Dubbed “digital natives” or the “thumb generation,” young people today are quick to adopt new technologies and to adapt them as they like. Exactly what they’re doing and why is research gold for anyone interested in the future.

Take the way kids create languages to facilitate text messaging. (In case you’re older than 26 here’s a shorthand decoder). Yesterday, at a presentation to launch his new book, Mobile Communication and Society, co-authored by Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey, Manuel Castells detailed how mobile phone use in countries around the world is signaling the end of corporate and governmental control over communication. Read the book’s introduction here.

How might corporations respond in the future? Maybe the same way they are in the present. A New York Times article on parents befuddled by “text-message teenspeak” reports that Cingular Wireless, the largest carrier in the US, is holding a series of “texting bees” to teach parents how to send text messages— including not only the ins and outs of text slang but also the context in which texting is the best approach, more appropriate than email or face-to-face conversation. Cristy Swink, the executive director for text messaging at Cingular told the Times “It’s about, ‘Do you realize this is how your kids communicate with their friends?’”

If its consumption habits and information savvy are any guide, the thumb generation will likely recast relations between corporations and individuals, creating a whole new variety of tensions. We can only hope Cingular will offer classes on that, and if they do, that they get someone like Castells to teach them!

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