Now we are moving on to some of the really interesting stuff. It has do to with the second of the three characteristics that Søren Schultz found in his research on the digital natives:

“We are now intimate with our primary technologies”

What does that mean? That means that we ,in many cases, need to stop thinking about technologies as tools at our disposal but as something that influences our behaviour in a complex manner.

Lets use the iPhone as an example of this.

Søren Schultz asked people if their iPhones had sound toggled on or off, and people below the age of 30 answered that it was always turned off. The answer to why people had the sound toggled of, was that they always had their iPhone with them – always – and they had the vibrator on, so they would notice the call or text anyway.

The essence of this is that the iPhone is not something we think about bringing along anymore, it’s not something we think about using – we just do it by instinct.

When we stop reflecting on why and how we are using the iPhone, then the iPhone starts to influence our behavior and way of thinking. As McLuhan once wrote it “the technology becomes an extension of the human being”.

Another example of this, is the function in the Facebook message-tool which enables you to see, when the other party has read your message. Don’t tell me that it hasn’t made you answer the message faster?

I believe that we need to take account of the way that we have become more intimate with our techonology. It means that we – as eMarketers – can almost always reach our target audience through e-mails or any social media, because it goes straight to their Smartphones. And they always bring their Smartphones along.

BUT that also means that we can easily overextend. When we think that we are pushing something through a public channel, such as social media, we are actually poking (the Smartphone vibrator) people in real life – because people are always online and they don’t want to be offline. From that follows that they cannot turn the digital messages off, as they could with the TV-commercials!

Therefore is their no such thing as a good, old-fashioned digital mass media and that has made the process of reaching reaching people much more complex.