Tag Archives: Millennials

Information may want to be free, but do we?

Posted on
6

There’s a bit of buzz going on right now about the release of Diaspora. If you’re not familiar with the name, it is essentially to Facebook what Linux is to Windows. That’s right, the collectivists are rising up again. Just as numerous articles about iTunes, Facebook, Apps, and other ‘walled gardens’have begun circulating through the media, the holdouts of a “free Web” are working hard to disrupt the corporate machine with a free offering.

The question is, this time, will the ‘free web’collectivists prevail. History is in their favor. However, we live in a very different time. The capitalists have made significant inroads and far more is at stake now that the Internet is recognized by money holders as an important revenue source and potential profit center.

So, do we want information to be free? Or would we prefer to pay for the convenience of walled gardens? Facebook has been reluctant to charge for membership even though 5¢ per user per month would have major impact on revenue. Yet nominal fees for Flip cameras and ‘good enough’technologies like MP3 have subverted higher quality by delivering more convenience. We’re all time crunched and often times good enough is truly good enough.

Different devices same dynamics.
For power users of the Internet,  ’free’is almost an expectation. Yet increasingly people outside this small subset are becoming more comfortable with forking over a nominal fee for a small application or bit of content. Sure you could find that article online somewhere, but for a few bucks its just easier to get an online subscription.

When we do this, however, we make a choice. Just as AT&T holds iPhone users captive and Blu Ray and HDVD fought it out for format dominance, so we become held fast to iTunes or Amazon. You might argue that one can always jump ship and abandon a standard by abandoning a device but often times you have to give up previous acquisitions based on proprietary formats. That can represent a significant investment.

By the same token, sticking steadfastly to open standards and avoiding the walled gardens omits us from the popular places and often leaves us chasing multiple formats and inter-device compatibility. Tech-headed hardcore collectivists will put in the time to smooth this out, but most of us won’t bother.

These are not new problems. They are the problems phone companies thrust upon their long-distance account holders 15 years ago and home video player owners pushed on people 25 years ago. Interestingly, in both cases a disruptive technology made the point moot as VOIP killed charge-for-distace telephony and is now eroding the need for a disc-playing video device in the home.

Today Hulu and YouTube and AppleTV and Netflix are all fighting to dominate the video-via-Internet market. This is the same battle as long distance telephone and home video players, just a different base technology.

There is another important difference too. We live in a mature post-mass-media world now. This would indicate that a single dominant player is less likely to emerge as market dynamics favor niche audiences and niche products most of the time.

Generation gap.
In my mind the single greatest ideological collision of our time is that of the open-source, everything-free collectivists who pioneered the web and the capitalists who have funded its explosive growth and much of its innovation. Squarely a Gen Xer, I grew up with a free internet and have that expectation. Millennials and the generation following them (now in grade school) are growing up with $2 apps and pay-for-content models. Where I am offended by the affront of having to pay for content, younger web users think nothing of this.

Sure, there will always be holdouts. You will always be able to get content for free from someone, somewhere. Even today anyone with bit torrent savvy can skip right by Netflix and Apple TV and download full length movies for free. This will always be a thorn in the capitalist’s side but now that so many others are comfortable using the Internet there’s plenty of available market share to profit on. Were I to put my money down now, I would say the capitalists have a growing advantage. Time and the aging of the Net Generation is on their side. The growing size of the non-power userbase who favor paying for convenience is also on their side. My suspicion is, just like Ning, Disapora will only see a little traction. Where Apache, MySQL and Linux are tools for the very collectivists who use them, social network software like Diaspora is meant for the non-poweruser who frankly wants to hang out with friends. Those friends have already chosen Facebook.

But…
It is worth sounding a not of caution to the capitalists though. If you build a walled garden, it needs to be Eden. AOL learned this the hard way. They built easy and convenient but blocked out too much. As more and more people began to hear that there was ‘more’outside the garden they got curious and began to climb over the wall. Facebook works very hard to keep up with people’s needs. Adding Places to FB immediately kicked Foursquare and Gowalla down a notch. Why? Because 500MM people use FB. If the non-poweruser wants to be where everyone is, Facebook has the advantage right now.

The second challenge is privacy. While people are increasingly willing to participate in capitalism online, they are sensitive about their information. One significant slip there could have a heavy cost as trust online is hard to earn. Even more interestingly, the 140-character nature of our reading habits fuels this fire. We see the headlines of bank hacks and privacy violations and often don’t read the articles. The net effect is things can feel less secure than they really are. There’s also a strong collectivist set within the mainstream locations like Facebook. These are the people who post Facebook’s quiet privacy policy changes for the world to see. Inherently leery of the capitalists, they are self-appointed agents of the masses and work hard to subvert the efforts of capitalists from within their own walled gardens.

The third challenge is innovation outside the capitalist model. Disruptive technologies have tended to come from those who do not buy into the capitalist philosophy. Apache and Linux were swipes against what power users saw an inferior technologies that were overpriced. So these developers banded together and turned the marketplace upside down. Now the “LAMP stack” is the favored, open format for the web. Perhaps something similar is being worked on now that will shatter the proprietary iTunes and Amazon formats.

I’m watching Apple begin to behave a little less like the underdog and a little more like Microsoft used to be accused of. You know, monopolistic. Google is doing the same. My guess is, in some cellar somewhere someone with no greater agenda than sticking it to the Man is developing something that will eventually chip away at the capitalists again. If enough people get wind of this – and that is increasingly easy in our interconnected age – it might make a difference.

The future favors the capitalists and the trend right now is to choose convenience over freedom, but it is a far more fragile advantage than in the past and trends online shift quickly.

Generation Collaboration

Posted on
3

Read enough about the Millennial generation and its easy to become convinced that they’re all A.D.D., would prefer to go to yoga classes than put in time climbing the corporate ladder and have an overpowering sense of entitlement.

As with any stereotype there’s probably some truth in there, if by broad generalization only.  Milennials are often defined  as the generation that grew up playing baseball in leagues where every kid on every team got a trophy. This illustration is usually used to underscore their pampered adolescence. However, there might be a benefit to growing up in a world where everyone got a trophy just for playing on a team.

That benefit is an affinity for collaboration.

Growing up, Millennials were rewarded for team effort, even if that effort failed to win a game or land them on all-star teams. The message taught early on was that collaboration lead to rewards.

This is exactly what I have observed in the Millennials I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I should note here that I am turning 40 soon. That puts me squarely in Generation X. Not a far cry from Millennials but a gap nonetheness. In truth, Xer and Millennial profiles have some overlap. Both groups are noted for their comfort with technology. Both are also environmentally conscious as well as more likely to try and strike a balance between work and the rest of life. However, unlike my Gen X peers, I see a collaborative quality in Millennials which is nothing short of game changing should it survive into that generation’s senior executive years (meaning their later 40′s, 50′s and 60′s).

The Medium is the Millennial.
I suspect that the Millennial  preference for collaboration stems from having grown up with collaborative media.

For the Millennials that I have observed (and this is admittedly not a scientific perspective I am offering), collaboration seems to come as easily as switching on a laptop and tapping into Wikipedia. They are comfortable asking friends for help, crowdsourcing input and even talking to direct competitors in search of solutions. My superiors in business growing up, and my peers now, also collaborate, but it takes conscious effort and often has back room office politics attached to it. I’ve also noticed we old(er) folk are also not as intuitively adept at using collaborative technologies for our daily work routines. I might typify it this way (and again, these are very broad generalizations):

  • Boomers grew up with printed documents and interoffice memos. They default to wanting to print their emails to review them and like having ‘hard copies’in file cabinets.
  • Xers are more comfortable marking up digital files, but they default to storing those files on a local hard drive.
  • Millennials will take their documents on any device and keep the ‘original’in the Cloud. They default to collaborative systems like Google Docs and Google Wave (and often are frustrated when their older co-workers are not opening embracing these platforms).

Cover Your Ass vs. I’ve Got Your Back.
Notoriously self-motivated, Gen Xers learned early on that corporations (and even parents) wouldn’t necessarily be there for us.  We learned to fend for ourselves after school while Mom and Dad worked and later in the professional world as corporations did their cyclical downsizing. A positive byproduct of this self reliance is entrepreneurialism. A drawback is a ‘Cover Your Ass’mentality that  undermines collaboration by teaching self reliance above all else. Millennials don’t seem to carry this burden. They don’t seem to worry as much about Plan B. Instead, they cover each other’s backs, helping peers – often without compensation of any kind – purely because they seem to collectively believe that by making others smarter they will gain too.

The question is how much Milennial’s  current life stage figures into their open collaboration. As Millennials move into positions where they are running companies, will they continue to be as openly collaborative? The stakes get higher as they age – building successful businesses, getting promoted, growing their stock portfolios and building out a comfortable lifestyle for their families. As they get older  will competitive instinct kick in and trump collaboration?

To be decidedly Gen X about it; The Flower Children of the 60′s became the Yuppies of the 80′s, exchanging their youthful values and second-hand clothing for big homes, fancy cars, new gadgets and tailored suits. Yesterday’s Gen X ‘slackers’who opted for ‘McJobs’rather than a corporate gig are now moving to the helm of companies and making their mark in the Fortune 500. One might expect the collaborative Millennials of today’s young workforce will similarly yield to the pressure to compete, succeed and acquire that is a big part of our capitalist society.

But what if they didn’t? What if the social, communal culture of the Internet with its open-source platforms, free content and commitment to the wisdom of sharing informs how they do business when they’re running businesses?

This would be interesting to observe. I am eager to watch Millennials assume the mantel of companies and organizations. I will be curious how their early experiences on the social web mitigate the lessons of capitalism which are far more Machiavellian. Faced with competition vs. collaboration, what will Millennials do?

The tension between ‘share’(as in between individuals) on the one side and ‘share’(as in marketshare) on the other, is destabilizing the foundations of entire industries (think music, publishing, technology). If they are truly Generation Collaboration then this friction between the communal underpinnings of the Internet and the capitalist trappings of business will only increase. That has been and would continue to be something extraordinary to observe.

We live in interesting times.

25 Random Things

Posted on
2

An interesting article in the Times on the ’25 Things’ meme that’s been washing across Facebook and apparently the entire internet.

A few key passages intrigued me.

“Marlon Brando once said, ‘An actor is a fella who, if you aren’t talking about him, isn’t listening,’ ”

and

“I’ve gotten 25 random things notices from people that absolutely fascinated me,” said Mr. Beaver, the actor. “But I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t want to be stuck on a bus with them telling me these things.”

I’m not entirely sure what it all amounts to. (And despite what all the social media ‘experts’claim, they aren’t either). But there appear to be some interesting trends around social media.

There’s an increasing number ‘low maintenance’relationships in our lives where we publish out, and talk about what interests us and hope/assume people are listening. This is in direct contrast to my understanding of friendship growing up, which should start with ‘how are you?’(a.k.a. concern for the friend rather than just an audience for my own broadcasting.)

We like to talk about ourselves. Social media provide a forum/canvas/venue/platform to gratify our inner need to express ourselves – whether through blog banter (i.e. here) or ’25 random things’or ‘video blogging’or publishing our music or photography or whatever. It seems many of us have an artist inside with a need to express him/herself. The motivation for that need is interesting and worth investigating.

It’s also worth noting the word ‘starving’is often attributed to artists (which is why many of us hedge the inner artist with outer employment) and might be applicable to social media companies too if they don’t figure out a few things pretty quick.

We’re not very careful about our privacy. It’s worse among young people who have not yet felt the sting of something coming back to haunt them in a meaningful way (i.e. job ending, marriage ending, etc.). The older we are, and the more life experience we have underneath us, the more cautious we tend to be.

This, incidentally, is not necessarily in alignment with the implied ‘older people don’t use social media as much a younger people’They may. They may just not expose themselves as often by signing up, creating profiles, or commenting in blogs. Which I realize begs the question, ‘Well then are they really using social media.’

Touché Self you have a point.

There is also, of course, the reality that the gainfully employed have less time to fritter away commenting on blogs etc. anyhow.

I am curious to see if the Millennial Generation, as they grow up, continues to be recklessly open because of the media they were born into or if they begin to lock down on their privacy a bit as the wisdom of age sets in and they realize the ramifications.

Or, in a third Eutopian scenario – if culturally we stop firing people or divorcing them when pictures surface of them doing naked keg stands.

Today it seems to be assumed that Millennials are simply more open because they grew up among pervasivie connectivity. But I question whether it’s the technology or the naievity of youth that leads to this openness.

Probably a bit of both if I had to put money down now.

Most people I know said, did or revealed some dumb things when they were young. It just wasn’t recorded on a server to haunt them 10 years later (or for their parents, employers, etc. to stumble upon). It was much easier to party hearty when no one had a camera phone to snap a shot as someone shaved your eyebrows while you were passed out.

Lastly, and more superficially, I wonder just how ‘random’those 25 Random Things are. Is it like resume writing where in coming up with our list, we’re trying to convey a certain message. I certainly did, but I am cautious about my privacy.

This gets to image management, and some interesting articles have been written on our online image and how we control (or lose control) of it.

Again, I don’t have any answers here. Just more and more questions as these little cultural memes fly across my radar. There’s so much changing so fast, it seems premature to do anything but to observe, think and ask.

Technodispositions.

Posted on
2

For a client I’m working with, we recruited an anthropologist to help us segment prospective target constituencies for a business that deals with world cultures. In the course of discussions with this anthropologist I was introduced to the term ‘technodispositions’. As I understood it, this is an assessment of a group’s/culture’s likelihood to use technology. It combines three avenues of inquiry:

Do they have the means? – That is the availability of the technology and the means (access, distribution, financial wherewithal, etc.) to engage with the technology?

Do they see/value the utility? – That is, do they understand and place value in the use of the technology and the solution/service it provides?

Do they demonstrate willingness? – That is, have they proven by actions that they engage with technologies when warranted. In short, that they are adopters of technology.

This idea had me wondering how often those concerned with building businesses around social media consider the technodispositions of their targeted constituencies. Sure, the plays for Millennials might be a little easier to guess at because they are known to have the means, see the utility and demonstrate the willingness. But what about soccer moms or retirees? Should their social media experiences have the same functionality, navigational structures and architecture as Millennials? Should it be assumed that soccer moms want to meet new people? Does enlarging the font on every page customize an experience to Seniors? Are contextual maps understood and appreciated by Joe The Plumber in Dubuque?

Numerous studies point out the vast disparities in how different socio-economic groups or ethnic communities engage with family, relationships, community, etc. It only stands to reason that social media would be impacted by this. Yet so many niche communites online share very similar functionality or imply significant assumptions in how they present navigation, informational hierarchy etc. Related, often times something new that works for one community is ported in whole to another and thrust upon them without much thought as to whether it is relevant, warranted or welcomes.

In the discussions I have, blogs I read and articles I find, it seems to me a lot of time is spent on the ‘technology’half of social technologies and not enough is spent on the ‘social’part. My suspicion is that the study of socialization (including technodispositions) probably far more enlightening as a predictor of which businesses will win out in the end.

By my observation, a lot of social media’s success stories have been happy accidents. Wouldn’t it be nice to plan for success rather than putting a new application out there and hoping something cares enough to use it?