The Digital Generation Gap

Last week, the Archer Group in Wilmington held a Trust Summit at duPont’s Theater N, featuring presentations by Mitch Joel, Julien Smith and Chris Brogan, some of my favorite people ever.  One of the stories Mitch told keeps coming to mind again and again.  It can best be summed up by saying “There’s no going back, only moving forward.”  As businesses are coming to terms with what digital communications channels are doing to business, we have to keep in mind that we can’t rewind time back to what we’re used to and comfortable with-  times have changed and there’s simply no going back.

To this point, I”m reading a great book by the vastly under-appreciated Seymour Papert entitled The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap.   It seems to me  that the phrase “Digital Generation Gap” describes  the core problem businesses are having these days- the digital generation gap and its disruption of business as usual is causing all sorts of problems and pain.

People are simple creatures at heart.  We are built to try to make our lives as easy and simple as possible.  Occam’s razor rules the day.  We want what we want when we want it.  We respond to positive reinforcement, and stop doing the stuff that’s difficult, unless we see a light at the end of the tunnel, and know the path will yield results.  We can get this wrong from time to time, of course, but the more assurance we have of success up front, the more patient we’re willing to be.

Take the case of the flashing twelve on the VCR, or get used to a new cell phone.  These are tasks that can be done or ignored in large part, if you can use work arounds, but in each case, the benefit of getting the small task done makes other things possible.  Program the time on the VCR or DVD player, and you can record shows when you’re not home.  Get used to the software of your new phone, and you can take advantage of more features.  Children and young people have grown up in a world where they readily adapt to the rules and structure of these new systems, but I would bet most families have some members who have instead decided technology is just too complicated for them and it’s easier to maintain the old ways, until they can no longer avoid it.

My mother in law, for example, wanted CD’s for Christmas, and I bought her an ipod touch instead.  She can have all her music available all the time now, and no need to worry about carrying around all those CD’s, but she still worries that she can somehow break it or otherwise make a mistake.  She teaches classes online, but computers seem complicated, they seem to break for no rational reason (yes, she is on an old Windows machine) and they’ve made her feel silly and dumb, and so she resists doing anything new.  She can see the advantages, but the thought of learning yet another new way to do things doesn’t excite her as much as scare her from trying. Trying to convince businesses to try a social media strategy for building more business feels the same way.  What’s worked in the past feels comfortable, and while they may have gradually adapted to things like email marketing, asking them to try something like Facebook or Twitter, and the whole method of engagement they’ve been using gets turned on its head- it’s scary, and there’s no guarantees that it will be successful for them, regardless of the number of case studies coming out.

We have a whole generation of people in management and decision making authority who see the world around them changing, with no real stability in sight.  They’ve been through the betamax to VCR changes.  They’ve gotten rid of all their old 8-tracks and cassettes and adopted CD’s and maybe even digital music and photography.  But they worry that what’s great today is going to be outmoded or out of fashion tomorrow, just when they finally feel comfortable with what they know and are doing.  And they’re right- things will continue to change.  The flood water is rising, and while you might be waiting for the river to crest and recede, I think we all have to get in a boat and start paddling together, because staying still isn’t the answer- you’ll drown and fall farther behind.

I’ve grown up with computers changing rapidly around me, and my kids are even more used to living in a rapidly evolving world than I am.  They still are more eager to experiment and take risks than I am.  I keep hoping to develop some sort of flow and pattern to my work to become more efficient, but that is coming more and more from adaptation than stagnation.  I need those reminders from time to time that just because I always “do it this way” does not mean there’s not a better and faster way to do it coming up tomorrow.  This sense of constant change is definitely anxiety-provoking, but denial isn’t helping.  Like sharks, we need to keep swimming (and experimenting) to stay alive.

The other part of the Digital Generation Gap that causes problems is the sense of community that grows through hazing.  There aren’t any more sure things and guarantees like there used to be- if you followed the rules, you would get rewarded later on- pain first, profit second. (Seth Godin discusses this brilliantly in Linchpin.)  We want people to do it the way we had to, so it’s hard and they appreciate the journey we had to go through, we tell ourselves.  Yet I never took any of the “pain from the depression” stories my grandparents told very seriously, and their struggle didn’t help me all that much- just because they couldn’t call their neighbors or watch TV, what did that mean to me as a child or young adult?  Somehow if I didn’t use the phone, I would have better moral fiber?  I didn’t believe it then, and I know my kids don’t believe it now when I tell them similar stories about my childhood.

Someone asked me recently if the podcasts we were doing for medical resident education was providing them “cliff notes” to knowledge.  Is it letting them off easy?  Why should it be any easier for them than it was for us?  In the end, I am more concerned that my doctor knows the right thing to do and why than how they learned it, but I also understand there’s a richness of experience that comes not from just reading a review of a book, but actually reading the whole thing.  I think the short cuts, if you want to call them that, are really about making the on-ramps to knowledge and experience easier, so you have time (hopefully) to reflect and gain deeper knowledge once you are engaged with the possibilities.

And as I write those words, I think about how this is basically the model for marketing and advertising.  We try to gain people’s attention and tease them with the prospect of our product or service, to let them see how our offering solves problems or makes their life easier, not more difficult.  We all want short cuts and friendly user experiences, so people can get to the heart of the matter- whether that’s advancing knowledge, buying a product, engaging our experience and expertise for money.  We can’t all be expert at everything, so we look for short cuts and anything that will ease our journey.  No one has to reinvent the wheel from scratch- we start out by sitting on a mountain of knowledge,  and our job is to contribute to that as best we can for our kids.

We may all carry the pain of our hazing- of the problems and experiences that made us the people we are today, but that’s no reason to make sure everyone else has to experience the same thing over and over again, ad infinitum.  We’ll close the digital generation gap in part by remembering how fun it can be to try something new, make mistakes and get on with it.  We learn most by experimenting, and more and more of life requires us to be adaptive rather than stagnant.  It doesn’t always mean it will be cheap.  It doesn’t guarantee success.  There’s risk involved.  But in the end, we learn more by moving forward than standing still, hoping it will stop raining.

(And don’t forget to check out Chip and Dan Heath’s new book about change, called Switch.  One of the best reads so far this year.)

Tags: adaptation, archer group, change, chris brogan, digital generation gap, experimenting, julien smith, linchpin, seth godin, Seymour Papert, six pixels of separation, social media, switch, trust agents

Privacy- Do We Have Any Anymore?

I listened to the most recent Media Hacks episode of Mitch Joel’s excellent Six Pixels of Separation podcast, where the guys were discussing everything from the Please Rob Me website, geo-location apps like Gowalla and Four Square, and even Blippy, my favorite example of a channel for overshare that was even highlighted at this year’s TED conference.

Couple this with the recent issues about kids being “monitored” by the Lower Merion School District, which is now being investigated by  the FBI, and you quickly can come to the impression that privacy is over.  The school district case is a mess, but it raises lots of interesting questions about where school and governmental authority begins and ends.

I have been online for longer than I care to admit, and I know that when I put something up on this blog, or Facebook, Twitter or any other channel, it’s open for anyone and everyone to see.  I will be accountable for anything I put up here forever, thanks to Google and the miraculous Internet Wayback Machine.  I know that, and I take that into account before I post things, knowing that clients, future clients, friends and relatives and anyone else out there have access to everything.  But where does the concept of privacy start and stop?

Everyone seems to have a different line they draw for themselves.  Some people don’t post anything having to do with family- no pictures of them or their kids online.  But then this rule is subject to violation when kids appear in someone else’s photos that get posted, when you’re in a group shot at a party, or other ways where your carefully scripted version of public and private is violated by well meaning friends.  Since it’s almost difficult to go buy a traditional film camera these days, and the actual supply of film at the local camera store yesterday was sad compared to the wall of film they used to stock, the majority of photos are digital, which obviously enhances the ability to share and exchange them, which people then do, meaning any photo- innocent or compromising- can become public domain with a few keystrokes.

This is not meant to freak anyone out, but it’s simply a fact that the old rules of privacy are being eroded away, bit by bit, byte by byte, over time.  If I were practicing family law, for example, I would definitely try to monitor both what my client and their soon-to-be-former spouse were doing and saying online- in a public forum, that information should be admissible as evidence, although I’ll be frank that Facebook was not created when I took evidence in law school in the early ’90’s.   On the other hand, the fact that there is this openness and discoverability might just work to keep people together, because they can’t hide that information from each other, either.  Transparency keeps everyone a bit more honest and accountable, but when does this constant stage pressure become too much?

We leave a digital paper trail behind us that should not be alarming so much as causing us to think a little bit, at least, about what we’re doing, what choices we’re making and why.  We can create incredibly rich and important relationships with others online.  I keep in touch with friends all over the globe now, that I otherwise would lose that sense of relationship and of being current in each other’s lives without these tools.  I learn new things every day, share information, and have fostered business relationships through these tools, and the fact that people can find out almost anything they want about me before we ever meet.  This “pre-vetting” is like a fast track towards trust, friendship and sometimes, business that works far faster and far more efficiently than ever before.

For all these tremendous positives, it also means that people know when I am cranky with my offspring, when I’m available, when I’m out of town, and just about everything I’m doing.  My trainer knows where I’m out to dinner and potentially doing something I shouldn’t if I check in with foursquare, but my clients also know when I’m in the office for the same reason.  I’ve agreed to make this information accessible, and I bear the fallout, good, bad and indifferent from this connection.

And my kids are growing up in a world where that line between private and public is fuzzier than ever.  It’s taken me years to become comfortable with all of this- will this be the new normal for them?  Will future politicians always have to see pictures of themselves as a child, ranging from food on the face to those first girlfriends, just by a few quick searches online?  How will anyone be able to be perfect all the time?  Will our standards finally change and we’ll have to allow for people to make mistakes and change their mind, rather than be somehow wedded to an opinion they had back a decade ago?

I have no idea where the concept of privacy will be in five years or ten.  Where courts will decide the constitutional rights to some sort of privacy exist, at least as far as the State is involved, is going to be difficult, especially when people are so willing to share (and overshare) with no thought at all.   Hopefully, we’ll decide much of our right to privacy still exists within our home, but we’ll have to see how the case in Lower Merion Township turns out, and whether inviting a governmentally owned computer into our house gives up some of these rights or not.  There’s tons of litigation like this ahead, you can bet, so all you law students out there- make sure you’re paying attention during Con Law and Evidence.  Your career could depend on it.

Tags: Blippy, foursquare, gowalla, internet, lower merion school district, Mitch Joel, privacy, six pixels of separation

Personal Branding

At the very first Podcamp Boston, CC Chapman and Mitch Joel did a great presentation on Personal Branding that altered the way I approached my web projects.  Instead of always staying in the background, I learned how important it was to own your blog and podcast, add your personality into the mix, and give your projects a human face and voice.  This is still excellent advice, for businesses or individuals.  Without a sense of personality, of humanity to our writing and work, we lose the most compelling aspect of it, and what people want the most- connections and affinity with others. (I’ll save the diatribe on Maslow’s Heirarchy of human needs for another post.)

There’s a small downside to personal branding, though.  When some web personalities become really successful, like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki, they become not just a personal brand but a brand unto themselves.  They become a product.  And people expect different things out of products than they do people.

Products are supposed to be available on demand, whenever we want them.  For example, I am in the process of replacing the “twitter van”- my old Toyota Sienna minivan with over 197,000 miles on it, with something new.  The old girl is just sad looking at this point, and my husband has declared enough is enough, so I am updating my “personal brand” with a new car.  We’ve been shopping for cars for some time, but I was disappointed to find out the brand and model we wanted were sold out of 2009’s so I have to wait for a 2010.  Dealers were surprisingly blasé about selling me a car.  I would have expected them to be a bit more enthusiastic about the prospect, but only one dealership did any sort of work to really see when the models would be available, see what they could order, and give me a great deal.  When I took this offer to another dealership closer to my home to see if hey would match it, they seemed incredulous that any of this was possible.  Yet, here I sit, with the VIN number of the car in hand, awaiting its delivery in the next few days.  The bottom line in terms of branding is that I expected with this brand that the Company as a whole should be happy that I want a car from them, that they should have them ready for me unless I want something really unusual, just as if I were buying a bottle of ketchup.   And as a brand, I expect they should be willing to do at least a little to make sure I don’t go off and decide to get the large purchase elsewhere.

But when people become brands, they can never be exactly like a car or a bottle of ketchup.  They can produce great books, like Trust Agents or Six Pixels of Separation, (both written by friends of mine), that act as products or souvenirs of the people and their ideas.  But the people themselves don’t scale the same way.  They still have lives and families and friends; they need to sleep and eat and have private time.  But some of this gets murky once personal branding and actually branding start to merge.

Think about this in terms of celebrity.  I think it really started with the Beatles.  The band became more than just records and music.  They became icons, they became lunchboxes and action figures and now even video games, many years after their initial fame for just being musicians and song writers.  Now you see the merchandising of fame and celebrity being as important as what ever someone did to become famous in the first place, but what gets lost in the hype are the people themselves.  A quick trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will bring this all into relief, as you see how many people get chewed up by the fame machine, and see the few that have managed to survive it.

We don’t always consider how weird and difficult a childhood someone like Michael Jackson or Lindsay Lohan have had.  We don’t think or look at them empathetically, as people.  We look at them as side shows, as entertainment, and when they seem to crack up, we say “Well, they asked for it, what did they expect?”  On some level, they just did what they did best, acting or signing or writing or whatever.  The rest became the business of being a celebrity, which has its privileges and up sides, but has just as many down sides as people take random pot shots at you, or think you have some magic you can lend them, or give them a big break so they can be just like you, or whatever.

Celebrity, the height of personal branding, breeds a certain amount of expectation and neediness in others.  We expect our celebrities to be the bottle of ketchup we can get a fix of whenever we need.  We expect them to keep on delighting us with every new project and we’re more than happy to express crushing disappointment when our appetites aren’t fed.  And the media, professional and amateur, seems only to happy to find something to criticise at every turn.  We think “Oh, what a big head they have now that they’re big shots.”     Or “Well, you don’t seem to remember that you used to be just like us before you got lucky.”  Or “Why should I feel sorry for them?  They have it easy.”  Or “Well, they’re snobby now- I can’t even seem to talk to them anymore- I guess we aren’t really friends.”

All of this is ridiculous, of course.  All that’s happened is that a greater number of people constantly want the personal attention and adoration of the person whose “made it”, and that the person can’t scale like their product can.  All this drama is happening on the side of the audience, not from the person on the pedestal, and the person can’t do much other than watch it happen, because the cat is out of the bag, and there’s little hope of getting it back in.

I don’t think there’s any easy answers here.  I think part of it is for all of us to realize that personal branding is a great thing, but once you reach the product stage, there are hidden traps along with the benefits.  And I think this is meant as a wake up call for all of us who have friends with strong personal brands, to remember that our friends still need the same love and support and attention they always got from us, even if it doesn’t always come back reciprocally- they are trying to scale, but they’re finding themselves trying to be people in a product loving world.  And that seems like a busy but pretty lonely place to be.

Tags: CC Chapman, lindsay lohan, maslow's heirarchy, michael jackson, Mitch Joel, personal branding, rock and roll hall of fame, seth godin, six pixels of separation, trust agents

The How To Myth

A couple of my friends have recently come out with fantastic books- Mitch Joel wrote “Six Pixels of Separation“  and Chris Brogan and and Julien Smith have come out with the New York Times best selling Trust Agents.  Both books discuss how people are connecting for business over the web and how these new relationships work, but there’s been some critique that the books aren’t “How To’s” of  internet success.

This got me thinking about the whole concept of the How To.

How To permeates every aspect of our lives.  As a parent, we have a major role in teaching our children everything from appropriate social behavior to self-care – how to eat politely, how to tie your shoe, how to brush your teeth, how to get good grades- it goes on and on.   From the kid’s side, our parents and our teachers are constantly giving us the recipes to follow to learn stuff we’ll hopefully need later on in life.

After being indoctrinated in the How To all of our lives, we seem to want others to provide us with the fool-proof formula to win at whatever decide we want to do.  How many books, for example, promise us 5 easy steps to instant fame and fortune?  8 steps to flatter abs?  & habits of highly effective people?  Somehow, if we can just get the recipe right, everything will be perfect, and we’ll look better, smell better, and have the easy life of a Hollywood star, with all the fame and fortune we can imagine.

I don’t know about you, but I have found the following things to be true:

• To get what you really want, and the satisfaction that comes from attaining a goal, hard work is necessary.  It’s never handed to you.
• The Rules, the How To, the Recipe for success may seem simple, but the devil is always in the details.  Take the 10 Commandments.  Think how many pages of interpretation and commentary have been written about this simple list of things to do and not to do, at least two thousand years ago.  Clearly, it wasn’t that simple.
• I love to cook, and I love to knit.  In both of these areas, success can depend heavily on following a recipe or pattern.  Even in directions that allege to be “foolproof”, I can assure you, I can find a fool (usually me) who will make some sort of mistake executing this simple set of directions.  Let’s not even discuss the infamous Beer Cheese soup or the sweater that was about 2 inches too short, shall we?
• The Genius is always in the customization anyway.  Take a given recipe- adding a touch of your favorite herb, or adding nuts, chocolate chips and raisins into those brownies- and you take the generic “just like the picture” meal from replication of someone else’s idea to your version of the same idea, with unique elements that make it all your own.
• Customizations of the prototype to fit your own life, the hacks we all make to get the generic product to fit our needs-this is what takes things from being just “stuff” to being a part of our own creative process and learning.  You don’t learn much about painting by doing a Paint by Numbers- you may learn basic technique, but it’s the application of those techniques to your own project where genius lies.

We all want How to’s because they are comfortable, and we hope that if we see behind the veil, we’ll automatically harness someone else’s creativity and hard work, harness their insight, and somehow, leverage that to make ourselves equally as successful.  Yet we don’t need more imitations, copies and echos of the original, as much as we all yearn for that one, unique, purely special moment, great idea, or original insight of our own.

I’m currently working on a project that is a How To- but the critical element is to try to let everyone know that in using this book -1) it’s only a guideline, a coaching tool- your own milegage may vary  2)We’ll give you templates that work for us, but you have to customize it towards what you think will be best for you and 3) Never be afraid to try something new, to fail, to try again, and fail better the next time.

We only learn from making mistakes.    Some mistakes you only ever need to make once. Let me help you avoid a big one- never put dish detergent in the dishwasher, thinking it’s an ok substitute unless you want to flood your house.

Some mistakes you make more than once.  I still insist, for example, I do not need to “swatch for guage” ie. make a small sample before knitting a huge project, hoping that the knitting gods will protect me.  I am frequently wrong on this account.

But the biggest lesson is this:  even the best how-to’s only provide guidance and suggestions based on one person’s experience and what they have researched about the experience of others, trying to shine a light on frequently encountered difficulties.  This is what Parenting books are all about.  But only you know yourself and your own unique situation, and applying these ideas to your life will require mass customization to obtain the results you want.  Lockstep copying won’t get you the best results, only customization of the recipe will.

I still get suck ed into the promise of the How To, but at least my expectations now are that it is nothing more than advice.  I will learn and master things only through trial and error, making better guesses and spurring different ideas based on what the book or expert offers, but I can’t expect that these books and lectures will fix my life- that’s my job, and mine alone.

Tags: books, chris brogan, how to, julien smith, Mitch Joel, six pixels of separation, trust agents