Whilst shaving this morning I caught a snippet of the Today show on Radio4, and was both amused and appalled.

The thesis of the segment – delivered by Lord Maurice Saatchi – was that TV advertising was “soon to be dead” from the business challenge of the “continuous partial attention” of our youth, bundled-up with a lot traditional “our children are aliens” fearmongering, and buzzbrands like MySpace.

They also managed to analogise it into current and emotive terminology too: anyone under 25 is a digital native – arcane and weird – and anyone over 25 is a digital immigrant, incapable of coping with technology in any form.

How horrific it is that children are using the Internet, as opposed to doing healthy, normal things like watching TV and absorbing mass media advertising in the healthy, convenient, nuclear-family form in which God meant it to be delivered.

Err… something like that, anyway. A sample quote:

the brain of the digital native is different. it’s literally been rewired. it’s faster. it sifts more. it recalls less. it means from the point of the advertiser, life has become much more complicated and much more difficult.

It sounds like a Chris Morris stream of consciousness.

No, m’lud, I hazard to suggest that our children are not different; I believe it’s just that you’re just getting older, and your developing observations and nascent prejudices – like those which many people develop as they age – now have a potential audience of similarly jaded advertising executives who are looking for something to blame, and who might pay to listen to this hype.

In fact I’ll happily posit this all as the flipside of the “Web 2.0” bandwagon.

We’ve discovered the Anti-Tim, in this angel isle.

The program is linked off the Today website and is accessible directly via RealPlayer. Then go read Adriana regarding a FT article about the threat of e-communities to advertising; mayhap their advertising lordships have formed a self-help peer-group?

Perhaps they can find reassurance for their situation in the classics:

Children today love luxury; they’ve bad manners and contempt for authority, they disrespect their elders and “hang-out” rather than exercise. […] They contradict their parents, chatter inanely and rudely in company, are slobs and they tyrannize their teachers.

Socrates, 469-399 B.C.