Millenials would give up nearly everything else to stay connected

A study of people aged 15-35 commissioned by network infrastructure company CommScope has found they have an umbilical degree of dependence on being connected at all times.

This age group is commonly referred to as Millennials by people whose job it is to generalise about vast swathes of the population, and is commonly defined as the first ‘digital native’ generation. Before them came the cynical Generation X and before them the optimistic Baby Boomers.

Among the headline findings from this study, which was conducted among 4,000 Millennials and Baby Boomers in San Francisco, London, Sao Paolo, and Hong Kong in early 2016, were:

“Millennials will represent the lion’s share of purchasing power in a few years, and since they prioritize devices and access to fast internet, they are expected to continue to put high levels of spend towards connectivity,” said Morgan Kurk, CTO of CommScope. “However, they need to be served differently than previous generations in order to meet their expectations.

Security software company Norton teamed up with Reed to do another survey of Millenials recently, focused on social media habits and online reputation management. It found:

The point of this survey seems to have been to show how easy it is to screw up online, and it seems a significant proportion of Millennials aren’t quite as ‘digital native’ as they’d like to be. Perhaps the generation born after the millennium will be called ‘social natives’ and will have mastered the art of managing their online identities.