From my own experience it's a "Time and Effort" vs "Money" thing. When I was young I was willing to put up with broken torrent connections, annoying ads, and other inconveniences in order to get stuff for free. Because I had more time than money and was willing to put in the effort.
As an adult I'd just assume pay the $1.99 or buy the $36 (a year) Pandora One membership so as to not have to put up with that stuff. Because now I have the money but there is much more of a demand on my time.
In that way I think these young kids aren't going to spend money they don't have now. But once they have enough money for media costs to be inconsequential they'll start paying for stuff.
Seriously though I do that on occasion and it always amazes me. It's like the motor part of my brain is completely separate from the creative part and so on occasion I'll type the completely wrong word because my fingers are somehow blindly transcribing what my inner monologue is saying. It's weird.
Younger people (high school students especially) also tend to not have a CC# to put in to pay for things online. They tend to have to ask their parents for their card, and justify to them why they should be allowed to charge something to their account (even if they already have the actual liquidity necessary to pay them back.) This becomes especially problematic with micropayments, because it's very hard to justify "giving my information away to a strange website" for a $0.99 charge. It's actually much easier to convince a parent to get off their ass for a $200 charge, as long as you could justify/pay back the actual 200 dollars.
Very true and now that I have a credit card I totally forgot about those days. At one point I had a prepaid debit card that could be used, if only GameStop or Best Buy had them available co branded with a micropayment service.
I am remarkably non-broke for a graduate student that went to grad school straight out of undergraduate. I was still amazed when my advisor whipped out his credit card to pay for Pandora One practically on a whim. On the other hand, I have learned the value of going out to eat instead of cooking.
Tangible goods have value. Pain avoidance has value. Intangible entertainment that is consumed at home has so many free substitutes that we're only paying for the marginal entertainment. I don't think this is news -- we didn't just grow up with Napster, but also DVD libraries, romsets, and hackable consumer electronics. I wonder what proportion of young people are aware of someone with substantial romsets for the NES or SNES?
Finally, my social network exists outside of its computer representation, and transcribing the personal data from Facebook to the next system is embarassingly parallel. Of COURSE there's no reason for loyalty.
Agreed. I normally don't talk to people on facebook unless I already know them offline, so it really just becomes an alternative to email. If Facebook starts charging, I'll just switch to some other form of communication, because thats what I use it for - to communicate. And guess what? Theres many many alternatives for that.
