By Richard Irvine:
Here’s a question for you:
As “Freedom Day” arrives, and we shuffle slowly out into the light, what aspect of this new found freedom will you be celebrating the most?
Standing at the bar of your local, dinner at a restaurant without having to double layer your North Face with your thermals, and a movie on a big screen with an even bigger bucket of popcorn, will I’m sure all be up there. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the single biggest cheer as restrictions come to an end will be reserved for the dialing back on the those never ending Zoom meetings.
Or in the words of Dame Maureen Lipman, “Enough already!”
Even the subversive thrill of sitting through a 3 hour WIP meeting wearing nothing more below the waist than a pair of underpants and flip flops has lost its’ shine.
Zoom happy hour? Shoot me!
It’s no wonder then that after nearly two years of this, Zoom Fatigue is now a recognised medical condition. And if the number of Zoom Fatigue self-help videos on YouTube is anything to go by you would be forgiven for thinking that the whole country is afflicted.
That said, one generation, the BOOMERS and to a lesser extent the Silent Generation, seem to be immune to the irritants of video conferencing. If anything they’ve embraced it and quickly grasped the potential of using this little piece of biz tech to help keep them in contact with their nearest and dearest - a captive audience thanks to months of WFH and home schooling.
This shouldn’t come as too much of surprise. As non digital natives, BOOMERS have been forced to learn about digital from the ground up. And being the generation that has always challenged the norm, they haven’t bought into it wholesale. Instead they’ve become quite adept at adapting it to their particular needs.
Take for example, the humble SMS. At the end of the last century (that’s the 20th Century, just to be clear) when mobile users first started to communicate using SMS, abbreviations and the use of punctuation marks to create new images quickly became a new and novel way of “speaking”. Once the Boomers discovered how to increase the font size on their phones, they too welcomed the SMS into their lives. Only they didn’t adopt the new text lingo of the younger folk, they created their own. What, I wonder, would they make today of something like Mural? Virtual Pictogram, anyone?
The irony in all of this is that Pre-COVID, this group was considered digitally illiterate by a vast majority of brands and sidelined from all but the most mundane online marketing efforts. In truth they are just as digitally savvy as any other generation, they just see the digital world through a different lens.
Bi-focal, of course.
Richard Irvine is Head of Creative and Innovation at A3A Agency for the Third Age
richard@a3age.com
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