SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

These days, it can be hard to tell how old people are, just by looking at them. With grandmothers on Facebook, the current cupcake craze and my whole office reading young adult fiction, the cues - visual or cultural - that we used to use to tell people’s ages seem to be disappearing. Personally, I don’t think of myself as old… despite an upcoming milestone birthday (ugh), I think I’m young at heart. I tweet, I download music, I blog, I watch reality TV - I can’t be that old, right?

Nope. I’m old.

And this is how I know.

Yesterday, I sat in a staff meeting and looked around the room at my colleagues, who were sitting with their chairs in a large circle, facing in. And it hit me - there is finally a failsafe way to tell who’s old and who’s young. Without exception, everyone in the room over 30 was wearing a watch, and everyone under 30 was not. It was striking.

The wearing of a watch seems to be the one thing that separates the men from the boys, as it were. Clearly, those under 30 have learned to find other, less constraining ways to tell time. Perhaps they have had cell phones or PDAs by their side from such an early age that they just never got used to looking at their wrists to find out how long they had before class started, or before their curfews came and went - a concept that is totally foreign to me.

I was intrigued, so I thought I’d ask these Gen Yers to explain why they weren’t wearing a watch yesterday:

• “My cell phone is so much a part of me that my watch is optional. A watch is only an accessory.” (Kristen)
• “I don’t like having anything on my wrist. I use my cell phone to tell what me time it is.” (Gloria)
• “The only time I wear it is when I am working out, because it can tell me my heart rate, etc. There are so many other ways to look at the time that I don’t need to wear a watch.” (Michele)
• “I never have. My cell phone is always with me, and besides, I don’t like knowing that I am always late.” (Lisa)

I admit it - I haven’t gone a day without a watch (intentionally) since I was about 8 years old. I feel unmoored and lost without my watch. Yes, I may look at the clock at the corner of my laptop screen more often that I look at my watch, and I do glance at my blackberry throughout the day to find out what time it is. But for me, going without a watch is just simply not done. It’d be like leaving the house without my keys.

So there you have it - the dividing line between young and old. Which side of it are you on?

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JULY 9, 2009

A few months ago, I moved to a new apartment, and with new apartments come all sorts of fun stuff like turning on utilities, paying security deposits, and scheduling a time (always between 10 - 2 or some other ridiculous window) for the cable guy to come.

So Comcast came, dutifully between 10 and 2, and attempted to install my cable. “Attempted” being the operative word - after about 45 minutes of fruitless effort, including significant help from me, my installer left, unable to finish the job. I went back to work, disappointed, then came home and did it myself with software I downloaded from the Comcast website.

You can imagine my surprise when I got my bill a few weeks later, complete with a hefty installation fee - for an installation that never happened, and that I ultimately did myself!

Unfazed, I got in touch with Comcast customer service via Twitter and complained about the fee, and it was refunded within 24 hours or so. “Great customer service!” I thought. “Why don’t more companies do this?”

But after thinking about it for a while, I wonder whether that these social media presences are really a solution to anything. I think we should really ask ourselves who’s being served by the Twitter accounts and Facebook pages set up by customer service departments. Yes - my concerns were addressed almost instantaneously, and without the usual rigmarole of 1-800 numbers typical of megacorporation customer service. But according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project,  broadband penetration varies wildly between different demographic groups in America. So, for instance, while 83% of Americans with bachelor’s degrees had a home broadband connection when surveyed this April, only 30% of senior citizens, 35% of low-income Americans, 46% of rural Americans and 46% of African Americans did. In addition, a stunning 85% of upper-income Americans had broadband access at home. These differences may have become more stark since broadband costs have increased: in a year where we’ve experienced slight price deflation, the price of broadband has risen 13%.

The correlation between the popularization of social media and broadband adaptation is not accidental.  Social media sites are often bandwidth-heavy and more or less require high-speed internet to be fully functional. Others, like Twitter, may not be bandwidth hogs but are much more useful if you maintain constant interaction with the service - something dial-up doesn’t do well.

I’m concerned that by embracing social media channels for customer service, companies might be inadvertently creating a two-tiered system for customers with problems - one, for wealthy and well-educated customers, that’s effective, friendly, and responsive, and the other for everyone else. From personal experience, the difference between @comcastcares and 1-800-COMCAST could not be more stark. One’s a pleasant, sometimes obsequious exercise in customer satisfaction; the other is bureaucratic, confusing, often unfriendly and occasionally flat-out wrong. I don’t know whether the people behind the @comcastcares account are higher up on the food chain than their phone customer service brethren, but they seem more empowered to refund money and deal with complaints. It bothers me that people like my grandparents, who live in the country, don’t have bachelor’s degrees, and are senior citizens, don’t have access to that same system.

I think efforts to provide better customer service are laudable, but they should at least attempt to be technologically-neutral. If I can get my problem resolved quicker on Twitter, make it so that your reps on the phone can do the same thing. Of course, efforts to make broadband more widespread and less expensive wouldn’t hurt, either.

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APRIL 21, 2009

I’m a Millennial (or if you prefer, one of the 95 million people born between the years 1980 and 2000), and it always fascinates me to see what non-millennials have to say about my generation. That’s why I was drawn to an article in The Financial Times earlier this month entitled, “Internet-savvy leaders waiting in the wings.”  It was written by the dean of the School of Business and Technology at Webster University, Benjamin Akande, and he spends the article analyzing Harvard Business School Professor James Heskett’s new book: How Will Millennials Manage?. Heskett’s book addresses our future leaders (that would be the Millennials, or the “iPoders,” as Akande calls us) and our need to embrace change.

According to Akande, embracing change won’t be a problem for us, especially given that we’re the first generation to grow up with digital media, where change happens at break-neck speeds.  He says:

So what will the future look like with iPoders at the helm? It will be a future of innovative doers, who value independent thought. To stay relevant, organisations must successfully recruit and retain them. Andrea Hershatter, associate dean at Goizueta Business School, Emory University, says of iPoders: ‘They don’t feel entitled because they are special. They just want to have those who are closest to them support their quest to achieve and accomplish meaningful goals.’

Why is this quote my favorite part of the whole piece? Because I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to hear older generations voice their support for and confidence in my generation. It’s nice to know that some actually have faith in our ability to achieve great things — unlike others who simply view us as “trophy kids.”

Like Akande and Hershatter, businesses should take note and begin to recruit and embrace the innovative minds of the iPoders.  Those who don’t will miss out our “innovative minds,” and inevitably, fall behind the curve.

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MARCH 25, 2009

Today, women far outnumber men in terms of college enrollment. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be 10.2 million women enrolled in college, compared to 6.9 million men. There is also a gender skew when it comes to job layoffs in these crazy economic times, which means that quite possibly women will soon outnumber men in the employed workforce. So surely we feel that women are catching up to men, right?

Well, not really. Regardless of these stats, there is still a perception that things tend to lean in men’s favor. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll published in MediaWeek last month reveals what we think. The poll asked: “In our society today, are there more advantages in being a man or in being a woman, or are there no more advantages in being one than the other?”

52% said that there were no more advantages in one than the other
40% said there is an advantage to being a man
6% said there is an advantage to being a woman
1% gave no answer

These numbers differ very little from the results of a similar CBS poll conducted twenty years ago. Back then, 45% of respondents said there is an advantage in being a man and 6% said there is an advantage in being a woman.

I think that much of these opinions stem from the salary differences that still exist today. Also, because we have all grown up in a society that embraces many of the wonderful things that the New Persuasion 5 Forces represent (Globalization, Innovation, Immigration, Saturation, and Personalization), and are used to seeing an older white male figurehead associated with success in these areas, we are stuck in an antiquated mind frame. Yet, we are seeing now, more than ever, that young people can be CEOs (think Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook), African-Americans can be leaders, and women can be powerful and self-made. So why haven’t these new realities affected our perceptions of who has it better? 

Thinking that women are at a disadvantage only creates a disadvantage for women. Believing that the person with the most talent — not the most natural advantages– will come out on top in the end is the key to achieving a true meritocracy.

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DECEMBER 1, 2008

Last week, I read an article in Newsweek that was cleverly called “Change You Can Conceive In: Could Euphoric Obama Fans be Sparking a Baby Boom?”

The author writes, “In the hours and days since Obama’s victory, many of his exhilarated supporters have been, shall we say, in the mood for love.  And though it’s too soon to know for sure, experts aren’t ruling out the possibility of an Obama baby boom—the kind of blip in the national birth rate that often follows a seismic event, whether it’s scary (a terrorist attack) or celebratory (the end of World War II).”

Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe have actually co-written a number of books on the subject of generational baby booms, namely, “Generations: The History of America’s Future,” which tells the history of America through a succession of generational biographies circa 1584 to the present.  According to Strauss and Howe, just as history molds generations, so too do generations mold history.  They even claim to have identified a historical pattern in which each generation belongs to one of four archetypes, or ”Turnings,” that repeats sequentially:

Awakening.  During an Awakening, rising adults are driven by inner zeal to become philosophers, religious pundits, and hippies, as they alienate children (who see the adult world becoming more chaotic each day) and older generations alike.  A Nomad (or Reactive) is born during an Awakening.  Nomadic leaders are cunning, hard-to-fool realists, and taciturn warriors who prefer to meet problems and adversaries one-on-one.

Unraveling.  An Unraveling is an era of relative peace and prosperity between an Awakening and a Crisis.  A Hero (or Civic) is born during an Unraveling.  Heroic leaders are considered vigorous and rational institution-builders, entering midlife as aggressive advocates of technological progress, economic prosperity, social harmony, and public optimism.

Crisis.  A Crisis is a decisive era of secular upheaval in which a values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.  Wars are waged with apocalyptic finality.  An Artist (or Adaptive) is born during a Crisis.  Artistic leaders are advocates of fairness and the politics of inclusion, and are irrepressible in the wake of failure.

High.  A High is an era between a Crisis and an Awakening.  A Prophet (or Idealist) is born during a High.  Prophetic leaders are cerebral and principled, summoners of human sacrifice, and wagers of righteous wars.  Early in life, few see combat in uniform; late in life, most come to be revered as much for their words as for their deeds.

What I want to know is whether you agree or disagree with Strauss and Howe’s dissection of generational archetypes.  If you agree with them, where do you believe your generation stands now?  If you disagree with them, what would you add or amend to make them more relevant?

Personally, I believe that an Obama baby boom would compose part of a New Adaptive Generation - a collection of “artists” who will be irrepressible in the wake of modern-day failures.  At least, that is what I hope.

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NOVEMBER 7, 2008

I am big fan of internet snooping. It never ceases to amaze me, what I can learn about people through a simple Google search. I’ve tracked down wayward college classmates for our alumni website. I once planned a reunion for a summer journalism program I attended in 1986 and tracked down, online, almost 75% of the people who attended.  And that was all before Facebook and LinkedIn, two sites that have made internet snooping even richer.  It’s no surprise that it has been over two years since Merriam-Webster added the verb “to google” to the dictionary. Googling has become a way of life.

This week I came across an interesting angle on the Google culture.  Buried underneath all of the election news was this article in The Washington Post (and printed in various other papers) about litigation consultants using the internet to get information about potential jurors. For example, a trial consultant working for a client involved in a patent case learned via a potential juror’s website that she “had spent a lifetime marketing exclusive sequined gowns for beauty contestants, only to have them copied without compensation.” Clearly, she was a good jury candidate for a client bringing a patent suit, given her sympathy for intellectual property holders alleging infringement.

According to the article:

Now, with a wealth of information online - newspaper letters to the editor, petition signatures, club memberships, campaign contributions - retrievable with a couple of keystrokes, Internet surfing can produce a detailed picture of how an individual votes, spends money and sounds off on controversial issues.

For some reason, this development doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t fault the lawyers for using these tools to learn all they can about jurors - I wouldn’t expect them to shy away from a free resource that offers significant insight into the minds of the individuals in whose hands their clients’ fate rests. But I can’t shake a nagging feeling that this is not what the jury system was supposed to be built on. Jurors are basically supposed to be anonymous and seemingly impartial, and the Google effect basically makes that impossible.  Lawyers can now practically custom design their ideal jurors, based not just on demographic data and courtroom demeanor, but also on the jurors’ own thoughts, history, and actions.

Just another byproduct of the Information Age? A troubling intrusion into personal privacy? Or a fundamental flaw in our judicial system?

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SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

Are you familiar with Stanley Milgram’s 1967 Small World Experiment?  What about the popular late 90s trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?”  Even if you aren’t, well, chances are you have a not-so-distant acquaintance in your social network who is.

According to an article in The Washington Post, Milgram’s famous experiment was recently corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication, loosely referred to as the “Microsoft Messenger Project.”  The study included every member of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging service from June 2006, or roughly half the world’s instant-messaging traffic at the time.

After reviewing 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, Microsoft researchers found that “any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances.”  For the purposes of their experiment, two people were considered to be acquaintances if they had sent one another a text message.

In response to the study, lead researcher Eric Horvitz said, “It was pretty shocking . . . there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity . . . that this idea goes beyond folklore.”

That Mr. Horvitz would find this study “pretty shocking” is pretty shocking to me.  Has it not already become conventional wisdom that people are connected in such ways – perhaps in more ways than we could ever count or possibly even comprehend?  Take you and me, for instance.  I’d be willing to bet that we have hundreds if not thousands of ties among us, and I would be placing that bet on intuition alone.

There’s even a well-known mathematical law we can use to put the shock value of this social “phenomenon” into perspective.  Known as the Law of Truly Large Numbers, it states that, with a sample size large enough, any outrageous thing is likely to happen – including (you guessed it) meeting someone who “coincidentally” shares a mutual acquaintance or some other personal connection with you.

For example, did you know that more than 16 million other people on this planet celebrate the same birthday as you?  At a typical football game with 50,000 fans, it’s likely that you will share your birthday with approximately 135 of them (unless, of course, you were born on February 29 – in this case, you will share your birthday with an estimated 34 other fans).  Therefore, according to the Law of Truly Large Numbers, it’s not really that unlikely, on any given day, for you to be in close proximity to someone who was born on the same day as you.  Most of the time, you just don’t realize it.

The Law has previously been used to put into perspective the odds of a person winning the lottery twice in his/her lifetime.  You might think the odds are something like 1-in-17 trillion, but they are really closer to 1-in-30.  The same principle can be applied to miracles.  If you (1) define a miracle as an exceptional event occurring at a frequency of one-in-a-million, (2) experience one event per second (3) for no less than eight alert/waking hours of the day, then after 35 days, you will have experienced 1,008,000 things.  Therefore, in keeping with the Law of Truly Large Numbers, you should actually experience about one miracle every five weeks over the course of your life.

So, please, Mr. Horvitz, save us the whole dog and pony show.  It would be an understatement to say that we kind of already suspected it was a small world, after all.

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AUGUST 19, 2008

It’s obvious that times are changing– in many ways.  Too many to count, actually.  I know this makes me sound old, but I was born in the 80s, so I’m not that old…yet. 

One thing that I’ve always been fascinated with is people’s strong opinions about cohabitation by couples before marriage (this reminds me a bit of the stay-at-home mom vs. the working mom debate).  Most people I know find themselves leaning strongly towards one end of the spectrum or the other– for varying reasons.  Some think that it’s never appropriate for a couple to live together until marriage; others feel that if it makes sense financially and personally, they should go for it to “test out” the relationship before they leap into something a lot more serious. 

This doesn’t even take into account the barrage of images of celebrity couples (think Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt) who are choosing to live together before marriage and even start families with no feelings of obligation to wed.  The public may start thinking, if they can do it… why can’t I? 

A July USA Today article called “Living Together Isn’t Just ‘Playing House’ ” really delves into the issue and explains why living together no longer has the negative associations and stereotypes attached to it that it did in days of the past.  According to the article, the number of opposite-sex couples who live together has jumped from less than 1 million 30 years ago to 6.4 million in 2007. 

According to Jay Teachman, a sociology professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, while old data showed an increased risk of divorce among cohabiting couples, that’s not necessarily true today:

Twenty or 25 years ago, if you were cohabiting and then married them, the marriage was more likely to dissolve and end in divorce…today that’s not the case.  You can cohabit with your spouse and not experience increased risk of divorce.  We’re making these finer distinctions that we didn’t make before.

I personally feel that cohabitation before marriage can be a good thing.  For me, it in part came down to a financial decision.  After I got engaged I realized it was pointless to keep my apartment because I was spending all of my free time at my fiance’s house.  Why continue to pay rent when I knew we’d be living together in a matter of months, anyway? 

My mom wasn’t exactly thrilled about this… but she got over it after she did the math and realized it would only be two months of living together before the date of our wedding.  She raised me with the mindset that cohabitation before marriage is a very bad thing.  Now that I am older and have formed opinions of my own, I stand somewhere in the middle of the cohabitation wars: I appreciate the idea in certain circumstances, but I also respect the perspective of my mother.

What do you think?  Is cohabitation less of a big deal today than it was in the past?  Does the new evidence make you think any differently about the concept?

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JULY 2, 2008

Is our country in danger of too much assimilation? As cities all around the U.S. diversify culturally, the process of becoming “American” becomes quicker and quicker. Not only are major cities diversifying, a growing number of immigrants are also settling in suburbia. As a result, growing up in a diverse environment, marrying outside of one’s race, and being more aware of other cultures is becoming the norm.  All of these sound like good changes, but as we become further removed from our ethnic roots, are we also becoming further removed from our individual heritages? Or are we simply breaking ties with the old and solidifying a new American culture?

According to a study using the latest Census Bureau figures, the percentage of Asian women born in the United States who marry Asian men has declined from 59 percent in 1994 to 37 percent today. The proportion of American-born Asian men who marry Asian women has also dropped, from 65 percent to 52 percent. According to this New York Times article, some Chinese-American parents are hoping to reverse these marriage trends by turning to cultural tours such as the Love Boat. These parents are sending their children on the four-week summer program, designed to strengthen young people’s connections with their Taiwanese roots, race, religion and language. The Love Boat – officially called the Expatriate Youth Summer Formosa Study Tour to Taiwan is sponsored and partly subsidized by the Taiwanese government. The tour got its nickname from the many romances that occur between the young participants.

As New Audiences rise in our country, will they long to rekindle their connections to their countries of origin? The success of the Love Boat suggests that more programs like this one will pop up as new Americans find it harder to meet others of the same descent.

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JUNE 30, 2008

It’s called “Reality Mining” and it works like this: by tracking aggregated non-personal G.P.S. data and running it through specialized software, information analysts are able to paint an interesting picture of how people live:

…Sense Networks, a software analytics company in New York, earlier this month released Macrosense, a tool that aims to do just that. Macrosense applies complex statistical algorithms to sift through the growing heaps of data about location and to make predictions or recommendations on various questions — where a company should put its next store, for example. Gregory Skibiski, 34, the chief executive and a co-founder of Sense, says the company has been testing its software with a major retailer, a major financial services firm and a large hedge fund.

Tony Jebara, also 34, the chief scientist and another co-founder of Sense, said, “We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”

All this information can then be sold to businesses trying to capitalize on location trends and traffic patterns. It seems like a slam dunk, if it weren’t for the thorny issue of privacy. On the other hand, some reality prospectors seem to have an answer for that too:

Mr. Skibiski says that Sense is interested only in aggregate data and that it’s looking for broad patterns, not the specific behavior of individuals. But he recognizes the privacy issue. He says he believes that people should own their own data, control when it is disclosed and receive some remuneration for it. His original idea in 2002 was to pay people for their data, but a formula for doing so proved too complicated.

Instead, Sense decided to trade services for data. On the same day it released Macrosense, it announced a new software package called Citysense, which uses location data to show where people are going, say, for nightlife, and maps their activity. Consumers who have iPhones or BlackBerrys can sign up for the service, which does not ask for personal information. Over time, the software will learn their patterns and recommend places they might like to go, or show them where other people with similar patterns are going. If they want to purge their data, they can do so at any time.

We make these sort of trade-offs more often than we think. If we want to use certain tools, like PageRank on the Google Toolbar, we have to allow for anonymous usage statistics. A number of software packages ask permission to share anonymous data as part of the EULA process. And every time you scan your little keychain card to get a discount at the supermarket, you’re adding your info to the dataset.

With all the compromises we make to privacy, is there value in the kind of trade Sense Network is willing to provide - a version of its service that’s useful to you, in exchange for data that it can sell to others? My guess is that it’s the sort of thing we’ll have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis, but we’d better start thinking about it. We’ll only see more of this kind of thing, not less, as G.P.S. and location-specific services become more ubiquitous.

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