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	Being Young and Growing Up Online By Noah Finn

Being young is a hard concept to define because it is relative in its very nature. There is no point when one ceases to be young and is therefore old. A young high-school student might see a graduating classmate as old, while the student's parent sees them both as quite young. Despite this blurred line, there are several perspectives from which to consider differences between people of different ages.

Physically there are distinctions both in terms of outward appearance and anatomical structure. Children are constantly growing as they mature into adolescents and eventually adults. Their brains are developing, becoming better at performing a growing array of functions. Once people have reached adulthood, their bodies continue to change and they eventually lose all signs of youthfulness as they become older. Intellectually, people start learning and expanding their realm of knowledge as babies when they begin to discover the world, and this continues long into one's adult life and beyond.

Assumptions about one's intellectual development based on physical appearance can often lead to mistaken judgments. Adults often dismiss children's ideas and suggestions, even when they have a valuable perspective to contribute. The same is true in reverse. An independent-minded teenager will often ignore the advice of parents, assuming that they are too old to really understand. A young business executive may dismiss the advice of an older, more experienced colleague as being outdated or out of touch, rather than looking to him or her for advice that could only be attained through real life experiences.

Despite all this, there are commonalities among people at different stages of life. Fantasies are an important part of childhood, bridging the gap as children learn to distinguish what is real and what is not. Teenagers have developed a more accurate view of the world but still lack the experience necessary to effectively make well-informed decisions. This begins to change as one transitions into adulthood — having developed a base of experience on which to analyze one's surroundings — and continues as one gathers more and more perspective on the world, its inhabitants, and how they work.

Childhood fantasies exhibit themselves in a multitude of ways. From having an imaginary friend to dreaming about what to be when they grow up, children make up for what they don't know with an imagined reality that is true to them — regardless of its actual truth value.

When I was about eight years old, I started a collection of sticks in my backyard and began carving points on them like spears. One day my parents asked me what this collection of sticks was for. I don't think I had a particularly well-formulated plan, but when prompted, I proudly proclaimed that I wanted to be prepared to protect our family if robbers ever came to our house. This has probably been a common idea among young boys for ages, even before the inspiration of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. Nonetheless, my parents proceeded to warn me that someone coming to rob our house would likely have a more powerful weapon, such as a gun, and that it would not be a good idea for me to resist them. While this was surely good advice, it was more than a little disconcerting to me. For years to come I often found myself being afraid of someone breaking into our house when I was alone or awake late at night.

At several times during my childhood I had different ideas about what I wanted to be when I grew up. While I was preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, I enjoyed my studies so much that I decided to become a rabbi one day. I assumed that the passion I felt at the age of 12 would naturally continue for the rest of my life.

At another point in my childhood I became interested in law and, in particular, courtroom trials. My understanding of courts was that people go there when someone is suing someone else, so I decided that I wanted to become a "sue"-er. When I excitedly told my parents about my idea, and after a bit of confusion on their part, they corrected me and said that I was actually describing what a lawyer does. For some reason this didn't have the same glamour for me and I continued to insist that I wanted to be a "sue"-er.

Over the past few generations the nature of being young has started to change, as has the relationship between younger and older generations. This shift is partially the result of the migration of many daily activities from off-line to online as the Internet has propagated across the United States and throughout the world. Whether it is the simple gathering of information, staying in touch with friends and family, meeting new people or shopping, more people are living and experiencing much of their lives online every day.

When I was born, computers were not yet found in many homes and the Internet didn't even exist. Yet it is hard for me to remember a world where computers were completely absent. As a young child I played games on a Commodore 64 computer and I started using an Apple II in elementary school. However, I remember being intrigued when my parents first brought home a desktop computer. I stared in awe at the green display screen. I excitedly typed away on the keyboard to create documents using the text-based interface. I don't think I really cared what I was typing, as long as it appeared on the screen and could be saved for later retrieval.

Eventually this computer was upgraded to one with a graphical interface. Even more fantastic was a strange, small object called a "mouse" that, when moved, would change the position of a pointer on the screen. But the most amazing feature was that it could be plugged into the telephone jack and connect to somewhere else, outside of our house.

Combined with a service named Prodigy, this telephone connection provided access to a seemingly endless stream of information. In fact, there was so much that I couldn't read it fast enough to keep up. This was easily resolved though, by another magical machine connected to the computer by a giant wire. This was the printer. I recently found a stack of several hundred pages of form-feed paper from back then. They were still all connected with the rows of holes along each side still intact. These contained some of the priceless content garnered from Prodigy, such as an introduction to the little-known new presidential candidate from Arkansas named Bill Clinton.

It is now 15 years later and a lot has changed. Nearly three out of four people in the United States use the Internet according to internetworldstats.com, and it is even more ubiquitous in a few other countries. These days many children start using computers before the age of five. A friend of mine looked to another friend's nine-year-old daughter to set him up with a MySpace profile. Many young people cannot even imagine a world that is not online. But this is not to say that older people have not become extremely Web savvy. After all, it is not children but working adults who are constantly connected to a Blackberry as if it were an umbilical cord. While people of different ages may find different uses for the Internet, being online, at least in the United States, has almost become a basic human need, as integral as food and water.

As the Internet has penetrated deeper into our society, the amount of information it contains has grown exponentially. Anyone can put forward their ideas online, through words, images or a multitude of other media, in just a few minutes at little or no cost. But at the same time, we have developed many tools to deal with this influx of information and keep us from being overloaded.

A prime example can be found in Google, one of the fastest growing companies in the industry. Google was created with the mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and it continues to do exactly that. What began as a way to find a Web page based on its relevance to a certain word or phrase has evolved into dozens of services designed to both disseminate and catalog the vast ocean of information that the Internet has become.

Another example that can be found in Google is a generation shift in entrepreneurship. It was founded by two graduate students in their late 20s based on their research at Stanford University. Many of the fastestgrowing online companies founded in the last 10-15 years, including Yahoo and eBay as well as Google, have been started by people under 30.

For many investors looking to back new companies, it has become conventional wisdom to look to this age group for the most innovative ideas in the online world. These entrepreneurs have since grown up, as the companies they started have become increasingly successful. Google continues to acquire companies started by other young entrepreneurs, keeping their portfolio of innovation high. The ability of these young entrepreneurs to adapt to the quickly changing landscape and fill in the ever-changing gaps continues to serve them well.

Amid all this, I have participated in, contributed to, consumed and learned from this online world, both in my personal time at home and as a member of RFI Studios, the division of Ruder Finn working in the online and digital worlds. As with many young people working in the industry, much of my knowledge has been self-taught. I learned all about the technical aspects of developing a website primarily by reading about and discovering solutions to problems I was presented with. During my four years working on the RFI team in New York, I was involved in many projects building websites, for our clients. While focusing more on the technical aspects of these projects, I closely observed the work of my colleagues and, as a result, I have learned a lot about all the different areas of expertise that go into a successful website such as strategic overview and insight, information structure, nomenclature and taxonomy, visual design, promotion and measurement.

Nearly two years ago, I decided that I wanted to move to Paris. This was partially for personal reasons, but RFI Studios had begun to set up a presence in the Ruder Finn office there, so it presented a great professional opportunity as well. Around the same time, one of our clients, Novartis, a world-leading pharmaceutical company with headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, with whom I had consulted, invited me to come work with them on-site in Basel. Basel is not far from Paris, so I arranged to work primarily out of Ruder Finn's Paris office and spend the rest of my time working on strategies and online implementation for Novartis. With all this lined up I excitedly made the big move in May 2006.

Upon arriving in Paris, I quickly met the Ruder Finn team here and was excited to start working closely with them. They were all very welcoming and eager to have another member of RFI Studios join the team. Ruth Blader, another RFI employee, had been working in Paris the previous year and would soon be back, but during her earlier collaboration with them it had become clear that there was much value to Ruder Finn and its clients in having a member of the team who was well versed in the online world.

My time in Basel started out similarly well. I had been there several times before so I was familiar with the city and several of the people I would be working with. I was soon introduced to several new people with whom I would also be working, and I was excited to begin this new phase living outside the U.S.

Ruder Finn had been working with Novartis for several months on a project to review and update its brand identity. This resulted in a new visual design for both its internal and external websites. One of the steps was to implement this on their intranet. I had previously collaborated with the team in Basel on an intranet standardization project and I was familiar with the branding work done by Ruder Finn in New York, so one of my first tasks was to update their intranet to align it with the new standards.

I had initially planned to split my time between Paris and Basel, but for the first few months I found myself primarily in Basel working on this large intranet project. After it was complete, I started to spend more time in Paris, which allowed me to work more closely with the team there, as I had initially hoped to do.

One of the first highly collaborative projects I worked on in Paris came around this time and was for the French National Association for AIDS Research (ANRS). The goal was to help them recruit volunteer applicants for research on an AIDS vaccine, a potentially difficult task given the common fears about AIDS. Our approach was to convince prospective volunteers that this was completely safe and that they posed no risk of actually contracting AIDS. It also required a very coordinated effort due to the short timeline required to launch in connection with the press event. However, it became a great opportunity for all of us to learn how a traditional PR campaign can work extremely well alongside a website launch and engagement of an online community.

The website proved to be extremely successful, with a conversion rate of over 40% of visitors downloading the application form; much higher than the standard benchmark of 10-15%. With the added combination of an online forum and several live question and answer sessions with scientists and past volunteers, ANRS ended up with a highly qualified set of applicants. By providing easy access to important information and trusted, knowledgeable people, the prospective applicants were more effectively self-selected, reducing the burden on ANRS to sort through many unqualified applicants when making the final selection.

One of the biggest lessons I have taken from the past year of integrating closely with the rest of the Ruder Finn team in Paris is the value of adaptability — both to living conditions and business techniques, new and old. We were extremely successful by adapting some of the traditional, time-tested PR methods and integrating them with the innovative communication opportunities found online.

As the first children of the Internet generation are growing up, our audience is increasingly online and has come to expect a different kind of communication. The Internet is allowing them to keep much of their youthful resilience and independence by allowing them to speak to each other, to companies and other organizations on their own terms and to affect change based on their individual desires and points of view. In order to continue to successfully reach these audiences, we must be even more resilient and not simply follow them but actually lead them toward the future.

Overall, I believe that being young is more a state of mind than anything else. There are no finite barriers and it is not limited by any physical characteristics. It is about the ability to think independently and see the world in a unique way. Since the earliest human civilizations, surely people have found ways to retain these characteristics into adulthood. But the emergence of computers and the Internet has created a broadly accessible mechanism for doing so by rewarding people for it. There will always be people who embrace youth throughout their lives and those who don't. Especially in this modern era, those who do embrace it carry with them a powerful instrument for a happy and successful life.