I don’t begrudge Matthew his chance to work at Morgan Stanley but the background on how he got the job makes me even less likely to credit anything he, or by extension Morgan Stanley, say about how the internet or social media really work.

…The med…

But you’re right here Kent, and there’s an annoying meme floating around about the “digital natives”, the kids who grew up using social networks, and how they’re all going to demand the same things from us when they’re adults and running the world. What I’ve seen from the kids I know is that as they age, their behaviors and needs change. They drop Myspace for Facebook, Facebook for e-mail (the one constant is messaging each other on their cel phones). I know that as a teenager, I spent hours gabbing on the phone with friends. As I grew older, I stopped doing this. So while it is important to understand that there’s a generation familiar with social networking, it’s also important to realize that what they do now is mostly irrelevant to what they’ll be doing when they’re ten years older. We’d be wise to let these sorts of technologies filter into our products where useful, but we shouldn’t think that copying what the kids use and pushing that on adult professionals is a good idea (see any of the sites that have described themselves as “Myspace for scientists” as examples).