the reasons they were attracted to the site to be significant once they looked around.

Secondly that around 50% of visitors to a website viewed just 1 – 3 pages.  One could judge this to be a simple corollary of the first fact.  It doesn’t take long to figure out that a site just “isn’t for me.”

Finally, and most importantly, site visitors spent very little time evaluating the information on a web page.  To quote the presentation, they “flick and scan.” 

Professor David Nicholas, Director, School of Library Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London was presenting a study on, as he described “the digital fingerprints, left behind by digital natives browsing the Internet.” 

Oddly, the digital natives (or neophytes) were left in the dust by the supposed osteophytes who seemed better at skimming, bouncing, and viewing than the young people were.  It seems that what was most important was what people brought to the table.  While the neophytes brought flexibility and a digital persona, what the adults had was much more important – mind maps, concepts and a world framework to contextualise the new material.

Perhaps in this situation Marshall Mcluhan had it wrong.  The medium served only to subvert the message for those not yet ready to receive it.

Are there lessons?