Being sent to your bedroom used to be a punishment: now it’s a teen dream. Through personal computers, mobile phones and gaming consoles, teenagers are spurning antisocial angst for a culture of “connected cocooning”, reports the Guardian (link via textually). The article on textually continues, The mobile phone, especially, has become an integral part of a young adult’s everyday life. Ringtones are a badge of identity as much as the clothes you wear; text and picture messaging is the way to spread the word.
The term coined by MTV to describe the 16 – 24 generation; connected cocooning is yet another facet of the instant gratification culture that drives this generation. Seems to me that for the young, keeping in touch with the aid of technology has double advantages : 1. communication is instant, 2. in most cases the parents have no clue about what is happening or how. Mobile phones and specifically instant messaging provide the user real-time value and presence, which are both vital ingredients in the way youth communicate.
Read the excellent Guardian piece Growing up with the wired generation.
Closer home, this report in The Industry Analyst Reporter says W2F analysts predict that in India alone, youth mobile ownership will grow by 300 percent. This means that by 2007, India will claim an estimated 27.6 million youth mobile phone subscribers spending $2460 million on average per year.
Mobile gaming companies and marketers are jumping into the bandwagon in a great hurry. And why not? The Business Line reports today that 4.5 lakh mobile game downloads happen every month in India.
So according to CIOL, Nokia and Samsung are busy developing cell phones which support local languages in India. And it is now possible for your mobile to get a comic angle; Hindustan Times writes that Amar Chitra Katha has now tied up with mobile technology firm Coruscant to push folktales and mythological comics into cellphones.
So what next?
Update : just read on BBC – Literary classics become txt msgs. For example, Hamlet’s famous line: “To be or not to be, that is the question” becomes “2b? Nt2b? ???”.
ya, right.