Listening to what the digital natives have to say

Here's an old English saying: "You cannot put an old head on young shoulders." It means that teenagers will make mistakes because they don't have the wisdom that comes with experience and age. But is that still true in the 21st century? Aren't today's teens better informed and savvier than any generation that's gone before them?

Recently, Morgan Stanley's European media analysts asked 15-year-old Matthew Robson to describe his friends' media habits. The young Londoner's report was "one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen, so we published it," Edward Hill-Wood, head of the team, told the Financial Times yesterday. The reaction was unexpected. "We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day," said Hill-Wood, who added that the report had generated five or six times as much feedback as the team's usual reports.

"Teenagers do not use Twitter"

So what did Matthew say? Well, for a start, "Teenagers do not use Twitter." Updating the trendy micro-blogging service from their mobile phones is simply too expensive, and Matthew's peers, who cannot imagine life without their mobiles, prefer to spend their money on texting, films, concerts and video games. As well, they find television boring, and prefer listening to music on websites such as Last.fm than traditional radio.

Sadly, Matthew has rather grim news for the troubled print industry. Teens find advertising "extremely annoying and pointless", he said. No teenager he knows regularly reads a newspaper, since most "cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text."

I don't know if we should listen to the opinions of those who don't read newspapers, but the time has certainly come for those who make media to pay attention to what the "digital natives" have to say. They have ideas and opinions, and none of them want to be just another brick in the wall.