you, my friend, are hella awkward.

let me set a few things straight. yes, i'm a GenYer. yes, we are wicked awesome and good for business. but we are also hella awkward. and, my friend, most likely you are too.

GenYers spend most of our days on the internet. but let's not kid ourselves. if you're reading this, you probably do too. you have a digi-positive 9-5; you write emails, texts, and generally communicate with words first--voice second; it's faster, sure. short of being Grandma who still (bless her heart) can't quite get all this new fangled stuff, you are in danger.

that's right.
you're becoming more awkward.
and likely, less understood.

that's the irony in this day and age. social networking. all points access to your friends 24/7. transparency to the enth. and yet, you still have no idea what i'm saying. and i'm an highly educated word-person-thingy.

half our country is still leaving 'h' out of "wat" and using "c" in place of 'see,' etc. there is no diction, no word choice, to convey emotion behind the txting, beyond maybe an ambiguous ":)"--and that is the primary mode of communication.

we're losing our body language, our vocal tone, our inclination to have conversations in real life, in person as well as the skills needed to decode those aspects.

we're just stuck in our heads. the Googling of thoughts, we read and intonate what we want to. personalized communication, it is what i want it to be--not necessarily what you mean for it to be. or so i'm noticing.

i had this issue this weekend. wanted to have a semi-serious chat with my sig other, who prefers only talking in txt (i prefer in-person). compromised, chatted on AIM (...no joke). and you know what? i 'walked out' of that chat not at all confident that anything i said actually was understood. the responses were just not on the level.

how do you combat your 'awkward' in an increasingly text-only driven world? do you feel less understood more frequently, or does the "140 character limit" just get you off? are you more in your head, or less? can you even tell if a person is lying by looking at them any more, or do you trust the transparency of consonants and vowels?

things to think about.

[img via.]

somethin' about the way garyvee says douchebag

...just makes me feel all aflutter inside.



i found this via @TDefren's new post. in this video, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about passion and patience.

which is funny, considering both have the same Latin root, pati, meaning "to suffer." [HOL reference for you there, kids <3]

which is to say, garyvee [it just rolls so nicely, i have to type it like that] believes that if you don't like what you do--not even a little--STOP. just STOP. and do SOMETHING ELSE. even if that thing is smurfs. me, i don't buy into the monetization of a smurf blog, but hell, i believe him, and his Pinot Grigio Hour. that's where the passion comes in. life is too short to be doing something you hate. yadda yadda motivational speech.

[hey does it sound like that stuff your generation sold my generation and now you want to take it back because we all think we're genuinely entitled to that Pursuit of Happiness? i thought so--but there's a catch.]

yeah, that patience thing, which has to do with that suffering thing i mentioned earlier. "how do i monetize my new Smurf Empire?" you may ask, and he answers: by doing some serious damage between the hours of 7pm and 2am, before you pass out, go to work, take an hour break to "kiss the dog," and do it all over again. so that you still have to go to work. to make the money. to do serious damage. to make your new Empire.

i'm not at all belittling garyvee's view. i think it's powerful, poignant, and necessary. its passion is inspiring and the message is spot-on. but i've also heard it before.

i think that, reading between the lines, it's also a message that requires you to keep that passion when you're up until 2am working on the new Empire, have barely seen family or friends, and still aren't so keen on the job you're spending 8-10 hours of daylight on. the message is to feel like he does on that stage, only every morning. and i think that's the hardest part. not just saying "I Quit!" as Audience Man #1 did, but sticking out the suck for the better ahead.

not the interest, not the late night Empire, and not the years of development.
but keeping the passion, and acquiring the patience, through those times of suffering.

make (out) face time.

okay, you win. you found me out. secretly, i'm an optimist parading as a realist. and these ads totally appeal to me. that's right, i said it. i love the new Dentyne ads.

do i chew Dentyne? no.
will i switch to Dentyne? no.
do i like Orbit's advertising? no.

well, you can't win them all. i get the strategy: you're gonna need wonderfully fresh breath to get that close "face time" with anyone, be it a whisper or a kiss. and you know what? they're right. i always carry a pack of gum with me. always.

(in fact, it used to be Dentyne. i can't tell you what changed, but now i only buy Orbit. how's that for advertising i hate. i could really do without the Orbit lady. the only one i ever liked was when Orbit "cleaned up a dirty mouth" and the couple was fighting; one called the other a "lint licker." anyway. i'm sure to switch it must have been a friend recommendation.)

way to know your target market. i wonder if post-30 chew anywhere near as much gum as 10-25. anyone have stats for me? plus, the relevancy is easy to relate to, especially when so many of us manage real-life interactions online (even if it's to arrange a face meetup). the push to Get Off the Internet is nostalgic (for my gen, anyway!) and cute. it definitely speaks to me, in the same way that Unplug Your Friends functioned.

porn and the search engine showdown

Google is on its game, with two shiny toys:
Google News, which enables you to search newspaper archives online [because you know, the interwebs will make newspapers extinct, until they're fossilized and preserved here] and Google Labs' Audio Indexing, which you must admit is pretty sweet, be it looking up the lyrics to Chocolate Rain or finding out what exactly the politician said during that speech or other [as it's currently being used for].

MarketingVox points out a new trend that Bill Tancer of global research at Hitwise discovered when analyzing the search engine data: millenials aren't so interested in porn anymore, compared to previous numbers. they're spending more time searching social media networks. wait.

you're telling me folks are less into porn because they're wasting time on facebook?

no no no, kind sirs. it's because they're busy finding porn on facebook, myspace, etc. don't get me wrong. i'm not saying there's actual porn on facebook. after all, they did take down pics of breasts. but the difference is proximity. you have no chance with Ms Giselle of whatever porn site. but you might actually get a chance to make porn with that girl you haven't talked to since sophomore year of high school.

in other SEO news, there's the Search Engine Rap Battle. i don't even have words.

pseudomodernity and "hyperliteracy."

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
... Life is very long [Eliot]

a response to Gavin at servant of chaos. a long theoretical friday-candy post.

i do have to agree that while both modernism and postmodernism had a "burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance," that what Kirby calls pseudomodernism, i would argue, has this same sense of inheritance--in a different way. postmodernism worked to break up the linear. to think in circles. understands cycles, and also to step away from them. to know that A can link to F without any letters in between; that logic jumps are products of inflicted learning methods. which is also why i agree that the internet is the pinnacle of postmodern thought.

and yet, it is this internet-style pomo thought process which we have inherited, which produced the thought patterns necessary for this pseudomodernity. it is this which enabled classroom computers in which teachers are assigning Facebook profiles as homework to express Holden Caulfield. what Kirby, who feels that his "pseudo modernists are spookily devoid of agency, caught in the neverland between the capacity to effect change and the overwhelming minutiae digital interactions," did not anticipate is our capacity to navigate that space because of our inherited postmodern thought.

i agree with Gavin when he says that "production fails (and always will) in its effort to capture the live moment" because i have that postmodern schema. that is, with Magritte-like wonder, the video of the event will never be the event (for example): it is a representation of an event purchased and reproduced through angles, moments elongated or not long enough--editing, for lack of a better word, regardless of quality of craft. even if it is live-fed, those watching will not have the same experience as those experiencing firsthand. but the temptation to get it to that space has prompted movies like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield as well as a rise in mundane youtube videos, etc.

but because of my place as a gen-y "pseudomodernist" i cannot say this will always be the case, that we will never be able to access that. i think we have a genuine skepticism in these productions even as we participate in them. we know they consume our time and that it places a distance between ourselves and the experience, even if we are the ones experiencing. which is to say, if i'm having a friend video my morning routine, my morning routine will be different simply because of the presence of the video camera. and we know this, moreso than our parents' generation who believe youtube videos as true (generalization, but i've noticed a certain naiveté there).

Gavin points out social media as a possibility for the beginning of navigation between those spaces of experience and production because they result in real-life experiences (eg, tweetups). while i think this is an excellent start, i think it's only part of the picture. i think just as before us came oral tradition, we are hyperliterate; we are writing a hyperliteral tradition. this is not the same as books, which had too much 'production value' with editors and publishers. this is your point of view and my point of view on the same thing, both available, both time-transcendent and hyper-recorded on 18 different search engines.

it is this connectivity, like microblogging from a mobile device, which moves real-time information from people to the internet to records to the future. what youtube videos lack are the personalized element. and "me" in the youtube video is superseded by the "me" watching it. what film editors try to artfully capture: the thoughts, emotions, and feelings of an experience, expressed through only audio and visual. eventually, someone will sort out how to merge the recording with the experience seamlessly. you won't have to disrupt your experience to record it. there will be no "postmodern gap," the anxiety between the interactive and the action.

it will feel like freedom. and it will be scary. as this emerges, so too will those who search out total experiences, who reject the idea of this recording, i'm sure. i hope to be one of them. but maybe that's the postmodern, rather than the pseudomodern, in me.

twitter as int'l pr/ad firm merger.

so yesterday i was chatting with my 'big brother' @griner on GChat and, among other things that are likely unrepeatable, we got to talking about what we look for in our jobs, and, what our jobs would look like ideally.

both of us are intrigued by social media (big shocker right?) and somehow we got on the topic of twitter... as many of us tend to do. it seems everyone wants to figure out why, exactly, twitter is awesome, how it could be more awesome, and why younger kids (and older folks?) aren't yet sold on its proverbial awesome awesomeness.

David and i realized that twitter is pretty much the best ad agency we could ever want to work at. as in, if we selected folks we know on twitter, regardless of location, it would make for a pretty sick setting. the thinktank there is marvellous. so many ideas are being bounced, debated, and realized. we're cerebral professionals, only also people, and accepting of that.

twitter is pretty much the staff meeting we always wanted.

in consideration hence, i think this is why its so alluring to our demographic, which i'm going to gingerly put in the 22-50 age bracket of varying professions. i know us social media and digital types are all up on it, but we're not the only ones. study the Everyone tab long enough and many professional communities emerge, from clothing designers to astrologists.

if someone were to form an agency from just our circle of twitter insanity, David and i suggest the following names:

Swallow (David adds: "We do what others won't." har har, pervy social media)
Finch (i counter in buzz cliche: "The next evolution in communication.")

but, to go back to why it's not catching on down the line, young kids don't need that same thinktank. a lot of them are very localized to one another and their desire for idea sharing isn't quite the same as ours (not that it doesn't exist--it just has different needs), a lot of which are solved via regular txt messaging and don't need a supplementary txt message program.

perhaps if there were an organization to join twitter and inform of parties in each area, that may be more attractive to a younger demographic across multiple spaces. or if charities working with a younger target market did it. i mean, even my personal fave charity, TWLOHA, doesn't have a twitter--and given its demographic influence, i would think they should.

hey radar's robert, sure your name's not richard?

"They felt threatened by our youth, confused by our lack of earnestness, and deeply troubled by our lack of appreciation for James Taylor. The boomers' entire identity was wrapped around being young and progressive. Gen X was an affront to their place in the world." -- Robert Lanham

[stop][rewind][rewrite][play]

You feel threatened by our youth, confused by our lack of earnestness, and deeply troubled by our lack of appreciation for Your Ass. The Gen X's entire identity was wrapped around being young and progressive. "The Millennials" are an affront to your place in the world.

...that's really what you're saying, isn't it?

reading: Chet > Safer > Lanham > Anastasia > Adrian > Me in April.

then again, radar is all about "pop + politics + scandal + style."
this is jack's complete lack of surprise.

interesting bits on gen-y.

how to engage us once i've convinced you that your company really, really needs 20something thinkers. and in case you didn't know, we're gonna change the world, or at least the interwebs... yeah. that we are. at least it's a far cry better than that hideous nytimes article citing us as lazy bastards. again, i reiterate: i do not have to hate my job. i'm sorry you do.

virtual connections, intangible hope

[updated fact adjustment]

i'm beginning premature analysis and first impressions of thoughts surrounding Twistori, a project by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs inspired by the previous We Feel Fine applet. i began using it the other day.

[/updated fact adjustment]

i am in love with these sites. i think i find them reassuring in a personal way without feeling intrusive. when i read "#I believe that the secrets of life are at the bottom of my coffee mug. I must investigate," i don't need to know who wrote it, how old they are, where they're from, or how they identify.

i find connection because it is a familiar thought consideration (belief) in a familiar sentiment (in unexpected places) with a personal addition ('i must investigate'). the phrase offers me comfort. i can commiserate and appreciate it. in the same way that i can appreciate, "#I love grapefruit...it tastes like Summer" and "#I HATE YOU STAPLER, HATE HATE."

simple phrases (i love, i hate, i think, i believe, i feel, i wish) are some of the most intrinsic building blocks for opening communication between two people because it at once shows a vulnerability (telling something about oneself) at the same time as offering it up for empathy (chances are you can relate to most of what appears).

but what does this mean?

it means i can reach out to people and find reassurance without their knowing it. without having to consider how they might feel about how i feel about their words. it's a selfish act of self-therapy, to, at its basest, simply know i'm not alone. i can know that i share so many things with so many people i've never met, and moreover, never have to meet.

i don't need to share my life story with them on Facebook chat. i can take it at face value and appreciate the common threads of human existence, which make me feel small and part of a larger whole, but in a reassuring way rather than a depressing one. it's not complex enough that i have to start asking myself deeper analytical questions about the nature of the statements.

i can just watch the world unfold around me in this faux sense of digital peace. it's pixelated zen. connection without judgment or responsibility. i'm not saying it forgoes human interaction, but it helps as a mental supplement. i don't know if this is the product of an internet disconnected generation, finding connections without faces, or if this is a human instinct to want to feel.

"#I believe this week is killing me."
and i just think we can all use a little zen.

[this will likely be considered again the more i dwell on and use Twistori.]

Lovefool: 1: TWLOHA.

this is the first official post of project Lovefool, wherein i promised i would:
"post about how much i love your brand. why i love your brand. and how much i'm willing to talk about how much i love your brand."

target #1: To Write Love on Her Arms.

why you should care:
unless you're entirely apathetic, have never been depressed, have never known anyone who was depressed, was never a child, never had children, and hate teenagers, you should help this cause. from their FAQ:
Q.What is To Write Love on Her Arms?
A. TWLOHA is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for those struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire, and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.
Q: How did TWLOHA start?
A: To Write Love on Her Arms began in Orlando, FL in February 2006 as a (written) story, the true story of five days spent with a friend who was denied entry into a drug treatment center. The story was a look at those five days, and the t-shirts were printed and sold initially as a way to pay for our friend's treatment.

why i love them:
the phrase "to write love on her arms" directly responds to the tendency of many young girls(/people) to cut their arms with razors (for a multitude of reasons). having helped many of my friends through this in our teenage years, and, having had my younger (HS aged) brother recently ask me why his friends were cutting, i believe that this organization is doing a great thing. it's giving hope and voice to a situation previously beyond (what we felt was in) our control.

how much i'm willing to talk about how much i love them:
i bought 2 tee shirts and a button pack to help fund them ($35 +S&H) so i can wear the message and talk about it in real life. i tweeted about it earlier today, and now i'm writing a blog post about it, hoping to get others to also see the value in the endeavor. to help lift up the young folks that many of our firms target for the next it-toy. as self-value plummets in teenage years leading to a multitude of situations, some created by the very media we sell, the least you can do is buy a button pack ($5) and speak up when someone asks you what "to write love on her arms" means on your stylish ironic tee shirt. please spread the word.

how much i love them/aka/the backstory:
! i first saw the phrase on "to write love on her arms" a tee shirt of a random person photographed online via google. as a poet and lover of words, the phrase stuck with me. i simply liked it. i decided that i was going to, at a later point when i had funds, scour the internet for whatever that shirt was a purchase one.

! before i could acquire the funds to do that, i had been saving up for this past weekend, where i went to the 2 day music festival Bamboozle with my friend Amanda of @reverieapparel. i was pretty much a scene queen for 2 days. it was wicked awesome. anyway.

! while i was there, i saw a shitload of young scene kids wearing these shirts. i had no idea why. i'd never seen one in real life before. confused, i turned to Amanda, who knew of my previous love of the shirt, and said, "wtf?" basically.

! Amanda told me that she had 2 or 3 of the shirts herself and that it was actually a product of a non profit organization dedicated to helping people in need battle depression, addiction, and all the malevolent behaviors that go with it. that made me love it more.

digital natives and the elevator twitpitch

i read this plea to ban employers trawling Facebook some time ago via a link through danah's blog, and while yes, i agreed to an extent, i didn't really think long and hard about it until elevator (twit)pitches arose.

now, i do think twitpitches can be useful. i like the simplicity, the conciseness, the mandate for effectiveness and efficiency. it does not allow for fluff but instead lets the work (ie, a link) do the talking. this is, on the whole, a brilliant idea--especially when aimed toward those who know well enough to craft themselves online; those who know and expect their online 'persona' to affect their working world.

but what about the up-and-coming folks, the "digital natives" as the phrase goes? they were not considering the twitpitch (and all that follows) when they were journaling online at age 13, sneaking into frats at 16, or generally doing "self-exploration" that they may not later wish to admit to (especially when some sites, like Facebook, make it so hard to delete the tracks later on).

as the article i first link to states,
“A world where even a 14-year-old has to think twice before posting an adolescent poem suddenly looks very unappealing and increases the pressure on children and young people to conform to a set of tightly focused adult norms.” (excerpt)

i recently asked my twitter followers this question;
@luckthelady was nice enough to respond, saying that:
To a degree, certainly. I definitely wouldn't hold it against a girl if she got drunk at a frat party, but...
If she's considered to be dishonest, a repeated flake or someone with a bad reputation, it would definitely affect the offer.

do you agree? disagree?
what do you take into account in your employment decision when "e-searching" someone? how well do you expect them to "cover their tracks" (or do you expect at all)? do you think this is unfair to begin with and puts digital natives on an uneven playing field with their more-crafted, older brethren?

and, my question also: how do you determine if someone is a "repeated flake" (for example) online? ie, what if they simply don't check Facebook in particular a lot? or how to measure this over the span of 4 years on Facebook? at what point is social media, aimed at friends, no longer about personal facts but professional representation?

i have questions. i'd be interested in any answers.

we have to change our tune? NYTimes, bite me.

and this is what's wrong (ok, one of the things that's wrong) with the mindset about work in america. i wish i could comment right on the site, because i would.

sure, yes, i agree, don't get me wrong.
persistence? important. hard work? important. paying the rent? important!
as usual, in the words of my dad, 'it's not what you say, but how you're saying it.'

excerpt:
Meanwhile, Eric Papp, the 24-year-old founder of Generation Y Consulting in Tampa, Fla., recalled how he had run into a friend who was dressed in gym clothes having just worked out in the middle of the afternoon. “I asked how his job was going and he said it was going well but he had to quit,” Mr. Papp recounted. “He said ‘It interfered with my social life. I had to work weekends.’ ”

None of this surprises Daniel H. Pink, an author who specializes in navigating the workplace. “This generation has been spoon-fed self-esteem cereal for the past 22 years,” he said. “They’ve been told it’s all about them — what they want, what they are passionate about, what they find fulfilling. That’s not a bad message, but it’s also not a complete message.”

IT SHOULD BE ALL ABOUT US. and yeah, maybe that's my "GenY" mentality.
why SHOULD the guy have to work weekends if he doesn't want to? it wasn't the job for him. he didn't love it enough, or find it fulfilling enough, to sacrifice his weekends and be a slave to the clock like other workaholics. clearly he's not doing too badly if he can quit that job and still have the funds for his social life. where's the rest of that picture, NYTimes, hmmm?

not to mention that in the same breath as you defunct GenY's values, you cite a GenYer who created his own consulting firm. how does that fit into your description? he took those values of self-esteem, work-fulfillment, and self-definition and made it work for him. kudos to that, sir, kudos to that.

if i never sat down and asked myself what i wanted in a job, i would never have gone into advertising. i know this for fact, because it's something i had to sort out midway through my college years sitting in a career services office hating my internship options.

it's not how "it's not about us" or these old rules you think we should follow.
it IS about us because we're going to be in your shoes. and well, we think they need to be shinier.

to struggling students entering, i wouldn't spout out negative dogma about how no one has a plan and how you are unimportant. you are important. it's your life. everyone's priorities are different, and i'd say to examine yours. write a list, seriously. do you need your weekends? what salary do you want to make in the future? do you want to take your work home with you after hours? would those answers change if you really loved what you did? what do you love to do?

persist. don't settle.
all the costs--photocopying and coffee retrieval--are worth it. correct, you may not land the thing you love in your first job, but PLEASE, please please, pursue what you love. if you love what you do, i'm going to love that you do it well, and there's success in that. and yes, it will look like work, NYTimes. but it doesn't have to. i still wake up every morning and say "do not want" because i sacrificed my love of sleeping in for the love of my work. but i love my work.

someone out there is doing what you love. join them.
do whatever it takes to join them. get involved.
and if no one is doing what you love? make it happen.
someone else loves it, too.