If you are feeling overwhelmed at the amount of tech we live with, you’re not as alone as you may be feeling.

Our baseline for this topic invariably falls to one of my favourite topics…Millennials, those born after 1980…roughly 13-30 years old.

This group has grown up with a ubiquitous exposure to technology that they see no need to kick anything old school (to completely date myself)…or do they?

In March 2010 Cassandra’s team began touching on an emerging shift with this group that suggested an increasing appreciation for unplugging, opting for digital vacations and coining National Unplugged Day. If you’re in the GenX or Boomer group this may seem rather obvious but to the average Millennial, it seems almost illogical to NOT want to be connected, all the time.

There are a few drivers behind this: the all-too-familiar Big Brother concerns, the health risks (cancers for keeping devices too close to us, too often), our parents ladening tech upon us so they always know where we are, right down to GPS-tracking of our pets, this group may be catching up to others in our society who feel like it’s just all too much.

A peripheral topic to this is the budding movement of employing tech on top of tech to give us the distance or privacy we seem to be craving but are largely powerless to attain, with a groundswell of new apps designed to  “help users avoid social media connections” and achieve some level of anonymity.

Key takeaway: Before you consider creating a consumer engagement strategy housed and accessed solely in the digital space, pause and consider if it can be done with a more human interaction. It is still very much in vogue to bring people together–live and in person–in relevant, meaningful ways.

The Cassandra Group is dedicated to following this particular generation through their fads, trends and life stages and shedding light on what they believe are notable insights. If you are clamouring for information on Millennials, this is a great source of information.