Are Millennials Ready for the Internet of Things?

Background

Studies on new media have dominated the end of the 20^th and the beginning of the 21^st Centuries. One impressive aspect was the technological change, which was fast (Lister, Dovey, Giddings, Grant, & Kelly, 2009; Wilson & Peterson, 2002) yet incremental (Lievrouw, 2004), and the essential role of users to the application and reinvention of technology by adapting it to their daily activities (Baym, 2006; Campbell, 2005; Lievrouw & Livingstone, 2006; Yadav & Varadarajan, 2005). Considering Lievrouw and Livingstone´s (2006) definition of new media comprising (i) artefacts and devices (ii) activities and practices, and (iii) organizational and social arrangements, IoT clearly fits in such concept, thus much that has been learned so far about consumer behavior in new media contexts is expected to apply to IoT. Moreover, new media were from the start associated to new experiences, new ways of representing the world, new relations between consumers, and new ways of organizing and producing (Lister et al., 2009), which clearly illustrates the added value of IoT for consumers and organizations.