Contributed by Dan Taylor, Economic Development Office.

Don Tapscott, one of my favourite business authors, writes about digital natives and digital immigrants. A native is someone born in the internet age and an immigrant is someone like me, born well before.

The digital immigrants I am going to write about are a little bit different. At our last #SMBB – Social Media Brown Bag session we had two young business people, Shannon Pitt (who I met digitally on Twitter) and Erik Rubadeau, come and present social media measurement tools to us. The session was very interesting and we learned tons, however something more powerful happened for me.

While the Digi-Couple seemed just post digital native in age, they were very much digital immigrants, but a different kind than what Tapscott is referring too. They had immigrated to Prince Edward County and could do so because of the digital revolution we are in the midst of. Eric and Shannon had left the big city and chose to live here and they can work anywhere in the world from little old Wellington, Ontario and they do.

Shannon is an interactive marketing consultant with a consultant agency in Toronto, where she travels to one day a week, the rest of the week she works from home. Eric is the Founder of Yeeboo Digital with regional and international clients, works from home and visits clients face to face as needed.

The extra exciting thing about Eric’s work is that he has started up a company here that he hopes to build, do more business locally, grow, hire people and expand. This is the kind of digital immigration that is helping to build our diversifying and dynamic economy.

For some perspective, our first wave of digital immigrants came around 7 years ago, the same time as DSL high speed arrived. Mature 55 plus business people, mostly consultants would live here and work elsewhere, we even have stock brokers and money traders who moved here as a result of shifting and geographically liberating technologies.

Now with the digital revolution gearing up in full swing, younger people like Shannon and Erik are choosing to move here, in some cases work elsewhere and in some cases start up their own business in a dynamic and growing field, bringing wonderful possibilities and prospects to our economy.

Digital immigrants we salute you and thank-you for choosing Prince Edward County as your home base from which to digi-commute and become enterprising locally based entrepreneurs.

Are you a digital native or digital immigrant, would you like to live in glorious Prince Edward County and work here too? If you are thinking of relocating, give me a call, perhaps Prince Edward County is the place for you? Dan Taylor 613-471-0881.

e-mail dtaylor@pecounty.on.ca
Twitter @CreativeDanT

Tags: Digital Immigrant, Digital Native, entrepreneurs, Internet, Social Media
Comments (3) | Posted over two years ago by Dan Taylor