The flip-flop crowd hits the corporate suites.

Studios and networks are courting a younger demo--for their corporate offices. As traditional media is poised to undergo dramatic changes and digital distribution platforms evolve and mature, old school executives will increasingly become relics of the analog-dominated past.

The next generation of television executives is already making its presence felt as they help lead the television industry into the digital Promised Land. What sets them apart is that they grew up children of the information age, not remembering a time when people wrote letters, not e-mails; when the telex machine was the only way to get text across countries; and when the television universe had less than a dozen channels--half of them UHF.

The young executives now populating markets such as MIP are not just early-adopters; they are "digital natives," a term coined in 2001 by technology consultant and writer Marc Prensky. Digital natives spend their formative years communicating via e-mail and instant messages, get their news from MTV, and have made video gaming the most lucrative entertainment form in the world. Prensky postulated that digital exposure literally changed the way this generation is wired--making these digital natives perfectly suited to confront the challenges poised by traditional media's slow, often painful transition from linear to digital distribution business models.

Part of the challenge is that, according to Prensky, people in their 40s are "digital immigrants, because they can never be as fluent in technology as a native who was born into it. You can see it in the digital immigrants' accents--whether it is printing out emails or typing with fingers rather than thumbs. Have you ever noticed that digital natives, unlike digital immigrants, don't talk about 'information overload'? Rather, they crave more information."

Because they grew up at the dawn of the information age, digital natives had practically unlimited access to new media and, thus, developed an appetite for nonlinear entertainment and a willingness to interact with their media platforms of choice rather than be passively entertained.

More to the point, digital natives see technology as their friend.

Another characteristic that distinguishes these digital natives, from older executives, is that they can operate any digital devise by instinct; without even opening the usually imposing 200-page instructional manual.

Prensky wrote, "This generation is better than any before at absorbing information and making decisions quickly, as well as at multitasking and parallel processing. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today's average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV)."

All of which (though somewhat frightening for mankind) will prove invaluable to the networks and studios over the next decade, when digital media is expected to become the norm.