Monthly Archives: November 2011
A Cloudy Forecast for Screenagers
In the late '90s, Douglas Rushkoff's book Playing the Future introduced the term screenager: a teenager who spends a lot of time at a computer screen sending emails and instant messages, downloading music and movies, playing games, and cruising around online. Cut to 15 years later, and we are all living in a screen age. Time online is no longer just for teens; it's for anyone with a power cord and a pulse.
In another nod to Rushkoff's book, the future is playing now, with the computer screen or the screen of your tablet or phone as mediator, translator, and conduit of today's new shorthand. A few years ago, "lmao" and "brb" and ☺ were the provenance of the young digital natives, but now they belong to all of us as the new slang, and they have virtually changed language forever. (#iRoglyphics)
Related topics:
Millennials
A Holiday Thought from Peter H. Reynolds
Occupy the Dinner Table: Gather friends & family--turn off your devices & reconnect to the best network around.
Related topics:
New Consumer
WWF: Change the Way You Think
The World Wildlife Fund has put together a series of videos to get people thinking about personal and global consumption--and how to make it more sustainable. Here's one about your morning latte. Did you know it took 200 liters of water to create it? Nope, we didn't either...
You'll find additional videos in the series here.
Related topics:
New Consumer
Generation Sell?
Writing in the New York Times Sunday Review, William Deresiewicz considers what best characterizes the millennial generation. He sees previous youth cultures as related to two things: "the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned." So hippies, for instance, were all about the emotion of love (love-ins, free love, Summer of Love) and the social form of utopia (communes, music festivals, liberation movement). Punks, in contrast, were all about rage and nihilistic anarchy.
And the millennials? Deresiewicz thinks they're best described as having the affect of a salesman. Their ideal social form: small business. What strikes him most about millennials, he writes, "is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly." He likens these traits to a "commercial personality": "It is the salesman's smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy."
It makes sense. This is a generation whose heroes are entrepreneurs (Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg) and whose ideal job involves starting a business--preferably with a social bent.
It's a great article. Read it here. And let us know what you think.
Related topics:
Millennials