The 2010 Threshold

Around 2010, the transformation from separate digital tools to media ecology accelerated. Separate tools began to flow together into new media environments. The threshold for new media disruption was crossed early in the new century, when new patterns of disruption began to emerge and new generations of young people came of age. Digital and connective technologies and tools began the long process of turning into media. The nature of the innovation ecology shifted during this transition period.

Young people who experienced this shift at a seminal time of their lives—particularly kids on the verge of becoming adults—will play an elevated role in what happens over the next decade, looking out to 2027.

Being a leader with people who have experienced this shift will be different in important ways, even though nobody yet knows just how different. As these young people become leaders, they will have capabilities that will be beyond those of us who are digital immigrants—even people like me who grew up with the early internet.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that it was an abrupt snap from off to on. The transformation became apparent to me only in retrospect, looking back. It is debatable just when the threshold was crossed, but it was approximately in 2010. The younger you are, however, the stronger the effect and the more prepared you will be to look really long.

Around 2010, the tools of connectivity began to blend together to seed a new media ecology of connectivity. When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Apple wasn’t just offering a telephone; it was introducing a digital appliance with a dizzying array of uses, including one still used by older people like me—to make a phone call.

Another early signal event in this transformation was Apple’s App Store, created in 2008. Then, around 2010, the connective tools started mixing together and transforming into connective media ecology.

We had early digital tools for connectivity back then, with a wide range of failed attempts preceding them. All of these technologies linked in some way to packet switching and the upcoming age of the internet.

The threshold period around 2010 was characterized by

■  early-stage—still very crude—social technologies

■  provocative but limited interfaces through early tablets and smart phones

■  early stage blended-reality abilities to overlay in-person experiences with digital filters

■  vivid video gaming interfaces that were already far more advanced than typical office systems of the day

These early media provided a hint of what it would be like to have a supercomputer on your shoulder—or in your glasses or contact lenses—as you experience life.

Questions started to emerge: What if we really did have a virtual overlay over the physical world? What if we could bring a world of computing power to the virtual overlay to help us make choices and filter everyday life? What if computing was truly mobile? What if anything could be a screen? What if we had intelligent agents that guided us through life, according to criteria that we established?

Whatever media ecology you have around you when you come of age will shape the rest of your life. I would argue that most kids become adults between age 13 and 15, depending on the kid and depending on the culture. The younger you are and the richer the media ecology around you, the stronger the impact will be on you.

I believe that young people who became adults in 2010 or later will grow up with different ways of thinking, ways of learning, ways of interacting, and ways of living. They will have powerful capabilities to look long and not be stuck in the futures that adults are imagining.

I’m really optimistic about those people who are 21 and younger in 2017. In fact, the younger they are, the more optimistic I am. Those who were born in 1996 or later will be most prepared for the future. This is not a sharp generational line. Rather, it is a fuzzy threshold where isolated technologies transformed into a new media ecology that is becoming a new context for living. The new media threshold of 2010 was clear only in retrospect. It was both gradual and dramatic. The new media ecology that emerged is now the context for thinking about and planning for the future. I believe that the kids who became adults in 2010 or later will make a better future.

The directional shift for this future is clearly from less digital to more digital to so digital that the word digital will become unnecessary. In fact, over the next decade, the word itself will disappear, since virtually everything will have a digital element. The big transformation will be from digital tools to connective media that will be so pervasive that people will wear them like jewelry. Digital media will so ubiquitous that they are invisible.

I wrote a book called Groupware in 1988. Nobody talks about groupware anymore because it’s just what our computers do. As group functionality got built into everyday computing systems and became basic to how we work and live, the word groupware became unnecessary. The word digital will follow a similar path, not to extinction but to being so pervasive that it is assumed.

Already, it is too late to have a digital strategy per se. Organizations will need strategies that have digital capabilities built in.