18 month olds are deciding your digital future.

The other day, a friend of mine and her son were leaving their house but the son wouldn’t walk out the door because he had misplaced his phone.  Like you and me, he couldn’t imagine going anywhere without his iphone.

He’s four years old.

It wasn’t a working iphone; it was a deactivated phone that his mom wasn’t using anymore.   You know, the old kind that couldn't tell you how to get to Buffalo Wild Wings; you had to type it in manually.  But it worked just fine for pretend conversations. 

And his ipad works just fine too.  A real one.

That four-year-old is part of the generation-to-be-named-later that’s come after the digital natives.  He and his iphone-holding, ipad-swiping, Nook and Kindle-reading buddies, who the New York Times suggests calling touchsceen natives. Call them what you want, but call them powerful; at ages from six months to three or four years, they’re deciding their generation’s digital future.  Here’s how.

You can tsk-tsk and shake your head at the use of digital products by babies who can’t yet walk or talk, but you can’t stop their continued exploration and use of digital products.  Just try to learn from them and maybe even join them.    

And when the next uber-cool digital product comes out, you can join the latest tech adopters, and do what they do:  drool all over it.