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Amanda Palmer performs “I Google You”:
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Kate Miller-Heidke performs “Are You F*cking Kidding Me? (Facebook Song)”:
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the new oldskool
My dad is an inventor. He’s got a bunch of patents, from two different continents, and an EPA award. He talks to me on instant messenger sometimes, which I find pretty impressive since he’s 76 years old and English is not his first language by more than 50 years. That half-century was spent in the USSR, the better part of it, trying to get out. Most of the people he knows his age barely know how to turn a computer on. But my dad likes on-switches. He likes buttons and technology and science and new ideas. He retired from a career as an electrical engineer but he can’t just retire from curiosity and coming up with ideas. Which is an awesome thing, unless you are unable to find other people–and especially people your age–to connect with, who share your interests.
It used to be that the way you would stay connected to your industry was through your job. Whether it was access to news about industry developments, or access to participating in the course of those developments, it was all pretty much granted by your employment. Once you retired–or were laid off at a certain age and couldn’t get rehired–your access was essentially denied. Perhaps, for a lot of people, who might not have been particularly thrilled about the careers they had ended up in, this would sound like a fantastic relief, but for those folks that had spent their lives passionately engaged with, and consummately fascinated by their field of work, being suddenly cut off from that entire world wouldn’t be quite so wonderful.
I’m not an expert on the institution of retirement, nor does my knowledge of the general senior citizen population extend beyond my parents and their friends, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that we have been living in a society where the options for what people over the age of 65 are expected be interested in are SLIM. They have definitely not been encouraged in any way to retain the interests they had when they were younger, or to think that they ought to. It’s as if once individuals hit senior citizen age it’s assumed they will simply want to trade in the things that had been exciting to them before, like handing back an access card to security once you’ve left a building, and instead discover their new interests lie within a finite selection of age-appropriate leisurely diversions they’d had nothing to do with before. To me the idea that an infinitely diverse array of identities would develop uniformly homogeneous interests simply by virtue of having lived to a certain age is about as accurate for teenagers as it is for senior citizens, and I think that this misconception will be completely undone by the social media generation.
Friendster, the first social network site I ever knew, can’t be older than six or seven years. Myspace is even younger. Youtube can’t be more than four of five. Facebook wasn’t even a serious contender in this space until like two years ago. And already, according to Universal McCann’s Comparative Study on Social Media Trends, April 2008:
- 57% of active online users (people using the internet every day or every other day) have joined a social network
- 73% have read a blog
- 45% have started their own blog
- 39% subscribe to an RSS feed
Social Security might be nonexistent by the time my generation retires, but all these tools for social connection and personal expression available already–and who even knows what future iterations are coming in our lifetime–mean that what we will have are the resources to facilitate continuing our specific interests, and to retain our individual identities far beyond what was ever an option for the general populations of a certain age before us.
According to boomj.com, a social network site geared specifically for folks born in the two generations from the mid-1940’s to mid-1960’s, right now 41 – 64 year-olds comprise about 80 million people in the US. These are arguably the oldest generations to have already been affected by social media, and there is no doubt that they will expect a dramatically different kind of experience once they “retire,” than the generations before them. All those people joining social networks and writing and reading blogs will continue to expect access to pursuing the interests which shaped our identities and, perhaps the course of our lives, well past where our grandparents could expect to get cut off. (Not to mention, access to pursuing new interests that previoulsy weren’t accommodated for “old folks.”)
Clay Shirky, In his 2005 TED Talk, pointed out that the #1 most popular interest group on meetup.com–a service that allows people to find others in their local area who share their same interests and affinities, and organize offline group “meetups”–is stay-at-home moms. When the site was first founded its creators had NO idea that this would become the most active group on the site, with the most members and the most chapters. But as Shirky explains, “In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay at home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods, so they they are reinventing it using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure.” (After watching that TED Talk I actually helped my Dad find some science-y/tech-y meetups in Boston–and if anyone knows of others, give me a shout, I’d love to pass the info on).
Whether it’s stay-at-home moms or seniors, no doubt the impact of these kinds of tools is just as meaningful to any group that has been lacking the social structure and access to stay connected to both their interests, and to other people who share them. As the social media generation matures perhaps the very concept of what our “golden years” are all about will be altered.
And on that note, meet Ivy, at 102, the oldest person on Facebook. From The Daily Mail:
Ivy Bean is a great-grandmother with a difference. At 102 years old she has joined the social networking revolution and become the oldest person on Facebook.
The former mill worker, who was born in Bradford in 1905, showed an interest in the website, after hearing care workers at her home talk about the phenomenon.
Although Mrs Bean currently only has nine Facebook friends, she said she ‘loves being online’ and is hoping for many more.
The world has changed radically during Ivy’s lifetime. When she was born Henry Campbell-Bannerman was Prime Minister of Britain – the first to ever officially hold the title.
At that time telegrams were the fastest way of communicating and a national telephone network was still seven years away. Ivy would have to wait 46 years until the first computer was invented.
Ivy retired at 73, a few years after her husband passed away, aged 75. She is living at Hillside Manor care home in Bradford which she moved to at the grand age of 101 after her last care home closed down.
Care home manager Pat Wright said: ‘We try to keep all our residents independent by letting them use the computer.’
Ivy, second from left, competed in the Bradford Over 75s’ Olympics.
the empire’s new clothes
Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
– Andy Warhol
It is totally disconcerting to discover a book that pretty much compiles your insights and articulates them back to you. Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy & Who We Are, by Rob Walker, delves into many of the exact same observations as I have witnessed amid the ecosystem of contemporary culture, marketing, and identity. Reading it feels something like discovering America’s Next Top Model is biting your personal fashion style, I would imagine. Sure, it’s incredibly validating to see your own insights coming at you from a New York Times Magazine writer, but it’s sorta frustrating to have to know that they’re not just yours anymore.
In social science there is probably nothing as revelatory as a contradiction exposed. That the emperor is not wearing any clothes is much more stunning a revelation than any critique of the fashion aesthetic. And it’s contradictions that Walker is interested in:
There was one specific incident that finally made me reconsider what I thought I knew about consumers, marketers, and even myself. This was the news that Nike had bought Converse.
To me, Nike’s famous swoosh logo had long been the mark of the manipulated, a symbol for suckers who take its “Just Do It” bullying at face value. It’s long been, in my view, a brand for followers. On the other hand, the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star had been a mainstay sneaker for me since I was a teenager back in the 1980’s, and I stuck with it well into my thirties. Converse was the no-bullshit yin to Nike’s all-style-and-image yang. It’s what my outsider heroes from Joey Ramone to Kurt Combain wore. So I found the buyout disheartening…. but why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker–any brand of sneaker?
As a consumer behavior columnist, Walker had observed as “the steady march of progress that had been reshaping media and technology for years broke into a sprint, through the rapid rise of devices and innovations like TiVo, the iPod, increasingly sophisticated cell phones, YouTube, Facebook, and so on.” He notes that according to many marketing experts and consumer-culture observers, this new landscape had created a “New Consumer:”
A clever creature armed with all kinds of dazzling technology, from ad-blocking gizmos to alternative, grassroots media. This added up to what professional zeitgeist watchers–
–and i’d like to add, none too few self-congratulatory alternative cultures–
like to call “a paradigm shift.” “Consumers don’t march in lockstep anymore,” one celebrated trend master declared. “We are immune to advertising,” other experts announced. The mindless “mass market” had been shouldered aside by thinking individuals: “Consumers are fleeing the mainstream.” Somehow we had all become more or less impervious to marketing and brands and logos; we could see through commercial persuasion.
The trade, business and mainstream press–
–as well as no shortage of idealistic social media folks–
have seconded this judgement. Thanks to “the explosion in information available to shoppers,” The New Yorker argued, “brand loyalty is in fast decline,” and “the customer is king.” The Economist, too, pointed to super-informed shoppers who have acquired “unprecedented strength” in their dealings with commercial persuaders and approvingly quoted a famous ad executive announcing: “For the first time the consumer is boss.” Advertising Age soberly informed its readers that because of “the power of the public,” consumers have lately obtained “increasing sway … over any product’s success”–in fact, the consumer is in control.
The only problem with this was that it did not match up particularly well with the realities of the marketplace that I was writing about every week in The Times Magazine.
It’s one thing to conclude that the advertising business is evolving with the new media landscape. But these giddy claims go well beyond that….
Meanwhile the number of brand messages we are exposed to goes up, and so does the amount of trash we produce. And on a more personal level: Have you noticed any decrease in the number of times you buy something you were sure you would love, only to regret it later or simply forget about in the back of a closet? There you are, contemplating the limitless and ever shifting choices in what to drink, what to wear, what to drive, what to buy. It is literally impossible to try everything for yourself. Be honest: As you navigate this brand-soaked world, do you feel in control?
Sure, we tell pollsters and friends that we’re sick of being bombarded with advertising, we’re indifferent to silly logos, we’re fed up with rampant materialism. In reality, one of the most significant changes I’ve observed over the years that consumer behavior has been my primary beat is something that goes well beyond the long-standing human tendency to enjoy acquiring things.
The change is particularly noticeable among many of the younger people I’ve met. Frequently, these smart and creative young people were quite happy to inform me that, yes, they were immune to commercial persuasion–that they saw right through it, as the experts liked to say. Meanwhile, they were playing key, active roles in helping certain products and brands succeed.
They were in the vanguard of what looks an awful lot like an increasingly widespread consumer embrace of branded, commercial, culture. The modern relationship between consumer and consumed is defined not by rejection at all, but rather by frank complicity.
This goes against what we’d want to think of ourselves, and of individuality. We want to think that our highly-attuned “seeing through”ness, and our distinctive tastes have set us apart, granted us superiority over the tastelessness of lowly label whores. We want to think that expressing our identities, and asserting our belonging within a particular cultural community is unrelated to, and, in fact, an escape from brand-consciousness. We want to think we are–as 77% of the respondents in a formal poll mentioned by Walker considered themselves to be–far smarter and savvier than most consumers. Which is a mathematical impossibility.
The truth of the matter is that actually we don’t really know ourselves that well at all. That’s the “Secret” in “The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.” We have come up with enough misconceptions about the relationship between, as Walker calls it, the consumer and the consumed, that the real mechanics of this interchange are happening beyond our consciousness. We’re not aware we’re naked beneath our fancy new clothes.
“Symbols matter to us,” Walker says:
Meaningful symbols (logos included) get created–and even when we claim to be immune from such things, we often participate in that meaning-creation ourselves….In the 21st century we still grapple with the eternal dilemma of wanting to feel like individuals and to feel as though we’re apart of something bigger than ourselves–and that, most of all we all seek ways to resolve this fundamental tension of modern life.
In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter delve into the social psychology history of individuality, excavating its modern beginnings from the wreckage of the post-WWII distrust of “mass culture.” They propose that witnessing how conformity had devastated Europe as enforced by the Nazis, plus the results of the Milgram experiment, which exposed some nasty realities about our human relationship to authority, “led conformity to become the new cardinal sin in our society.” By the time Walker gets around to weighing in on it, this manifest individualist destiny has become an American right.
Enter “The Pretty Good” problem, as Walker calls it. Or as Alex Bogusky says: “All products are excellent.” It’s no longer about what’s better than what, or what’s more reliable, or what’s more effective. It all works, it’s all really good. The way you choose between all this totally dependable functioning stuff is, essentially, based on what expresses you.
“Buying a $5,000 handbag just because it’s a status symbol is a sign of weakness,” Walker quotes a particular “keen observer of branded culture”: Miuccia Prada. “Presumably” Walker suggests, “buying a $5,000 Prada bag is okay, if you’re doing it for the right reasons–quality for instance.” But I don’t see anything ironic in Prada’s remark. It’s probably the way anorexics think about the eating habits of the obese. In between those extremes though, weakness or not, we all have to eat. And we all feel we have to express ourselves, define ourselves, locate ourselves, even, on the cultural spectrum. How do we do that in our modern world?
Well, like, take the gutterpunk bike messenger dude Walker comes across while investigating the resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon’s popularity, getting a PBR logo brand–that’s skin brand–the size of his back. This may seem a bit excessive, but “Pabst is part of my subculture,” he says. More specifically, it can function as a symbol of a subculture, and skin branding as a means of expressing both a personal commitment and community loyalty is actually not at all uncommon among fraternities. In the absence of a Greek letter, endorsing a brand–that’s logo brand–can, and often does, become adopted as a symbol of belonging to a culture or community. You might not have gotten a skin brand or bought a $5,000 handbag, but all of us have purchased things not just for our own “personal narrative,” as Walker suggest, but because they represented our culture, our context, where we belong.
This is actually the part in the book where Walker’s assessments start to fall apart, I think. Unlike his research on the consumer adoption of corporate brands, in chronicling “underground brands”–by which he means, essentially, lifestyle symbols developed by independent entrepreneurs–he doesn’t mention any research from talking directly to the adopters of these brands, and thus fails to convey that the adoption of both kinds of brands happens basically for the same reasons.
He gets part of it right. Many underground brand creators:
Clearly see what they are doing as not only non-corporate, but somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materlistic mainstream–but doing it with different forms of materialism.
Take a minute to get acclimated to the irony if you need to, but that’s not the real contradiction here. This is:
Perhaps the threat that brand-smart young people really pose to commercial persuaders is not that they have stopped buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too.
What the exact definition of an “underground brand” is–beyond being created by “brand-smart young people”–is never actually defined, and that may be the root of the oversight. Walker’s case studies for underground brands are pretty much exclusively clothing, or even more precisely, t-shirt labels, but I’ve seen the same phenomenon play out with underground music brands bands, and events. A community, weather it’s mass or niche, Greek or gutterpunk, needs symbols, and the difference between how an “independent” maker of symbols behaves vs. a “corporate” one, is that the corporate one answers to Wall Street.
You can argue that size matters. That somewhere along the slippery slope a brand is either big or small, but I would imagine even small Wall Street-beholden brands would behave the same way big ones do. And conversely, as Walker himself talks about, though doesn’t quite process to it’s logical conclusion: to stay competitive, Wall-Street brands are starting to behave like indie ones. Scion’s success via alternative marketing, which Walker calls “murketing,” happened not because it invented its own grassroots community from scratch, but because it leveraged the communities around existing independent brands in much the same way a concert venue leverages the community around a music act.
Talking to independent brand creators, Walker says, “Made me realize that it wasn’t just commercial culture that the brand underground was co-opting–it was the most exclusive and elevated form of it.”
Which is kind of like saying that an indie-rock band “co-opts” Elton John. I think music fans are only too happy to have more options.
It’s not culture that’s being co-opted, it’s industry. An indie band “co-opts” the music industry, and indie brands “co-opt” the industry of commercial persuasion itself. This isn’t a “threat” to commercial persuasion, as Walker suggests, but an expansion, an upgrade. Commercial persuasion, v. 2.0.
Or whatever.
“It’s time to set aside the old conspicuous consumption argument that consumer behavior is all about status–all about badges,” Walker writes. “If the underground logo is a badge, it’s one that is most noteworthy for how few people can see it.”
Uh-huh…
The average underground logo–just like many corporate ones–may be more subdued than, say, the narcissistic in-your-face mania of Louis Vuitton’s logo, but the underground brand is a badge, and it’s one that is most notable for how meaningfully it expresses a community. (By the way, that requires visibility). It may not be all about “status” but it IS all about identity.
Suddenly, the book is not so disconcerting after all.
controlled randomness
“the biggest problem americans have is what cereal to buy in the cereal aisle.”
-my dad (who spent the first 56 years of his life in the USSR)
i’ve been watching my friend sarah write about her adventures in crazyblinddate land, and it’s gotten me thinking.
sarah explains:
CrazyBlindDate.com was started by the folks who brought us OkCupid — the free social networking / test-taking / dating site that’s given the pay sites like Match.com and eHarmony a run for their money. And so far, I’m impressed.
The premise is simple: you tell them a few things about yourself, who you’re looking to meet, where you’re willing to travel, and when you’re willing to do that. Meanwhile, other people are on the site doing the same thing. The Internet Brain lines you up, makes a match where requirements coincide, and asks both parties to confirm the date after showing basic information about the other person. This includes very blurry pictures of each other, as a teaser. Once you say yes, you’re committed to it.
….Why I’m excited about this site: they’re taking something that has massive screw-up potential, and handling it well.
sarah then decided to test out exactly how well this screw-up potential is indeed being handled by subjecting herself to some first-person “Field Research in Extreme Social Media Sports.”
in case you’re wondering, that crazyblinddate ended up going something like this:
and here’s where it gets interesting. despite the lame-o first foray, and despite the fact that she herself admits that, “Blind dates are inherently sketchy-sounding,” she decided to do it again!
see, what’s happened is that we all (well, most of us, anyway) seem to have ended up in some scene. ethan watters coined it as “urban tribes” in 2003, but this kind of thing has been going on for ages, really. it’s hard to escape noticing how many times the word “scene” is uttered in the course of i’m not there, todd haynes’s recent movie about the live(s) of bob dylan. evidently “folk music” was a kind of “anti the pop tastelessness” scene going on in greenwich village in the 60’s.
what’s happened since then, however, is that social network apps have come along. which, in retrospect is barely even an appropriate way to think about them because we (generally) use them to connect to people we already know rather than to random strangers. what these sites have really become are “friend management systems,” which is an important tool for the maintenance and enhancement of any social scene, if you think about it. it’s preceisely what’s great about those kinds of sites: we can now assert our place in our scene even without leaving the house. true to form, bob dylan’s myspace page has been viewed 2,983,449 times.
so what’s interesting is that crazyblinddate is the anti all of this. we’ve become so obsessed with needing to control our choices, our lives–or lifestyles, our destinies, that we’ve become insulated against chance. and despite what facebook’s aggressively chance-destroying mini-feed has to say about it, with its relentless broadcast of all the activities of all your friends all the time ever, i think, really, we LOVE chance.
it’s what makes something like last.fm so great, for instance. the possibility of an unexpected, fantastic music discovery that we do not have to actively seek out. it finds us. by chance. if there was a service that i’d say CBD offers–aside from the “matchmaking” service–it’s that deliberate creation of chance.
even though we love chance despite our neurotic compulsion to set up barriers against it, we are also simultaneously overwhelmed by the amount of choices we have to make. a few weeks ago a friend of mine took me to this famous ice cream parlor in berkeley, and the amount of choices of ice cream flavors was suddenly paralyzing. even after the samples, i really was not adequately prepared to have any idea if i wanted raspberry cheesecake flavor ice cream or apple cobbler flavor ice cream. all i wanted was ice cream.
yes, we want as many options as we can get so as to have the opportunity to find the thing that fits US the best, but sometimes having to slog our way through the trenches of the long tail is just fucking taxing. i think, horrified as we are to admit it, we kind of want something randomizing. we don’t always want to have to think about it. we want the perfect ice cream flavor to find us. by chance.
i think the creators of CBD definitely realize this. the whole site is about the sudden, emphatic, click-first-ask-questions-later push into the pool of chance:
Welcome to Crazy Blind Date! We like to keep things simple. That’s why on very short notice we can set you up on quick dates with total strangers at public places like bars and coffee shops. You’re not allowed to see their picture or even communicate. Choose your city:
when i was in NY a couple of weeks ago i heard ads for CBD on the radio, evidently it’s been featured on the monrning show too. the intention here is definitely not about being a service for a niche kind of demographic. EVERYONE likes chance in some form. that’s the point. and even while the promotion for this thing is certainly not flying below the mainstream radar, the chance inherent in the site’s service still makes it feel like you FOUND it by chance. it’s amazing that mystery as an aspect of the service can be self-fulfilling in terms of the “discovery strategy.”
the way CBD works, you don’t get to see what the person you’re meeting even looks like beyond just this blurry kind of photo:
you don’t get the option to stalk them on myspace first, you don’t get to find out anything about who their friends are. it’s the opposite of what so many social-network sites, or even dating sites offer, and i bet there’s going to be a lot more stuff coming like this. whether it’s with music, dating, or ice cream, i think we’re all looking for opportunities–and sites–that plug a “controlled randomness” feature back in.
whatever, internet
cut it out, internet.
everyday there’s some kind of new technology hoopla vying for my attention with the sordid insidiousness of a tabloid magazine at the checkout counter. and i don’t even buy that shit, but for some reason i can never resist trying to get the latest download on what’s going on in brad and angelina’s relationship while i’m waiting to ring up my groceries.
like this crazy story about a 17 year old girl from a working-class chicago suburb with no business background or any kind of investment backing accidentally striking it rich with her site that creates custom myspace layouts: www.whateverlife.com. (i feel like i may as well be reading about the state of britney’s deteriorating mental health.)
or getting sent links to stuff like dapper.net–which i don’t even understand what the hell it means half the time and that just fills me with this kind anxiety that’s on par with the dread of an “orange”national security alert. (are you feeling it yet?)
at least a friend of mine explained to me what this means: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial
translation: “FACEBOOK = SCARY”
but that, of course, just begs the question: why is google so scared? what’s facebook really trying to do?
it’s like lindsey lohan. it’s insidious. it’s a giant nebula of crowd-sourced user-generated conspiratorial terror. i don’t want to think about the internet anymore. i’m over it. i just want a break.
though you really just can’t help but wonder what the hell a 15 billion dollar valuation means exactly.
crap!
i’m doing that thinking about the internet thing again.
fucking QUIT IT, internet. i don’t even care about this defeating, demoralizing tabloid trashstuff.
this is why i try to stay on the people side. with humans it might take like millennia to create any kind of significant change. it’s like…. all you have to do is look backwards at a relatively finite amount of information. (we may be discovering more of it as we go along, but it’s not like more of it’s being created.) so you just figure that stuff out, and you’re good to go. the basic programming idea behind the way we think, why want what we want, why we buy what we buy, why we behave the way we do, it’s all right there….. it’s like a swiss watch. it’s complicated, but you’re not expected to put it together differently every morning.
the internet, however is a different story. makes you want to just stick your fingers in your ears and go “lalalalala” (it’s working out well for the music industry, i hear).
ugh….
the whole thing’s just a big ol’ mess.
the post about the whateverlife.com story says:
The name came to Ashley in a moment of frustration. After losing a video game to [her friend] Bre, she dropped the controller and blurted out, “Whatever, life.” She liked it instantly. She thought it would be a great name for a Web site.
well…..
at least i’m not the only one tired of this stuff. even fifty’s got technolofatigue: