When I wrote Twitter Is What Second Life Wasn’t: Light, Cheap and Open I was addressing something simple:
“the hype surrounding Twitter may well be hype but isn’t the same sort of hype that Second Life enjoyed 2-3 years ago, and here’s why.”
Well, I forgot how passionate Second Lifers are and so it goes. So it was delicious to discover the 20-or-so comments in response to my recent AdAge DigitalNext article. Here’s the comments through to today (Via Marketing Conversation):
Dr. Robert Grunstein
I am always amazed when I find stories like this. When I find the sort of story that shows that people like dentists, sadly known for having a high rate of depression and suicide, who are passionate about doing good for those of us who only have Medicaid or who cannot generally afford — or won’t spend for — good dental work. Kudos to Steven Eidman and especially to Dr. Robert Grunstein
May 3, 2009 by Steven Eidman — Dr. Robert Grunstein has always been a car and truck guy. So when he heard that an old municipal fire truck was up for sale (”the holy grail for car guys,” he says), he bought it. The fire truck cost him $5,000; converting it into a mobile dental unit and taking out the water tank set him back $50,000. “It had a new motor and perfect transmission,” Grunstein gushes. It’s the perfect vehicle, he says, for combating the “tsunami of bad teeth.”
This morning, I fired up my Android G1 and checked my Inbox and found a link to a post on NPR.com, Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships. The premise of the article is that there is no time, in a busy boy or girl’s life, to get stuck in a relationship:
Young people from high school on are so preoccupied with friends, getting an education and establishing themselves, they don’t make time for relationships. New goal: fun, not marriage.
Well, I have had some very strong opinions about this, especially when it comes to girls. In my 2005 opinion, when I wrote Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s, I believed that the new “hook up” culture would be a blood bath where women would move forward with the intent of sexual empowerment while men would sit back and lick their lips and take advantage — but I don’t know anymore.
A number of experts accept this relaxed attitude toward sex outside of relationships as a natural consequence of the sexual revolution, women’s growing independence and the availability of modern contraceptives. But Deborah Roffman, who conducts human sexuality workshops for middle- and high-school-age students and their parents, sees that as a distorted view of liberation.
“It’s not a new model. I think most people would probably look back and agree that this has been a more traditionally, or at least stereotypically, male model,” says Roffman. “What I’ve seen over the last few years is girls adopting a more compartmentalized view, and feeling good and empowered by it.”
She’s not convinced that this is a good thing for women, and says that being able to say yes is only one way of looking at freedom. She would feel much better if young men also were developing a greater capacity for intimacy.
Being able to engage in intimate relationships where men and women bring all of themselves to the relationship is the cornerstone of family, Roffman says.
I addressed this in a much less elegant way, which is why I am not Dr. Abraham, in We Men Didn’t Get the Memo, wherein I posit that this “devil may care” attitude towards sex and the hookup could very well result in a Judo flip that puts men too far into the driver’s seat as women need to compete for men because, for men, it is about the path of least resistance to sexual behavior:
As men in such a seller’s market, we don’t have to choose. We can date another willing girl every night. We can push sex much faster than we ever could believe. The three-date rule? Ha! That’s the official rule, but now the first date counts from the night we first met. Oral sex on the first date has sort of become de rigueur — if you want a second date.
Instead of getting control, the Manolo Blahnik
Feminist has relinquished control to us men.
And even worse, this is a very dangerous game. We men are bigger, stronger, and not all of us are so nice. I personally have a lot of experience with women who are survivors — survivors not just of dating or their 20s, but survivors of sexual abuse and rape. [We Men Didn’t Get the Memo]
Well, that was then, this is now. Has it turend out the way I thought? Well, according to recent books like Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School and Oral Sex Is The New Goodnight Kiss, maybe things aren’t as fun, simple, or innocent — girl-friendly — as:
We all attended health class in middle school and high school. We know about condoms and sexually transmitted disease. Sex is fun, and a lot of people would argue that it is a physical need. It’s a healthy activity.
Well, after four years and a year living in Berlin, I intuit that the psycho-sexual culture of America’s youth is becoming way more — but not exactly — European. Not exactly because from what I got from the article is that this new mood of hooking-up is driven by intimacy-avoidance rather than intimacy-seeking. Europeans, and Berliners in particular, are not averse to intimacy. Are you intimacy-averse?
Europeans don’t date — even the Brits don’t date — they hang out in groups, go dancing, drinking, socializing, and sometimes hooking up and having one-night stands; however, the be all and end all of this friendly mixing is not to secure constant sex but to have fun. While we like to think of Europeans as being more open to sex and maybe even more promiscuous, I don’t know how true that is.
My German friend Frank tells me that they find their partners like this:
Well, we hang out together as friends and sometimes when we’re out we dance and drink and sometimes go home together.
Then, when you wake up in the morning, you decide: do I like this — do I like her — or don’t I? If it doesn’t work out, it is considered a one-night-stand, of course, but not with a stranger, with a friend, which is OK in the group.
However, if it does work out, there is a very strong nesting instinct and couples who hook up casually after a night out oftentimes live together, have children, and spend decades together — without all of the bullshit and expectations of the interviewing of dating and the officiation of marriage.
I have a feeling that this is where dating is going in America. And this is not the result of American cynicism or self-destructive behavior, but rather as a continuing evolution away from a “women-as-chattel” culture of marriage to something else. Maybe a gender culture of “separate but equal,” that is less concerned with roles, with expectations, or with God’s Sacraments and more interested in living a life, “fulfilled.”
I don’t fancy this is a response to anything. Why? Well, I was just reading a New York Magazine article called Class of ’09 that kept reinforcing the discovery that teens and 20-somethings these days really love, trust, and appreciate their parents — consider them friends and even share their musical tastes. Parents as mentors, something that is also a breaking down of traditional structures of family.
That said, could the other side of the double-edged sword be that parents have been doing less parenting and a lot of befriending. Are America’s youth acting out sexually because their parents were too busy? Because their parents were too adoring? Because their parents were terrible role models? Could it be a reflection of their parents’ behavior? Could it be the result of indulgent parenting? Well, I don’t know.
Personally, I think that it is a good thing when kids love their parents and don’t think everything they do is super-uncool and lame, no matter how bad it may be for prime time comedies and sit-coms.
I don’t know how this is all going to shake out. I believe that there is going to be a lot of casualties, both emotionally as well as physically, before it all sorts itself out in the end.
What do you think?
I am going to post both articles below: the one from NPR and the one from my blog
Please check out my latest post on Advertising Age Digital Next, Twitter Is What Second Life Wasn’t: Light, Cheap and Open:
I run into many skeptics who believe that Twitter is rife with the sort of hype associated with the ascent and crash of Second Life. This is not true. Twitter is suffused with hype, for sure, but it is a much different and more sustainable hype than Second Life.
Here’s why: Twitter is light, cheap, open and permanent, whereas Second Life is heavy, expensive, closed and ephemeral. Twitter does things right where Second Life failed.
Second Life is amazingly heavy, requiring lots of computer, lots of bandwidth and a commitment to client software. Second Life is a closed system, a walled city, completely invisible to serendipity and coincidence. Second Life is greedy, pushing avarice and commerce. Second Life is ephemeral and anti-textual, meaning that all of the work and energy one spent on Second Life invariably went away the moment people stopped investing time and money into the platform. While there was a programming language, a scripting language and lots of room for creativity, Second Life was not nearly as agnostic and open a platform as it could have been.
On the other hand, Twitter is open and has a fantastically generous API (an open API as opposed to a closed API, which is why so many developers have created such useful applications on top of the service). Twitter is highly textual, highly contagious and very much real time.
Consider its effect on content discovery. Google, the search king, always wants to know it is up to date, that it is on top of everything. It’s constantly insecure that it will lose the war to upstarts. And when it comes to zeitgeist 2.0 — real-time trend tracking and trend recognition — Twitter moves even faster than breaking news scrawls and updates.
The most famous example is the rapidity with which the Twittersphere responds to tragic events like earthquakes, tornadoes, and terrorist events like the shootings in #mumbai and the #iranelection.
For a second, let’s forget Twitter the website and look at how differently people access and engage with Twitter. Not only can one interface via the web or SMS, but there are also hundreds of desktop clients, iPhone and smart phone apps, and third-party mashups of sites and services.
That’s what’s funny: A large proportion of the API calls to Twitter these days aren’t even made by humans twittering all day long. Rather, they’re made by third-party search engines and services offering sundry services: finding friends, tracking news, graphing conversation, tracking searches, plotting trends, collecting metrics, following people, un-following people.
In many ways, the Twitter platform has become almost a fungible input-output flow of data, like IP, tap water, or the electrical mains — all the creativity and all of the development is happening as a result of this relatively featureless and structure-less raw platform.
Everybody admits that the elegance of Facebook‘s interface does an amazing job of hand-holding the diverse levels of technological prowess that Facebook users possess. However, Facebook shares many things in common with Second Life: It is a walled-garden, cliquey and hard to cross-pollinate. And finally, Facebook works very hard at defining what the user experience is to the best of its ability in a world where openness and open access can often work for you instead of against you.
The biggest mistake that social network services and online virtual communities make is being too invested in the outcome of how the community will grow and develop. To be successful in community development and community creation, one must be committed to the community and meeting their needs versus being committed to giving them what the community producer thinks the community wants and needs — often very different things.
At the end of the day, Twitter has always been more like the cardboard box holding the toy than the toy itself. Twitter seems to have built the perfect box to play in and with until you decide what sort of toy you want to build — and then Twitter makes it possible for everyone and his brother to take a go at building the toy in the box, always just focusing on being the most amusing, easy-to-use, scalable and compelling box possible.
To me, Twitter is a lot like IRC from back in the day. When you install Internet Relay Chat, there are no rooms and there are no members. Only by engaging and by creating rooms and groups does it become truly useful. (Twitter and IRC share the same conventions in terms of using the hash, #, to indicate a self-organizing group that only exists as long as people choose to use it.)
The strange thing is is that Twitter is one of the very few applications — Web 2.0 or not — that gets the benefit of everybody trying to train each other via — believe it or not — morning talk shows, news spots, news specials, local get-togethers. Oprah! Ellen! The View! I mean, how many dot-com/Web 2.0 platforms have the benefit of that? On the flip side, the downside to Twitter’s choosing not to carefully control every aspect of the user experience is that it’s not always intuitive or apparent how to use it. The third-party apps may be more useful, but most newbies begin their experience at Twitter.com.
People who don’t get Twitter really have not spent enough time with it. There are tons of ways people can use Twitter: Many people use Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed news reader, following Twitter feeds of news organizations and news alerts, including links and so forth. Twitter doesn’t care how you use it: passive reading or active conversation.
In fact, Twitter is such a neutral solution that you might very well forget that you’re a member, which is why there might be a perception that over 60 percent of all of the users who visit the site don’t go back the next month: Twitter doesn’t want to be too much trouble.
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Chris Abraham, president of the digital-PR firm Abraham Harrison, is a blogger who specializes in social-media marketing with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement and search-reputation management. Chris lives in Berlin and Washington and can be reached via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Via Advertising Age Digital Next
I have known Ellen for over five years — maybe longer — and she is as beautiful in person as she is on TV. She is also brilliant, creative, curious, generous, funny, open, and friendly. So, it is my job to help her promote her new movie. Ellen Bry plays Ester Hobbes, a Chicago socialite who suddenly loses everything, in The Lost & Found Family, a new Sony Pictures release. For the full story, I have excerpted the words of another dear friend, Dan Hull, who also adores Miss Bry, Ellen Bry: Stamford Connecticut girl makes good (again). Break a leg, Ellen!
Ellen Bry: Stamford Connecticut girl makes good (again).
Some girls just love to work. Our friend Ellen Bry, a nighttime drama television mainstay (St. Elsewhere, Dexter, Boston Legal, Monk, The Closer) for decades, and known in the LA-NYC underground as WAC?‘s in-house photographer, has the lead role as Ester Hobbes, a Chicago socialite who suddenly loses everything, in The Lost & Found Family, a new Sony Pictures release. In the film, we meet a strong and spiritual woman who is surprised to learn that she has inherited just one thing from her dead businessman husband: a run-down old house in Georgia, and the turbulent foster family living in it.
Taken from the story Mrs. Hobbes’ House, The Lost & Found Family is a poignant, uplifting, instructive and remarkably powerful family film set in the American South. It was filmed in Jackson, Georgia, a town between Atlanta and Macon, with a population of about 4000, in Butts County.
It is a movie for people who go to church, sing, say “golly”, watch lots of TV, eat a lot, and are afraid of virtually everyone and everything all the time. It is therefore bound to be a cult classic, comforting to millions residing in the vast grayness and troubled reverie that is American Fly-Over Country.
Just joshing you.
Early in 2008, I saw a rough cut of The Lost and Found Family–then still entitled Mrs. Hobbes’ House–before Sony acquired it. I recognized the people portrayed. Many Americans, including my own family, have roots that reach deeply into, say, southwestern Virginia, east Tennessee, and southern Missouri (where I’ve visited family my entire life), going back well over two centuries.
Later generations are still there: always hard-working and proud, sometimes devout, seldom well-to-do, and worlds away from the country club life Ester Hobbes led when her husband was alive. They often struggle to make the best life they can.
You need not be Southern, rural or devoted to any form of organized religion to be moved by Ester Hobbes’ story. This film will touch every viewer with simple but forgotten verities that bind us to one another.
There are artful, and moving, performances by Ellen and her younger cast members, who include teen heartthrob Lucas Till (Walk The Line, Hannah Montana: The Movie), and Jessica Luza, a film and television actress (The Sullivan Sisters, Boston Legal) and MTV fashion host. Ellen’s other movie credits include Mission Impossible 3, Deep Impact, and Bye, Bye Love.
