Social Media Challenged...or The Challenge of Social Media

Used to be that going online for me meant that I would head over to AOL, log on and play a game of solitaire while I waited for the computer to connect with the internet, using a very weird, but oddly reassuring set of blips, beeps, dial tones and what almost amounted to a computer shout, before the little icon would pop up on the mailbox and the AOL guy would say, "You've got mail!" For a few months in late 1996, AOL allowed you to program a guest celebrity voice to tell you 'you had mail'. Mine was Hugh Grant, before the whole Divine Brown thing and movies like American Dreamz, something....the Morgans and Bridget Jones 2 and I was still a fan. Sorry Hugh... got nothin' but love for ya...but you did make some execrable movies. (Cough) Mickey Blue Eyes (Cough) Nine Months.

Nowadays the gap between me and the internet has considerably narrowed. There is a whole WIFI network in my home. No more blips and beeps. Just hit the icon and go, you are online. Frequently I am online on my laptop/tablet and my TV is too, simultaneously playing some Netflix offering.

Many days, before I've had my morning breakfast, and while I am still in my robe and pajamas, I've already started 'online' because I've no less than 4-5 sites to hit.  Outlook/Gmail for my emails, Facebook to make sure that I am still relevant and have 'friends', LinkedIn to obsess over my professional image, Twitter to check my popularity and YouTube for anything new and recreational. Not to mention blog stats, to see if anyone is actually reading this and puzzle out who the people are that are breezing by this to read and not comment.

Frankly, I am tired just reading the above.

As part of my 'career training', I have been increasingly coached and coerced into creating, refining and editing my 'online presence'.

My online presence...I started to ponder that today. Introspection reached a zenith when looking through my LinkedIn contacts and all the suggestions from them (LinkedIn) of the "People You May (Should) Know", were, I realized about 95% from Non-Company. Non-Company= pain. I  just don't want anything to do with or to have to think about Non-Company.  But how do you just delete people?  LinkedIn is a place where prestige is gained by the amount of contacts you have and how often your profile is buzzed. Hopefully it's buzzed by some multi-millionaire entrepreneur type needing a personal assistant who wouldn't mind working out of his lakeside estate on Lake Como.

Ditto for Facebook. Facebook is just pain of a more familial and social nature. Again, how do you just delete?  Because FB contacts are not just business contacts, many are personal friends and relations. Many of which you might see once a year, if that? So why do I need to be updated constantly on your activities? Most of which just serve as reminders that my life isn't as populated by cute kids doing cute things, and backyard BBQ's as yours because nearly everyone in my life is dead.

 I even tried quitting cold turkey only to be told by a career counselor, that amounted to career suicide.  Really. Could my career die a more gruesome death than it already has due to natural causes?

At least with Twitter, my feed gives me useful things, reminders about encroaching thunder storms, traffic alerts, gas price alerts, when my favorite TV shows are on, what the celebrities on my favorite TV shows are doing. By the way, kudos to the NCIS Twitter people who bonus-ed me with a nice pic of a toothsome and shirtless Michael Weatherly reading over the script for the 1st episode of the new season! Hopefully Michael was at the part where Tony DiNozzo kills the bastards who shot Gibbs and is able to ascertain that he was wearing a vest and will be okay.....

YouTube is probably my favorite. It lets me know whenever Mazda have new video of the Miata up on their feed, gives me back all of my childhood memories, in some cases lets me watch entire seasons of "I'm Alan Partridge", and the music videos that thanks to reality TV, MTV no longer play.

I know that, much like rock and roll, (which actually may have died without us realizing it) social media is here to stay. But just as the old folks who shook their heads at Elvis (sacrilege) and Jerry Lee, I don't have to like it!

Here's to future days! You know when the hackers hit the server farms and we are knocked back to an age where we have to talk to one another in person, on the phone, and listen to what we actually say out loud.

Well, a girl can dream, can't she?

The Preferred Risk- Generation Y

One of the other galvanizing forces that compelled me to begin writing and sharing my thoughts as a member of a disenfranchised generation was an article that appeared on the MSN Money section a few
days ago http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43976881/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/.

In this piece the writer, a Ms. Anika Anand giddily argues that Generation Y is the best chance the USA has to 'fix' this depressed economy. Yes, I take a liberty in stating depressed but I have always heard that an economy is in recession when your neighbor is unemployed and that depression is when you yourself are unemployed.  Getting back to this piece, which it should be mentioned, is a money article that most definitely falls under the heading of an op ed piece; for me it was another of those moments when my blood pressure soared and my hackles rose for once again it was seemingly another opportunity for the press to take an underhanded swipe at X'ers. On the surface this article is a masterpiece of rose-tinted optimism that any good ol' red-blooded patriotic American loves to read, the artistically tatooed hipster riding in on his eco-friendly Prius (steed) to save Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet (Volt of course). But if you delve deeper into the theory, far more sinister for me was the feeling that once again all the efforts of the previous generation, my generation, were forgotten and worse than that, that they failed to learn from us.

Wasn't our generation with its dot-com startups and killer apps the original modern day entrepeneurs? Where would Gen Y be if not for the efforts of X'ers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? There would be no Mark Zuckerberg -Winklevoss Feud to litigate if they hadn't had the shoulders of Sergey Brin and Larry Page to stand on. Who needs Jack Dorsey, et al (Twitter) if Jerry Yang and David Filo hadn't paved the road with Yahoo back at the inception of Internet 2.0?

To read Ms. Anand's piece is to flirt with the idea that since no one else, we're looking at you Generation X, because the Boomers have all retired to Florida to spend their social security and pensions drinking Ensure poolside, is willing to take up the task. (Sigh), "We'll have to shoulder that burden and save the world". I can't help thinking it calls to mind the world-weariness of Bruce Willis'
admonishing of the crew in Armageddon, "The United States Government just asked us to save the world. Anybody want to say no?"

She further goes on to cite a Kool-Aid drinking journalist tipsy on the promise of the messiah generation coming into it's own,

"This is a generation of serial entrepreneurs," said Donna Fenn, a journalist who wrote "Upstarts!," one of the first books identifying the Gen Y entrepreneur trend. "A lot of them start businesses in their 20s and many of them don't think that their first business will be their last. They're addicted to creating things, to the startup phase. By the time they reach their 40s, they will have started three, four or five companies."
She said the so-called Millennial generation is inclined toward entrepreneurship partly because they saw their parents lose corporate jobs in the downsizing movement of the era. They also witnessed a wave of ugly corporate scandals followed by the meltdown of the financial industry. The result is that they tend to have a lot less faith in large institutions like companies or government, she said.

And yet in a stunning but not wholly unexpected piece of journalistic hypocrisy, we are told that these same millenials who 'tend to have a lot less faith in large institutions like companies or government' are apparently looking to the who else but the federal government and corporation venture capitalists to fund these civilization-saving initiatives.

Aaron Smith, co-founder of another young advocacy organization Young Invincibles, is also working with Gerber on the Youth Entrepreneurship Act. He acknowledges that now is a tough time to get anything passed in Congress, but contends that a bill helping young entrepreneurs would give the government a good return on investment.

"Increasingly, Congress is looking at ways to create jobs at a relatively low cost," the 29-year-old said. "One of the interesting things about young people is that their barrier to starting a business is small, in terms of the monetary amount. We're talking only a few thousand dollars."
Matthew Segal, founder of a nonprofit that promotes entrepreneurs under 30, has a slightly different focus. He thinks getting consumers to support young business startups should complement any potential legislation.

Have none of these people taken a good hard look at the government, the Federal Reserve, the goings on the US Treasury? Have not the 1st Stimulus, the 2nd Stimulus, TARP, bailouts of supposedly too-large-to fail AIG, GM, Chrysler, Cash for Clunkers, all been cloaked in failure?  What about our recent politically charged debt ceiling debacle, our S & P credit downgrade?  Uncle Sam has his pocket linings hanging out, we're writing IOU's for debt we'll probably never be repay at the rate we are spending and China is knocking on our door with their hands out.

For that matter, does no one remember the dot-com bubble burst in 2001-2002? As a matter fact, yes. And I'll tell you who...the Gen X dot.com startups who were millionaires one day and wiped out the next. The people who woke up at Enron in the fall of 2001 to find the 'smartest guys in the room' had just gambled away their jobs, insurance, retirement and their hope. We learned our lessons well that day, trust no one...and most especially the government.

So before you go out there Gen Y, shaking your heads at us, bent on doing what we slackers, abdicators of our country's financial future seemingly are NOT doing, you might do well to learn from us. We have our reasons for being quiet and electing to not rush in to save what might not be sound in the first place.