• by Peter Lauria , January 29, 2007

If Consumer 2.0 is barraged with an unprecedented amount of media on any number of platforms, what can we expect for the next generation of media consumers? What does Consumer 3.0 look like?

One theory advanced in the Kaiser Family Foundation's recent report on "Media Multitasking Among American Youth" takes a particularly Darwinian view. It conjures up images of Gremlin-like news junkies frantically digesting nuggets of information: "In this media-heavy world, it's likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and that these changes will be naturally selected. After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful."

It's probably safe to assume that it will be more than a generation before such evolutionary adaptation even begins to take root - after all, evolution moves at a glacial pace. But broadly speaking, the next generation of media consumer won't look like a consumer at all. The next generation is as much a creator of content as a consumer of that content. Consumer 3.0 writes, edits, splices, shoots, and manipulates original or reproduced content to aggregate its own audience for its own media ecosystem.

Consumer 3.0 is in charge of distribution and networking. More than half (55 percent) of kids between the ages of 12 to 17 use online social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook to create Web pages and upload text, music, and video files, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"The tools are already in place for people to completely tailor their own media experience," says Jason Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media's Entertainment Group. "MySpace has no direct involvement in the media on the site; it just provides everything a user needs to do what they want with media."

Granted, consumers have absorbed and incorporated new media technologies such as camera phones, VOD, place-shifted TV, and broadband Internet applications into their lives at an impressively rapid pace.

But podcasts, RSS feeds, user-generated content, citizen journalism, social networks, and other forms of digital content creation and distribution remain in their infancy. And if not in their infancy, many applications still fall short of critical mass. There might be 100 million people on MySpace, but that's nothing compared to the 6 billion people in the world.

To put it another way, GenY is only now beginning to master the tools to control its media experience. Count on future generations growing up and creating their own media ecosystems from Day 1. That's a scary thought for media companies and marketers.

Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC, says in-house studies have found a blueprint for consumption that suggests "the media you grow up with basically determines the kind of media consumer you'll be."

Now that's evolution.