I’ve got your zeitgeist right here for ya!

If you’ve never heard of Universal McCann -or as I will heretofore refer to them, “UniMac”- well, you aren’t in the internet marketing business.

I’m not in that industry, but I came across this 3-month old research study written by them while I was looking for something else. (BTW, how much creativity do you think that search engines have encouraged with stuff like this? You start with one train of thought, looking for something specific, and you get taken off on an unexpected tangent. I don’t think that I want more accurate search engines!)

UniMac conducted a bunch of surveys and focus groups in order to try and quantify how pervasive usage of new forms of media is among heavy users of the internet. The study is full of lots of pretty charts and graphs, but here is the headline from their conclusions:

“Digital fluency has become the zeitgeist of modern day culture with a younger tech savvy segment adopting new media platforms and leading the way, not to mention teaching their elders.”

Basically, just about everybody up to the age of 45 who uses the web is using blogs, watching YouTube and signing up on social networking sites at about the same rates. Most telling, I thought, was the figure that 71% of all internet users 16-34 are blogging. This, coupled with their other finding that 1/3 of all 16-34 year-olds are practicing digital piracy (AKA “file sharing”), indicates that the social and economic revolution that the internet has inspired over the past 10 years is only tip of the iceberg.

"File sharing is commonplace and hints at where the web is going – electronic social interaction beyond the written word."

This dovetails with a great article that I read in New York magazine a few months back. In it, funny-man/critic Adam Sternbergh observes that today’s 35-45 year-old set are just as likely as their 18-24 year-old counterparts to be into the latest trends. In fact, they extrapolate their “trendiness” into pretty interesting manifestations.

"When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?"

There’s some Upper-West-Side pretentiousness packed into that lead, but you get the idea. The generation gap is closing fast, and my generation (the Gen-Xers) are at the forefront of the change.

Folks born in the early and mid-1970s are old enough to remember what the world was like without the internet. We can recall when Star Wars represented groundbreaking, cutting-edge special effects. We remember when there were no cell phones and when beepers were all the rage (posting messages onto beepers using numbers was the precursor to IM-ing). At the same time, we were young enough when the technology revolution hit that we could adapt to it and absorb it into our consciousness. We trail blazed on AOL and helped drive the development of broadband networks with our insatiable appetite for MP3s and porn.

Your welcome, world.

I think that in addition to spurring new ways to do business and making the world more “flat,” the Internet Revolution has also empowered individuals to be trailblazers. There’s so much disparate stuff on the web that you almost have to innovate every day in order to make sense of it all for yourself. You are forced to always be exploring and changing your methodology; there is no real chance to get set in your ways.

A good example of this constant evolution can be found here. CNN has an AP story about the theory that our culture’s fascination with social networking sites may be nearing an apex.

"As the novelty of their wired lives wears off, they're also are getting more sophisticated about the way they use such tools as social networking and text and instant messaging -- not just constantly using them because they're there.

“I think we're at the very beginning of them reaching a saturation point,” says Bugeja, director of Iowa State's journalism school and author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.

It seems that we may have gotten through the “wow” phase of these new way of communicating and we are now actively trying to find the best ways to take advantage of them in our lives. For some, that may even mean dropping them altogether.

“The superficial emptiness clouded the excitement I had once felt," Henderson wrote in a column in the student newspaper at Iowa State University, where he studies history. “It seems we have lost, to some degree, that special depth that true friendship entails.”

So, after just 18 months, we are already starting to talk about how this particular phase of internet development may have run it’s course. I wonder what the next iteration will be? Which technologies will be merged and how will they revolutionize how we communicate, collaborate and socialize?

It’s an amazing time to be alive.