Dancing with Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation That's Transforming the Way Business Is Done

Citation

Fourie, I. (2013), "Dancing with Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation That's Transforming the Way Business Is Done", Online Information Review, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 659-660. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2013-0114

Reviewing a great publication that fills one's head with new ideas and possibilities of things that need doing is always a pleasure and privilege. The only frustration is wondering where and how one will find time to re‐read the book to ensure that nothing has been missed. Dancing with Digital Natives is such a book.

Editors Michelle Manafy and Heidi Gautschi and their expert team of authors representing business as well as academia can be congratulated on bringing together a timely, visionary publication raising awareness of not only generational differences, but also a reconsideration of assumptions and procedures. They succeed with flying colours in their aim:

[…] after reading these collected essays, we hope you will be equipped with tools and ideas that will allow you to better navigate this digital world and understand just what makes its natives tick… Here we offer a range of interconnected ideas that provide new insight into this generation of digital natives that will empower those of us working with them to make the most of these interactions, to drive education, business, and innovation forward in the digital age (p. xiv).

The content of Dancing with Digital Natives is arranged in four parts and 19 chapters. Part 1, on digital natives going to work, includes five chapters touching on Facebook in the workplace, changes in the workplace, the dis‐organisation of invention, the challenges and opportunities in the police force, and hiring through personal branding. The five chapters in Part 2 focus on marketing and selling to digital natives. They address the value of social customer relationship management (CRM), marketing to youth through mobile technology, adapting old‐fashioned marketing values, engaging digital natives where they live, as well as social capitalism and the reputation economy. Part 3 concerns the entertaining of digital natives. The four chapters deal respectively with the fact that the digital natives actually are the entertainment, ethics and technology, engaging emerging readers through social interaction and digital natives as music consumers. The five chapters in Part 4 address education of the digital divide. Chapters comment on standards and promoting achievement through technology, a public school for digital children, a collaborative effort to teach digital literacy digitally, initiatives in France to educate digital natives, and learning about what digital natives know and how to teach them the rest.

Regardless of whether one has different experiences and opinions, Dancing with Digital Natives is a publication that makes one thinks. It is highly recommended to academics, employers, owners of businesses and marketers. I would even consider it is as recommended reading for class discussion of the digital society at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The style of challenging accepted practices and assumptions can certainly serve as a good example of assessing changes in a dynamic world. Dancing with Digital Natives is about making the most of younger people; we should, however, also interpret it as allowing and encouraging younger people to make the most of themselves – soon they will be serving a generation younger than themselves.