Categories
Women

The Buck Stops With Generation Z

Gender inequality exists, but only in the workplace. Young women grow up believing in equality, but when she enters the workplace, she hits a brick wall.  That will stop when Generation Z joins the workforce. Not because gendered roles will somehow evolve in the next decade, but because technology will.

Generation Z is the most technologically immersed and advanced generation ever. They are known as “digital natives”  because they have never known a world without iPhones, laptops, video games, chat windows, tabs and texts. On airplanes, toddlers are abated with digital shows and video games instead of stuffed animals and paper coloring books.

Such tech-ubiquity means Gen Z holds the following traits above and beyond any other generation, all of which will eliminate gender inequality:

1. Multi-tasking. Gen Z are innate multi-taskers, and are primed to want instant and immediate outcomes. It also means that Gen Z wants clarity and simplicity – some say they tend to oversimplify – but this is good for inequality. Gen Z won’t have the time or patience to engage in the nuances of gender, and thus, will simply allow people to just be “who they are.”

In the “Becoming Chaz” documentary, Chaz Bono remarked it was the youngest members of his family that took his transition from female to male the easiest. In fact, these youngsters said it wasn’t a big deal at all. That’s just “who he is,” they said.

2. Globalized empathy. Part of their ease with gender is that Gen Z is well-educated. “They are much more connected to the outside world than previous generations,” says Alec Mackenzie, an eighth-grade Spanish, language arts and film teacher. “They know what is hanging in the Louvre because they’ve seen it on the Internet. They know more about the world because they visit it on the computer.”

As such, they are much more empathetic and knowledgeable to the plights of their peers. Generally known to be wise beyond their years (“12 has become the new 22,” says one Gen Zer) and living in a fully postmodern era, they are especially aware that everything is a social construct, particularly gender. They shy away from sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black.

3. Lack of ambition. Their elders are already bemoaning Gen Z’s lack of ambition, but that is really their dis-enthrallment with traditional power structures and control. Gen Z is growing up in a world where the old power structures have already fallen apart (marriage: divorce, wealth: financial meltdown, security: terrorism), so there is nothing left to put on a pedestal.

Climbing the ladder will become less important as a result. Gen Z will job-hop in their careers to find satisfaction, just like they multi-task in their daily lives. They’re expected to have at least five careers and more than 20 employers in positions that don’t even exist today. It’s hard to be ambitious when you don’t know what the future will hold.

“They are very collaborative and creative. They will change the workplace dramatically in terms of work style and expectations,” argues technology professor Larry Rosen. While Gen Y strived for team-oriented work approaches and collaborative environments, it will be Gen Z who really reaps the benefit. As old power structures melt away, and the status quo becomes working together instead of in competition, women and men will find themselves on an even-playing field.

4. Pleasure-seeking. Those power structures will shift from the workplace to personal lives. Previous generations have paved the way for a workplace that was first live to work (Boomers), then work to live or work/life balance (Gen X), and is now live with work or work/life blur (Gen Y). Taking this to it’s natural conclusion, Gen Z will live. Work will take a backseat to Gen Z’s hedonism.

Already Gen Z has a reputation as pleasure-seeking and consumerist. Not to mention anyone can be a star now and have their own following due to the decentralized web. Consumerism used to confer status (which was traditionally wrapped up in a man’s success and career), but Gen Z will buy things simply to feel something. When that happens, when men and women care less about power and more about pleasure, equality will be easier.

5. Remote workers. “Computers have blurred the line between the workplace and home for adults, and the same is true for today’s students,” argues Duane Mendoza, a technology resource teacher. Via web-based lessons, students in Mendoza’s yearbook class are able to work from anywhere.

Gen Y blurred work and life to work remotely because they wanted flexibility and fulfillment. But Gen Z will work remotely because they know no other way. They prefer to communicate via email and text. While replacing side-by-side and eye-to-eye human connections with quick, disembodied e-exchanges may seem counter-intuitive, it will allow sexual innuendo to stop. Not being in the same physical location alone will decrease harassment. And when Gen Z isn’t working in person, they won’t be able to see the perpetuity of men in power that keeps men in power.

Gen Y believes in equality, but can’t have it because they’re stuck in a workplace with outdated paradigms. Gen Z won’t be stuck there though. They’ll be at the coffee shop with their friends on their laptops. As a result, Gen Z will be the first generation where women and men are mutually respected not just in their personal lives and relationships, but also at work.

In the comments below, let me know me know the single biggest insight you gained from today’s post. Of course, if you have additional ideas or resources about Gen Z, technology, and the future of equality, share them below as well.

Categories
The Objectivity Myth

Old Media Needs an Opinion

Journalists are objective. Bloggers are not. The two have been duking it out since the dawn of the Internet age. Journalists think objectivity will save their jobs and bloggers know that is nonsense. Old media is not irrelevant, but they are digging themselves into a hole. Let me explain.

First, understand that journalism has never been objective. Newspapers first emerged as political publications funded by partisan parties and read by the top of society’s pyramid. Then in a move to both democratize media and increase profits, newspapers dropped their prices and attracted multitudes of immigrants and workers as subscribers in order to sell those eyeballs to eager advertisers.

That should sound similar to today’s content farm with one big exception – newspapers were written by an elite group of thought-leaders (and still are), and so the power to create and distribute information remained in the hands of just a few.

Fast-forward a century, give or take a few decades, and you have the media industry that politics and technology built. But now the Internet has given everyone the opportunity to create and distribute information. No longer is news controlled by large media conglomerates, but by anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation.

On the Internet, we have largely admitted that individual and institutional objectivity is impossible. Not even Google tries to offer impartial news results when you search, preferring instead to offer up “the most articulate and passionate people arguing both sides of the equation,” says Google News’ founder, Krishna Bharat. Today we trust algorithms to deliver objectivity since humans cannot.

Objectivity is null on the web because the reader can always self-verify and fact-check themselves. That is what the proliferation of information is there for. You will be tracked. “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links,” technologist David Weinberger argued back in the day. “Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Fair enough if you have the time to click on all of those links, but none of us do. Not to mention transparency often stifles meaningful dialogue. Nevertheless and despite my own bias on it, transparency is just as useful as objectivity in holding individuals and companies accountable, and as a big bonus, it doesn’t require you to act like an impartial noob.

Now, here’s what’s important.

The real reason newspapers can’t transition online is because they’re holding onto the veil of objectivity as the reason for their relevance. Readers, in turn, cry foul because they know objectivity is unreasonable, and instead uphold the virtues of new media. Then everyone declares traditional media is dead.

Sad face.

The thing is, objectivity is irrelevant, not news organizations. Rule number one in running a business is to determine the value you provide to your customers. A newspaper’s value doesn’t lie in it’s impartiality, so it’s ridiculous that traditional media continues to place those virtues on a pedestal. The traditional news model is not outdated, but journalists’ ideologies are.

Why do news companies continue to praise impartiality? Well, the veil of objectivity did allow newspapers to have a successful advertiser-subscriber model. And being profitable subsequently allowed newspapers to fund long investigations that readers came to rely on. So media organizations often confuse their business model, objective reporting and actual good journalism – that is, investigative reporting, news that is highly crafted and cared for, and that continuous sifting and winnowing for the truth at all costs.

A journalist doesn’t ask “Why? What? How?” because they’re impartial. They ask because they care. They ask because they have passion for the topic. They ask because they want to uncover injustices, right wrongs and make a difference.

There’s no reason why the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York Times should insist on objectivity as superiority. It has nothing to do with the actual amazing content they provide day in and day out.

The real travesty is not the loss of impartiality then, which never existed anyway, but the fact that without big profits, there are no big budgets, and no big investigations. Only half of the states in the U.S. now have even one full-time reporter in Washington, D.C., for instance. Can we keep our politicians accountable through our computer screens if a smaller and smaller number of people show up in real life?

No, we cannot. Nor can we uphold fair labor practices or ensure financial rigor at banks or keep up with everything else that’s important to our society. Blogs don’t have big budgets either. So journalists and bloggers both end up having to pander to page-view journalism, which serves advertisers alone (witness the devolution of media).

Here’s what the New York Times and the rest should do. Let go of objectivity. It’s elitist, it’s unattainable and it’s not important. Talk about real benefits. Charge for access and load up on advertisers to make mad money and deliver mad value.

It’s okay to have an opinion. In fact, it’s what makes us human.

Categories
Economies

3 Drawbacks of Reputation as Currency

Three facesPhoto: Ygor Oliveira

We talked about how reputation as currency on the web has the potential to be quite powerful. But there are drawbacks to using reputation so fluently. Here are three:

1. You Can’t Have a Bad Day.
Our current economy uses money as a currency, which is great because you don’t need to know or trust me to exchange value. With money as a currency, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a good mood all the time or if you snap at the Home Depot cashier or not. It’s an impersonal exchange.

Reputation, on the other hand, doesn’t allow such flexibility. In fact, your reputation’s value is based solely on so-called “good” actions which are defined by a larger system’s expectations rather than what benefits your individual values or goals.

Reputation as the web’s currency (currently in use as the reviews you left on Amazon, your eBay seller ranking, your Klout score, etc.) sounds great until we realize it is a universal truth that you can’t have pleasure without pain.

People do have bad days (even on the Internet). More than that, people make mistakes and fail often. A system that ignores the very basis of how we learn and solely focuses on the positive is a difficult system to keep up with.

2. You Can Be Someone Different Entirely.
Which leads us to the next issue… reputation as currency forces everyone online to fit into a certain mold and exhibit certain behaviors until we have a web dripping in happiness. And a bunch of trolls. People can create a web presence that has nothing to do with their true selves. And on the flip side, they’re also forced to create anonymous profiles to express their real ideas.

Either way, people can create and manipulate who they are and their reputation easier than ever. That’s important because reputation is based on trust, and the more that we force people to be different than who they are, the more difficult it will be to rely on reputation as reasonable indicator of credibility.

3. You Have To Be Large and In Charge.
Trust development is being outstripped by technology. Whereas trust used to occur over a period of time as a result of working closely with another, now we feel like we can “trust” someone with a quick glance at their Google trail. And that’s a problem for the un-plugged.

“The people who have the highest reputation scores are usually the people who are the most public,” argues Paul Adams. Those who are willing to live their life more freely on the Internet are the reputation winners. No one is re-tweeting your stellar shoe recommendation to the stranger on the Metro. If you’re building relationships in real life or want to maintain some semblance of privacy, too bad.

Online reputation is inherently unbalanced toward the happy, fake and loud. It’s good enough for now, but if we want our social architecture to scale in any sort of useful or meaningful way, we need to re-program how reputation works on the web.

Categories
Future of Work

Fare Thee Well, Boss

The boss-employee relationship is defunct. Managers think young workers aren’t willing to pay dues, but really young workers aren’t willing to be employees. Managers dangle the lure of a raise or a title, but young workers just want to build something together as a team.

The new org chart shouldn’t be based on hierarchy then, but a horizontal ladder of peer-to-peer management, where employee and boss teach and learn from each other. They share, knowledge, experience and ideas.

Working together in service to a larger vision is a more human way of employment, but it is antithetical to how businesses currently run. A business is successful – no matter what it’s product, salsa or insurance – because it can replicate a system to make that  salsa, distribute the salsa and find customers to buy the salsa over and over again. The 5,674th jar of salsa has the same chance at delighting a customer and turning a profit as the first.

Start-ups call this the secret sauce.

That’s why many people love working at start-ups so much (and why many people don’t). At a large company, you advance your career not on the originality of your own ideas, but because you can showcase increasing familiarity and understanding of the company’s secret sauce. You’re the company man.

At a start-up, particularly in the beginning, all ideas are equal. The secret sauce is unknown. It’s a mystery. The mode of work is to test, experiment and recycle constantly. Will it work to do it this way? How about this way? It is a puzzle, an unfinished essay, half of a log cabin. The end result is only known as something great in the mind’s vision. A large company buys a start-up because the start-up figured out the replicable system.

When a company finds the secret sauce, it is institutionalized because it works. A hierarchy is put in place to ensure it continues to work and that no one deviates from the system, because that would put the company’s success at risk.

Originality is siloed into its own department, but companies do have to keep pace with innovation, so orders to add to or subtract from the secret sauce are handed down from those who are most familiar with the company’s system, typically upper-management.

You usually have to advance through a company’s hierarchy to change the system, because factory workers don’t have their own widget factories to experiment with, for instance. In order to know all there is about creating a widget you have to continue to be promoted. Hierarchy makes sense.

But wait, we don’t make widgets in the knowledge economy.

The Internet gives everyone connected to it the same opportunity to experiment on the same platform, whether you’re a company or individual. Now low-level employees have front-level, do-it-yourself access to the tools that create the systems and sauce on a scale more omnipresent than ever before.

A blog is an experiment. How do you bring in consistent subscribers? Does commenting on other blogs work? What about guest-posting? Does emailing other bloggers work? Should you build relationships with Blogger A or Blogger B? Why? What is quality content? How do you write it? Does it matter?

An Etsy shop is a test. What headlines work? Does it matter how the crocheted plastic bag holder is photographed? Where do you advertise your products? Google? Facebook ads? What is good SEO? Which color is better? What is the customer’s feedback? Which shipping method is cheapest and fastest? Does including a personal note give you a better rating?

Expertise is no longer institutionally created, but self-made. And it is no longer systematized but shared in the open for the rest of the web to adapt, change and build upon.

There is no need for hierarchy. Decision makers, yes. Titles and responsibilities, yes. But hierarchy, no. Leadership is now inclusive and collaborative.

Fare thee well, boss. It was nice to know you.

Categories
Guest Posts

Ladies: Take Your Business to the Next Level with a Hot New Program

I just railed against the proliferation of sites that are about “how to be rich, be happy, quit your day job, have sex every day and live well.” I said something like these sites were “self-referential profanity of the mind” and “devoid of any value.”

So it is an unjust coincidence, let me tell you, that something I love would be named exactly, “Rich, Happy and Hot B-School.” Business coaches Marie Forleo and Laura Roeder run the online program, and I have a wee bit of a girl crush on them.

Once you watch one of their videos, you will understand. They’re smart, good-looking and uber-creative which would normally make me feel quite threatened (and a bit jealous, let’s be honest), but they only manage to make me feel all warm inside.

As a woman entrepreneur with multiple side projects and a full-time job to boot, I need guidance that can help my business and is entertaining, engaging and above all, effective. I need it to work. I don’t want it to take up too much time, and did I mention, I want it to work?

That’s my real problem with every other site that wants to teach you how to be rich and happy. I would never want to be like the people running it. I don’t want to emulate their lives; they’re sleazy! Not to mention, most have no freaking clue what they are talking about. They present abstract ideas that sound good in theory, but that’s where they stay, in theory, and never reach the tangible step of action and follow-through.

Marie and Laura, however, know what they are talking about. They speak from success and experience, and are focused on results. In an interview on Mixergy, Laura revealed that she made more than $300,000 from her business in 2010. Marie — who is a best-selling author, a “multi-passionate” entrepreneur and a master athlete — talked about how she has achieved so much during an appearance on The Rise to the Top. Besides all that, I would want to have drinks with them. Multiple times.

Let me stop gushing for a moment though, and let you know exactly why the Rich, Happy and Hot B-School gets me completely excited to rock my business:

  • It is refreshing to see women speak directly, with a great amount of humor and confidence (none of that self-effacing nonsense).
  • The duo are focused on helping women achieve, but anyone can get in on it. They skip the stereotypical and patronizing advice, and just dole out smart, effective and useful how-tos, tips, templates, stories and support that you can use today to increase the profitability of your business immediately.
  • They dive right into the nitty-gritty of what you don’t know how to do, and tell you exactly how to do it.
  • Their teaching style is amazingly fun; it is how learning is supposed to be. They’re exhilarating and give you all the right tools. They set you up to execute, over and over, and to do it well.

Shall I continue to count the ways I love Rich, Happy and Hot B-School? Probably not, I mean, you get the point, right? Now it’s time for you head on over and enroll.

It is single-handedly the best resource I’ve seen to start a new business or improve the one you have. I’m excited to see you there.

This was originally posted on Brazen.

Categories
Guest Posts Happiness

Why aren’t you happy, darn it?

Ah, happiness. It’s so elusive, right? My guess is that you spend the great majority of your time online reading and browsing aimlessly, seeking that secret to happiness, that thing that will make you motivated and feel happy for the rest of the day, maybe the rest of the week if you’re lucky.

In fact, it seems that everything is “how to be rich, be happy, quit your day job, have sex every day and live well” and in these five buckets (happiness, money, work, life, relationships), we’re seeing people repeat the same things over and over to the point where there is no value anymore.

Seriously, how many times can you read about how to be creative or how to execute your idea? You probably would be great at doing what you love, but you are too afraid to do so because we’re stuck in society’s delusion – that is, what we really want to do we’re afraid won’t be acceptable in society or are told to stay in whatever place society has created for us (particularly true for women).

There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing what they want and living their highest values except most people try to live in other people’s values instead of their own, or they expect other people to live inside their values instead of recognizing they have their own as well.

Le sigh. I’d like to suggest two solutions:

1) Recognize that happiness is not the end goal, but that you are always feeling happiness, and you are always feeling pain, in every moment. Struggle isn’t something to overcome then, but just is. Some days things will go your way, and some days they won’t. Accept it and find a balance.

2) Dive deeper. Happiness is not the be all and end all. There’s a whole lot more going on in the world like energy innovations, media, healthcare, philosophy, the sharing economy, technology, fashion, the food industry, political history. So, maybe stop reading so much about the processes of ideas, and start reading about actual ideas.

My guess is that by avoiding your pursuit of happiness for awhile, you’ll find more of it than you thought possible.

This was originally posted on Elysa Rice’s GenPink.

Categories
The Internets

Being Always On, Always Right and the Case for Anonymity

There are a lot of reasons I stopped writing my last blog. Primarily though, it was because the Internet takes a lot out of you. It expects to be able to dissect everything. The Internet wants to pull you apart. Everything should be accessible and out there for all. In the Interneted world, you have to be always on.

I don’t particularly want to be always on. For starters, I am incredibly moody. Most people on the Internet seem like happy people or are on their way to being happy.

I am not happy. At least not today. Try again tomorrow?

Still, I soldiered on with my last blog until it petered to its end and took the last bits of me. And then after some distance and perspective, I started this new blog. I started showing up on Twitter. I logged onto Facebook more. But it’s even harder to be on the Internet than I remembered.

It’s exhausting. There hasn’t been a day when I didn’t crave the freedom of anonymity, if only to escape for a moment the pressure to be always right and available.

Not that I even hold anything back. I am not someone different in person. (Although how would you know, right? Or do you trust the identity I’ve put on the web?) What I write is what I experience. Perhaps a temper tantrum or two doesn’t make it in to a post, but well, now you know.

Point being, if I were anonymous, I would write the same things. But I think it would be easier.

There are a great many people, however, that cannot or do not express their opinions and thoughts and ideas so easily. Those people are forced into the category of degenerates on the web: trolls.

Many believe the trolls’ online anonymity “is a treatment of a symptom rather than a cure for the disease. The disease is a total lack of tolerance for the differing views of others in our society. The symptoms of our disease are things like racism, ostracization, unjust reprisal, stigmatization and persecution. [Anonymity] does nothing to address the root causes of these maladies.  On the contrary, it gives people carte blanch to revel, indeed to roll around gleefully, in them. [Anonymity] allow people to be their worst selves, to perpetuate the cycle of hate, fear, and cowardice that has gripped western societies, without the need to face the consequences of their words and actions.”

That comment is fairly reflective of the values of the open web. Radical transparency is linked to the promise of a “more tolerant, peaceful and profitable digital world.” Besides, would trolls ever say the things they do if their real identities were attached to their comments? Probably not, goes the usual argument.

Online authenticity and transparency forces you to live a certain kind of life. First of all, it forces you to live at least part of your life online. For anyone on Facebook, it’s a large part. Add anytime that you log in with your real identity to buy a product on Amazon, or use Twitter, or blog, or sell something on Etsy and it’s an increasingly large part until you don’t have a distinction between public and private identity.

Not only does such transparency force you to live your life online in order to complete basic tasks on the Internet, but it also forces documentation, so you have to live a certain kind of life that can be documented. You have to be right. And good. Online, all the time.

Sure, this allows you to Google yourself and the guy you met at the bar Saturday night, but it also allows you to make judgements based on that data trail. At its best, when we follow our friends’ profiles around the Internet, it is little more than novelty and entertainment. At its worst, employers and potential lovers decide our fate in just a few clicks.

Either way, it’s not hugely beneficial to you.

Companies, on the other hand, retain a large benefit from your identity. They are the ones that want to collect your real identity so they can use that data to their advantage. Facebook’s crowning virtue is authenticity and it seeks to control the web by poo-pooing anonymity at all costs. Now Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and everyone else who wants you to login with their account follows you everywhere on the web and collects every bit of data it can about you.  Mark Zuckerburg famously once told an interviewer that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” How very virtuous… and profitable.

What’s real authenticity anyway? Is there room for you to change your mind on the Internet? One anonymous commenter argues, “Having to log in or authenticate myself makes me less likely to leave a comment. Having to identify the comment back to myself in a traceable way makes it less likely as well. My mood or sentiment about a topic might change, but that post will be written in stone.”

4chan, a site where “roughly 90 percent of all messages on 4chan are posted under the site’s default identity, ‘Anonymous,’” is generally known as the scurds of the web. But “those messages are not only anonymous but ephemeral, because 4chan has no long-term archives: old message threads are automatically deleted when new ones need the room. This mechanism was originally meant to save storage costs, but as [its founder Chris Poole] notes, ‘it’s both practical and philosophical.’ Among other things, it challenges the idea that digital identity should follow you across time, linking what you say when you’re a teenager to the middle-aged business owner you might become.”

Novel, that. People actually change and grow? Say it ain’t so, Internet! Anonymity allows people a place on the Internet to be wrong, Poole says. That’s important because while trolls may not say their real opinions to you in person, they’re still thinking it. And when we take away the place to test those ideas, we take away any chance of tolerance for differing views.

So do you prefer to live in a world where people don’t speak their minds at any cost? Or do you want to allow anonymity? One is decidedly more virtuous.

Categories
Predictions

What Comes After the Social Web?

   I am worried about how the Internet defines social.

There is a big difference between shopping online and shopping in seventy-degree weather, when someone brushes your bag, and you run into your friend on his way to a soccer game. Online shopping is solitary; real-life shopping is social. Seeing that my friend “liked” a new laundry solution on Facebook is not a social experience.

I rarely shop alone. Even on utilitarian trips to the grocery or Target, even if I don’t have an accomplice, I am still out and among other people. I want my best friend to tell me what to wear and that the very short shorts look good on me and encourage me to buy a pair when I would never do so otherwise. I want Ryan to tell me that the color of the bike I’ve chosen is great and for the bike salesperson to tell me that the particular model I’ve picked out is hot across the country and is almost sold out. I want energy. I want exchange. I want life.

This simply doesn’t happen online at the moment. There is no thrill of interacting with another human being. The experience is stale, stagnant and one-sided. It is the worst of consumerism.

I am worried that online commerce is mistaking data for social. When you use my interest graph to connect me with the exact person in California who has the vintage wine I desire, that is not social. My interest graph is not social. My reputation is not social. My identity is not social. These are important as currencies on the web, but only as currencies of social relationships. They are not the social relationships themselves. They don’t form the experience of shopping. Too many sites nowadays are defining social commerce as a like, a share, a review. That is not social. That is data.

Data is good for the company, not the user. Data is good for targeting, personalization, and aggregation. Data is good for marketing, but it’s not social.

“Nothing beats targeted relevancy,” argues one online enthusiast. “And social serendipity will not beat targeted discovery.”

That is so sad. Surely if the web has taught us anything, it’s how much, as a race, we humans love to go off on tangents? To be distracted? I certainly don’t go on Twitter and Facebook to be efficient.

Most people don’t know what they want anyway. I can type in my interests and style preferences until my fingers go bare bone, but what I really want is the summer dress my girlfriend wears out on a Thursday night. She looks so good!

As sites increasingly recommend only what they think you want, you lose out on the spontaneity and delight of finding something new and different. Anyone who has used Pandora realizes this is the service’s strength and weakness. You discover new music initially, but eventually the site just plays the same things over and over.

Personalization isn’t just useful at times then, creepy at others, but also annoying. Only boring people hang out with people just like themselves and do the same things over and over and never step out of their bubble world.

The social aspect of shopping is in that real-time discovery, spontaneous input, and watching of people. The movement, the behaviors of another person. I can’t see that on the web. All of our normal cues are missing. So, we go ahead and rely on algorithms? That’s fancy, but there are easier solutions.

Let’s talk about Amazon’s new flash shopping site, MyHabit; it was just launched this week and it’s in the same vein as other private sales sites like HauteLook, Beyond the Rack, and Gilt. You might think Amazon is behind, but really, Amazon is always just a wee bit ahead of the curve, and man, do they get it right with this.

Okay, first, on those other sites, I can see the front of a shirt, the back of a shirt, I can hover and zoom or use my mouse. Pretty standard nowadays. On a slightly different site called JewelMint I can even watch a thirty-nine second video about a pair of earrings.

But here’s how Amazon, in a rather genius move, instantly differentiates the experience. In addition to upscale photography, the site features videos of the clothing on live models. So the moment you visit a product detail page, the model starts to move; she shifts, she turns, you see her back, and then she shifts and turns back around. I don’t have to hit play and the whole thing lasts about five seconds.

It’s non-intrusive and the user experience is really just brilliant. I can actually see how the model moves and how the clothes move on her. I have a one hundred percent better experience in judging and assessing the piece of clothing that a photograph can never give me. And that is social.

You may be thinking no, that’s UX. You may be thinking you’re not interacting with the model – and certainly I am not talking to her – but really I am. I am watching her just as if she were on the street and seeing how the clothes move and look on her. It is live and it is a humanizing online shopping experience.

This is only the beginning of how user interfaces and experiences, not data will redefine online commerce. I would love to see an interface that allows me to see what strangers and my friends are browsing in real-time. I’d really love to invite my best friend in Madison to go on a shopping date while I’m in DC and browse a site simultaneously while I glance at her and what she’s browsing.

If you try to imagine these experiences in the web’s current architecture, it seems clunky, unrealistic even, but I assure you, the interfaces that use the data of web 2.0 will evolve and become increasingly important in web 3.0. And that’s what will define social on the Internet.

So everyone else is busy prophesying that while “the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce will be about recreational shopping where the merger of social and interest graphs will drive buying decisions,” but here’s my prediction: it’s not going to be about data. Data is useless without a meaningful experience to plug into. How the interface and experience of social is formed will drive the next evolution of online commerce.

Just you wait.

Categories
Paywalls

You Like Mainstream Media Now, Don’t You?

Osama Bin Laden was killed yesterday and the reactions ranged from revelry to relief to wondering why the New York Times didn’t take down their paywall. C.W. Anderson, an assistant professor of media culture at CUNY tweeted, “NYT has a public obligation to place articles out from behind paywall in cases like this.”

Why on earth would they?

The Times has ten-thousand employees, all of which I’m sure will work over-time this week. In any other industry, when workers do more work, when they do more quality work that is life and earth changing, we pay them overtime. We reward them. We give them a raise.

But journalists? We devalue.

I don’t know where you were getting your news all day, but I was getting mine on NYTimes.com.  And yes, in one day, I read through all twenty articles of my monthly limit.

The Nieman Journalism Lab reported that the New York Times has the ability to take down the paywall for breaking-news, must-read stories. But I imagine that would only be relevant for issues of public safety. “You should pull down your paywall when it will save lives,” argues Brian Boyer, an Editor at the Chicago Tribune. “If you pull it for big news, you’re missing the point, right?”

Right. I imagine that Anderson tweeted The Times should remove their paywall because he values the quality, in-depth and expert reporting that The Times provides and wishes that to be available to as many as possible. But there are already twenty free articles, and so those many aren’t going to be affected by the paywall on a day like today.

NYT readers are like adolescent children, wanting their freedom, ignoring the hand that feeds them at will, but come running back in a crisis. We may like our conversations and opinion on Twitter, Facebook and blogs every other day of the week, but when it comes to what’s important, we still turn to the big dogs. Twitter, Facebook and blogs don’t supplant mainstream media as the best source of news, they amplify it.

Which is why it’s ever more important to support the media as an institution, despite the power and meaning behind citizen journalism. If we don’t, the next time we want consistent, reliable and trustworthy news, we risk finding a site that has shut down. Ultimately we do need expert content.

It is not the New York Times’ public obligation to put their paywall down. It is the public’s obligation to ensure the paywall stays up.

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Expertise

How Amateur Content Makes Us Dumb

newspaper collagePhoto: mypixbox

It’s a misnomer that the web was the innovation that gave amateurs their place alongside experts in credibility. We were actually primed for this during the industrial revolution when things like hot dogs became an abstraction of real food. Processed and pushed into its casing, hot dogs look nothing like and have no relation to anything they are made from. As meals go, this is one for the amateurs. Real foodies eat sweet pork sausage that is made on-site at the restaurant. And the real, real foodies (experts), make sure that the pork didn’t come from an industrial hog.

The web did however reinforce what we already knew – that you can’t define expertise by whether you are a blogger or a journalist, whether you have a PhD or not, or whether you have put in your 10,000 hours, so the distinction between amateur and expert remains along the line of abstraction – or hot dogs vs sustainable sweet pork sausage.

Here’s how I look at it —

Amateur content is 1) written for a mass audience and 2) does not make connections between larger systems or ideas. Just like you don’t care where your hot dog came from or what it’s made of, amateurs write in a silo and on the surface. This has nothing to do with size. Both Oprah and a small personal development blogger can distribute amateur content on any given day (and do).

Expert content on the other hand is 1) written for a niche audience – but in a way that a mass audience can learn from – and 2) does make connections between those larger topics and ideas.

Amateur content has devolved into meta content, where it’s increasingly abstracted to the point where everything is “how to be rich, be happy, quit your day job, have sex every day and live well” and in these five buckets (happiness, money, work, life, relationships), we’re seeing people repeat the same things over and over to the point where there is no value anymore.

Oh it is alluring to read, again and again, how you can incubate and execute an idea or motivate yourself on a Monday, especially when can’t quite seem to master these seemingly elusive tasks. But it’s also a self-referential profanity of the mind.

And rather pointless I might add, as you would not still be consuming such content if any of it was of any value. All processes are the same – pick one and go with it. Or develop your own if you want to be teacher’s pet, but don’t ignore the deep dive that getting your fingers sticky with actual knowledge provides. Expert content drives a whole other level of learning and discovery and questioning.

The five buckets of furthering your own sparkle and hustle are only meta descriptors for the actual beef of living. Work, life, love, money and happiness are useful insofar as they are labels or subject headings to the intricate web of understanding. But when amateur content insists that we relate to our lives on this meta level, it ignores well, the rest of the iceberg.

This isn’t to say amateur content isn’t entertaining or necessary in some contexts. I like a good hot dog from time to time, love Oprah all the time, and generally consume amateur content for different (and good) reasons throughout the day. But we need more writers to create expert content and more publishers to distribute it. Not only for the sanity of our selves, but for the evolution of media.

Content will have to be that which cannot be easily copied, and that which cannot be abstracted into a big meta bow. And it will have to dive deep into the many sub-headings and levels, continually sifting and winnowing through energy innovations, media, healthcare, philosophy, the sharing economy,  technology, fashion, the food industry, political history and much, so very much more.

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Women

Women Struggle With New Literacy: Programming Your Life

The web makes it easier than ever to test and execute on your ideas, at least for those who know how to code: Mark, Aaron, Ev and Biz – you know, the ones running the show. These guys along with other young lads are defining, controlling and programming your life.

“Only an elite gains the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in Program or Be Programmed. “The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs. As a result, most of society remains one full dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind the few who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.”

Young white males are still in charge just as they have always been. If you want real equality, everyone needs to build the revolution. Women need to learn how to code.

“Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest growing, and most valuable consumer internet and e-commerce companies.  Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet,” argues Aileen Lee on Tech Crunch. She goes on to reveal that 77% of Groupon’s customers are female and that women oversee over 80% of consumer spending, or about $5 trillion dollars annually.

All well and good, but women do not rule the Internet. We are not deciding how these experiences are being developed, built or regulated. We are not deciding how products are displayed, inventoried, or marketed. We are not creating the user interfaces or user experience.

While more than 50% of the US population are female, 92% of founders are male and 87% of founding teams are all-male, report several studies. Not to mention computer science is one of the last disciplines where there is a gender imbalance in the US: about 80% male, 20% female.

Arguing that women control the Internet because we love to shop only panders to and reinforces the social construct that will truly bring equality: being part of the revolution as it happens.

No longer is it enough to know how to put together a slide deck or write and publish a blog post. Instead of learning how to build the software, we learn how to use the software. And when you use programs that are made for us without understanding how they work, you allow the technology to teach you. But you can teach the technology. Programming decides the limitations, the possibilities. It’s all within the variables and commands behind the curtain.

Maybe you don’t mind all this. If you want to be directed by technology and those who have mastered it, that’s fine. But don’t expect any semblance of equality any time soon. If you want to direct technology however, if you want to be at the forefront of this revolution and define what life will look like, you need to code.

“Gender imbalance materially impacts innovation,” VC Brad Feld told me in a recent interview. “Over the next twenty years, the only way we’ll have enough software engineers working on hard problems is to get more women involved. In addition, I believe that mixed gender teams are more effective at driving innovation and, especially when you consider many of the products being created impact our every day lives, it’s clearly a major inhibitor not to have women involved in the creation of these products.”

No kidding. Why is innovation, that which influences everything else, still ruled by young white males? If the new literacy is programming, women are just as behind as ever. “We lose sight of the fact that the programming—the code itself—is the place from which the most significant innovations emerge,” argues Rushkoff.

Feminism has run stagnant with modern young women, but I have its rallying cry for the new century: program your life. Don’t let others do it for you. Women will not find equality by giving themselves credit or solving workplace flexibility. Even when we do everything right, we still fail women. But today, the web allows such low barriers to entry that anyone can control our future. Let’s hope anyone includes more than a few women.

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Q & A

Good Deeds (Part 2)

In Part 2 of our interview, the former CEO/activist of Seventh Generation talks about how he would launch a company today, the tensions of scale, and what motivates him the most.

After leaving Seventh Generation, the company he founded and ran for twenty years, Jeffrey Hollender didn’t stop in his fight for corporate responsibility, sustainability and social equity. In Part 1 of the interview, Hollender spoke on today’s labor movement, changing the rules of business and politics, and the biggest failure at his old company. Jumping in where we left off –

So, let’s talk about large companies again – is scale ever a sustainable business model? You’ve pointed a lot to small and medium-sized companies that can’t compete. Is there a situation or model where scale can occur, but can still be meaningful and contribute positively to our society?

I don’t want to say that big is always bad, because there are many good things that large companies can do that no one else can do. Walmart, for example. If Walmart decides to eliminate a chemical from  products they sell in their stores, they can force that chemical out of commerce much more quickly and much more effectively than the government can.

So we’re in a position of tension. On the one hand, harnessing the power of large companies to do things that even the government can’t do. Yet at the same time, Walmart is a company that cost the state of California hundreds of millions of dollars because they don’t provide a broad health care coverage for their employees and thus, they go into the emergency room  and the state of California calculated that that costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

When you have a dynamic that is set up where the only things that matters and the only things that get measured is the maximization of profits, you have a conflict between what’s best for society and what’s best for investors.

And the notion that the marketplace will take care of it all is a complete fallacy because there is no free market. There never was a free market. And we have a market that is designed to do certain things, to benefit certain companies and certain products and certain services. We need to change the way that system of benefits works so that it more broadly serves society and doesn’t only serve a handful a companies.

That plays in well to the next topic I wanted to address. The Internet allows us to have more currencies than simply money – there’s reputation, authority, data, etc. that allow us to exchange value in a way we don’t in the non-interneted world. I’m curious, do you think technology can change how our current system of benefits works?

We already have many, if not most, of the solutions we need to get the world headed in the right direction. It’s not that we don’t have the technology to produce clean energy. It’s that we have a system of subsidies and incentives that subsidize and incentivize the wrong kind of energy production.

While I see technology playing a role in solving many of the most difficult and challenging problems we face, I don’t think at the moment we have to wait for technology. I think we to again stop incentivizing and supporting the wrong technology and support the right technology.

I think the peer-to-peer economy is one important piece of the economic transition we need to make. But there are other important pieces as well. I think that we have to transition to an economy where we don’t have employees, where we have worker-owners. We live in an economy where most of the wealth of that is created by business ends up in the hands of very few people. We have a more unequal society than Egypt or Tunisia. That’s a dangerous situation from a social perspective and to my mind, one of the biggest and quickest ways we can address that is to transition and create businesses where ownership in those businesses is more widely held, so as value is generated, we lift all the people who are working, rather than few people at the top of the corporation or the outside capital that comes in to finance the business.

I am interested in legacy lately. Do you want to leave a legacy? If so, what do you want your legacy to be?

I honestly have never– I’m not entirely sure what legacy is about. I think a little bit more about responsibility and I feel that I have a responsibly to make a contribution to society and to the world that may leave a legacy but that legacy doesn’t particularly motivate me. I’m more motivated by seeing someone smile and the feedback one can get by doing good deeds, than how those deeds will be viewed after I’m gone.

At my full-time job, I work for Alice.com, a start-up that allows CPG manufacturers to sell directly to the consumer. As a result, I’m interested in the rise of private label and the fact that retailers hold all the data. Is there enough shelf space for the really cool innovative products? Or will that become an issue?

Well, I mean today, there is already not enough shelf space. We live in a world where shelf space is largely controlled by large companies, and I’ve found it increasingly difficult for small innovative brands to get shelf space. And I think that the solution is the internet. If I was launching a business today, I might entirely skip trying to get it on the shelves of stores and go directly to consumers online. The store has a limited number of square feet in which they can sell stuff, and by the very nature of that limited space, there is going to be limited variety.

You know when you talk about technology… we want to balance, on the one hand, and support our local retailers because they’re anchors in our community; they create jobs and yet there are many things that we won’t be able to get from our local retailers that we can access online.

I’m glad you brought up the tension between local retailers and the Internet. I think we need to wrap this up. Is there a question I should have asked, but didn’t? Or that you wish others would ask? This is your chance to get whatever you want to say out there.

Yeah, I’ll give you one or two concluding thoughts. One of the things that concerns me deeply is the fragmentation and compartmentalization of the world. We have lost the ability in many cases to see the connection between things as we become increasingly focused and increasingly specialized. As we become so focused, we lose sight of the unintended consequences of many of the things we may do or many of the things that we may support. And I think there’s a greater need today than there ever has been for us to look at the whole system. And to look at the impacts of what that system produces and the way we’ve designed that system. Albeit, that is a way of thinking that few of us have been taught to do.

The other side of that coin is that when we look at the landscape of organizations, particularly NGOs that are trying to solve problems that the world faces, we have millions of organizations that seem largely incapable of working together and do a better job of competing amongst themselves and a new sense of cooperation is absolutely critical to address the problems we’re facing.

We can’t think of something like global warming as an environmental problem. Global warming is as much an economic problem and a health problem as it is an environmental problem. And when we look at it through a single lens, we won’t understand and we won’t develop strategies to change it in a lasting fashion.