(Anti-) Social Media And Your Kids

For those of us in the, let's call it the more mature generations, for those of us in the more mature generations the past couple of years has been one with a lot of learning about new technology. With the explosion of Facebook and Twitter almost every industry has had seminars and "experts" (how long does a new product or process need to be available before you can be an "expert?") coaching adults in their late thirties and older as to how to most effectively use the sites to improve their businesses.

Along with LinkedIn and My Space, Facebook and Twitter have been dubbed "Social Media" (while some use "social networking" I prefer media since to me social networking is a cocktail party). While Twitter has evolved to have mostly older users than Facebook or My Space, Linked In is almost strictly business networking and appears to be falling behind the more popular Facebook for the more mature generations. As for My Space, my understanding from browsing and inquiries is the site is not so popular with older folks like me and is more late teens and under 30s age brackets--I could be wrong but that is my impression.

While "friends" in the post college generations are welcomed when they come into the Facebook community with posts from friends "so great to see you on FB, you will love it!" the younger crowd assumes all their friends are already logged on and sharing their photos, music, videos and status. Like getting a cel phone and texting their BFF before they see if it can call home, teenagers assume anyone with a computer and Mom's permission will have a Facebook account. Key to that phrase is Mom's permission. There are no seminars at Obscure Former Educator Middle School teaching kids how to use Facebook to better their studies and become more productive and reach more prospects. Kids inantely know how the software works and quickly adapt to any changes. If you want proof, if you have any nieces, nephews, grandchildren, under 18 on Facebook take a look at their Wall and Profile compared to yours--they get it.

They get it because our children have grown up, or are growing up, with technology we had to learn how to use many years after college. I'm 47 and if you are my age or older you were over twenty when a company called Apple brought the Macintosh computer to market. Somewhere in your garage is a box with "Animal House" on Beta. You remeber when only doctors had car phones, hell you still call your mobile device a car phone half the time. Chances are the first portable cellular phone you saw was a "brick" with a battery that lasted two phone calls to the office or one call to your boyfriend or girlfriend. Many in our generation still do not know how to text on their mobile phone or burn a CD of their favorite music on their laptop.

Our kids, and I'm saying our kids are anyone in college or younger, intuitively know how to use all of this stuff. Have you seen a 14 year old girl working the buttons sending a text? First it is an entirely different language filled with abbreviations and acronyms, second the kids fingers remind one of a Western Union telegraph operator (for the younger readers call Grandpa to explain telegraph). They are constantly connected and communicating with their friends and social circle. While I do not have teenagers yet, my experience from those that do is it is normal for them to be working their Facebook pages, texting friends and taking calls all at the same time--multi-tasking social interaction. They never leave communication and if they do word spreads like wildfire, "OMG POS Out" because parent is over their shoulder and they have to sign off for a while.

Not only are they texting and posting on each others social media pages, but they are now using Skype or other software for live tele-conferencing with friends--they can never leave each others site. BFF, Best Friends Forever.

When I left high school for college I knew I would never see most of my classmates again. I was in a pretty unique situation since my high school was in Brussels, Belgium and almost all of my classmates who were returning to the States for college were going to be on the East Coast and I would be on the West Coast. But we also knew that our high school was not like most of our peers experience, going "home" meant something different for us than our new classmates at college. There was letter writing to stay in touch and eventually, at least for me, that fell by the wayside for most of my high school friends as our lives changed and we became more ingrained in life at our colleges, then new jobs and careers. While my high school experience was unique for my generation, my college experience was not that much different when it came to socializing and new relationships. Some of my classmates would frequently go home if they lived locally, or maintained the high school romance at first, a few lasted past Christmas break of freshman year, but those visits and relationships tended to diminish over time. They diminished because the communication and interaction was focussed within the college campus and the friends and relationships that created new and shared experiences that were not transported back to high school relationships.

It is harder to maintain a relationship with a monthly or quarterly letter, with a brief visit over busy holiday or summer schedules, when new relationships are developing with peers who are in the same position of being fairly shut off from communication with previous relationships and forced by proximity and length of time to forge new ones. Through the process we matured, mostly, wandered through the awkwardness of transition from teenager to adult, and prepared for careers and possibly families with support, encouragement and advice from others sharing our experience.

Many of those reading this will be remembering their college and young adult years and relate to what I am addressing, we cast off many of our old relationships and roles within our high school social groups and grew into our new selves and roles. We did this because it took effort to communicate with our prior social groups and friends, and at some point the cost-benefit analysis of the effort versus the reward caused the effort not to be worth it.

Today the entire social fabric of college life has changed due to the technology available to the students. A young woman of eighteen leaving home and travelling to college 1,000 miles away is in no less contact with her high school social circle than she is when sitting at home on Wednesday night. She can text. She can post on Facebook. She can email. She can take a picture or video with her phone and send it instantly sharing her experience. She can log onto Skype and see and hear her BFF. Or her boyfriend. She stays connected to her comfort zone and social circle where her role is defined and without missing a beat her relationships do not change.

Multiply this by one thousand and all the freshmen women on her campus are engaged in the same behavior. Any new experience is not unique but instantly shared with high school friends in Denver, Miami, Omaha or Los Angeles. If something is wrong or support is needed instead of crying on a roommates shoulder and open up to someone new, pick up your mobile phone and start texting those who know you best. Every student is already in several relationships that they carry with them in their pocket or on their waist--where do the new relationships fit in?

A few parents with kids going away for college are concerned about their kids shutting down their instant communication enough to live their own experience at college and forge their new relationships that will carry them through the rest of their lives. Concerned that the roles their kids have been assigned in high school will follow them to college, be the role positive or not, and hinder their ability to grow into their true selves and mature based on their own decisions and actions not filtered by a peer group created when they were thirteen or fourteen. Concerned that going away to college and the independence that teaches is diminished by dragging the social network to school with them.

How easy is it to blow off the guy from Sociology of Tazmanian Monkeys who wants to take you to pizza on Wednesday night if you are still spending a few hours each day/night on Skype with your high school boyfriend? How easy is it to ignore the proximity of the girls in your room cramming for a macroeconomic class when you have your cell phone and Lauren who is at BC is in a tizzy because James her high school beau has had the same girl in the last five pics he sent yesterday and today? How easy it is to go through four years of college 1,000 miles away and never leave home?

Social media is new to the adults. Many of us are using Facebook like an interactive high school year book, many of us have reconnected with old friends from high school--who was supposed to send the last letter and did not that stopped our relationship and communication? We are joining the social media sites and communication techniques late in life with strong and established relationships in our home, our neighborhood, our work, our church, our community, relationships formed and forged as adults.

Our younger generations are not using the social media as much to form new relationships but to stay connected to their "old" relationships--old being the four years of high school. Is this healthy for the social development of the generation? Will the current generations that grow up with the instant communication technology have gaps in socialization and communication that previous generations learned through the independence of maturing away from home and the comfort of high school? How will this affect their abilities to lead? Solve problems? Manage departments or companies?

UPDATE: I saw this cartoon from Mike Smith (no relation, though my brother's name is Mike Smith) in the Press-Telegram this morning after writing this post--very appropriate for the subject.

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Constituent Communication

A little over a year ago I signed up for a Facebook account after receiving an invitation from now 1st District Councilman Robert Garcia. At the time Robert was one of the publisher's of the Long Beach Post and I was a contributor to the site; I wrote about the Facebook invitation and the technological gap between my generation (47) and Robert's (31) in a post titled "Tech Savy, Culturally Naive." Since that post in June 2008 we have seen a Presidential candidate leverage the available technology to promote his campaign to deliver messages and collect cash, and we have seen Garcia photocopy Barack Obama's campaign playbook and win a crowded contest for his seat on the Long Beach City Council. Using the exponential math of degrees of separation social media sites like Facebook and MySpace, and to some degree the more business oriented site LinkedIn, connect friends of friends of friends to new friends.

As an experiment and an excuse to gather friends together, in March I used my Facebook page to create and launch a barbecue at our home. "Stuftivus" was a great time with fourteen people who did not know each other but knew me or Leslie or both--but had communicated through comments made on my Facebook page. As the party got started and people showed up it was if they were walking into a high school reunion, I vaguely remember you, let's catch up. And it was a great time, friends of my mine became friends with friends of a friend. Degrees of separation were lifted. Now many of these people now communicate directly and their circles have gotten a bit bigger and the world a bit smaller.

Last week the Facebook home pages of thousands of people across the country and across the globe had several postings from friends, or friends of friends, announcing Councilman Garcia's placing on the Long Beach City Council's agenda an Equal Benefits Ordinance. The Equal Benefits Ordinance, or EBO, would require contractors bidding on city contracts who offer benefits to their employees and their spouses to also offer those same benefits to employees who are in domestic partnerships (more information available on Garcia's website). While I am opposed to our cash strapped and broke city adding any more costs to doing business in a city that is already notoriously unfriendly to businesses, I am not using this space to debate the merits of the proposal and the merits of opposition. My positions on gay rights are on public display so any who take my position on the issue as anti-gay is ignorant of my stance, my position is from that of a business owner, a citizen of a city that has been mismanaged for years and the over-extension of government.

That all said, the issue I want to address is how Garcia is changing government in our city with his presentation of this issue to the public, using his Facebook, MySpace and Twitter accounts, and those of his staffers, to announce the EBO at tomorrow's city council meeting. With a drip of announcements on all their pages, and encouraging their friends and contacts to show up at the city council meeting, to write letters to the offices of other council members and the mayor, the message and the news spreads quickly through the on-line communities.

Garcia's use of the social media to distribute his policies and news from his office is very cost effective and efficient. Facebook and other similar sites have no charge to users, revenue is generated from advertising. With a few moments of staff time and a few clicks Garcia's staff is able to saturate multiple websites and communicate with several thousand people--directing all of them to Garcia's website, not paid for or controlled by the city. Using the technology that his generation is dependent upon to communicate with friends, get news, express themselves and their opinions, allows Garcia to target his supporters and their circles of friends and acquaintances. By by-passing the traditional media, or putting it in second or third position for getting news, Garcia is going directly to voters and supporters without the filters of reporters and editors.

Garcia is the youngest person on the Long Beach City Council and he is showing his elder peers on the council how to communicate with their younger constituents. Constituents who do not have home telephones, do not typically subscribe to the local daily papers and who spend more time surfing their social media sites to see what their friends and acquaintances are posting and reading than seeking out news stories on their own. Garcia's messages and notices are an active part of the social media exchanges within the Long Beach area, and the results were seen first in his election in April and will most likely be seen tomorrow night at the city council meeting where the seats will be filled because of his agenda item for an Equal Benefits Ordinance.

Since my self-deprecating post last June I have become much more in tune with using Facebook and Twitter (my Twitter here), though I have struggled with separation of my personal and business uses--Twitter is almost solely business postings of rates and economic news through the day, while Facebook is much more of a personal and social site for me. Using the social media I have seen how effective it can be in engaging others in discussion or for supporting an event or cause. The communication to multitudes through a quick sentence and posting a link is very effective and at times empowering.

Garcia is considered on the cutting edge with many in the "old guard" of politics and government, but rather than cutting edge he is very much mainstream for his generation and the way they interact and communicate with each other. Using their available technology, provided for free, they are able to share themselves, their ideas and their causes quickly and pervasively through friends of friends of friends of friends of.....

If you, like many of my acquaintances, have been pooh-poohing Facebook and Twitter as for younger generations and not a serious means of communication, I suggest you look at the occupant of the White House and the 1st District Council seat in Long Beach as evidence of the effectiveness of properly harnessing the sites and the power they bring to your message.

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Twit, Twit, Twittering

So I guess I am twittering now, plus the Facebook thing, and the LinkedIn; I am so connected I must be only two degrees from Kevin Bacon at this point. So you can twit me at http://twitter.com/dcslb if you wish to twit me or what ever it is called. My brother sent me a twit and I decided to check it out because I had heard Hugh Hewitt and several guests on his show the past few weeks speaking about twitter. It costs nothing (but time spent setting up, surfing, etc, etc) and if it can enrich my life (literally if anyone needs a mortgage in California who is reading this) there is no harm in being a twit.

What I can see from my first experience and about twenty minutes is that twitter has a long way to go, a very, very long way to go, to be anything near Facebook in terms of connecting people. It appears several applications are down this evening, it is not easy to search for someone and to "link" them (or "follow" in twit terms). From conversations on the Hugh Hewitt radio show it seems a lot of members of the GOP and conservatives are using twitter to try to close the technological gap on the Democrats--which as was seen in the recent election is huge. From my brief experience thus far twitter is about 1998 in terms of technology. If key members of the GOP are counting on this to return to a majority in Congress then I better get used to Madame Speaker Pelosi for at least four more years.

Anyone out there twit? Let me know some tips as to how to navigate and why I should be using twitter.

BSOD or I Hope You Get The Flu

This is the Blue Screen Of Death, BSOD. Leslie does not know of the BSOD because she's a cool Mac user and hates anything Windows related. I am somewhat familiar with the BSOD having had, like many Windows/PC users, a semi-major viral attack about every 18 - 24 months. Today was the fourth work day in a row that I spent considerable time on the laptop because of a virus I picked up last week. On Facebook. On a video. Stupidly clicking the button to "update your flashplayer." So several hours Thursday with the anti-virus scans and the spyware scans. Friday was more of the same, and then my Internet Explorer died, which introduced me to Mozilla Firefox, which is a pretty cool browser; unfortunately many of the websites in our industry require Internet Explorer. The weekend was somewhat slow as I was busy with house stuff and just ran the anti-viral/spyware. They kept coming up clean. Monday, I worked through it waiting for our IT vendor to somehow save me. Yesterday he took control of the laptop via remote and when I came in today, Wednesday, my laptop was "fixed."

Fixed means that everything was reloaded on my laptop--everything except my settings, you know the things like your labels for Outlook Calendar, instant messenger, Adobe, log-ins and passwords to the fifty sites you visit everyday. So today, I hope, was the beginning of the end to get my laptop back to where it was before I stupidly clicked on the button to update my flash player--which as soon as I clicked I knew I was in for it. Argghhh.

So I was stupid once again and let down my guard and was violated by a virus concocted and sneezed out into cyberspace by some guy with a personality disorder, or perhaps he is just an asshole. There are penalties for spreading viruses, for maliciously disrupting computer activitiy, stealing information and other cyberactivity that is malicious in intent and practice--when was the last time you heard of someone being busted and serving time for writing and spreading a virus?

I Googled virus, virus jail, computer laws virus; as we Google everything these days. I came across this debate on Helium.com where one guy argues that those who spread computer viruses be jailed and another guy argues they should not. The anti-jail guy says it is a form of free speech, and that there is a college in Canada (figures) where they teach how to write computer viruses, and if they teach it in college then how can it be illegal? Well they also teach nuclear physics but that does not make blowing up a nuclear bomb illegal. And many colleges have ROTC or riflery classes but that does not make shooting someone, except in self defense, illegal. They teach communism in college as well, which goes to show just because something is taught in college doesn't mean it is good.

While I have been trying to be more positive and forgiving and understanding on this issue I hope the jerk who wrote and released the virus I got last week gets a real virus; I hope he gets the flu. The yellow sputum cough and racking vomiting and pounding headache and bones that just hurt and you can't sleep type of flu. For a week, or maybe more. I hope he hurts so that he understands his malady is cosmically caused and he confesses to the authorities what he has done so they catch him and send him to prison.

Have a nice day. May the BSOD not be with you.