Category Archives: Consumer Psychology

Minority Report Might Be Here — 30 Years Early

“Sometimes, in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.”

Iris Hineman – 2002’s Minority Report

I don’t usually look to Hollywood for deep philosophical reflection, but today I’m making an exception. Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report is balanced on some fascinating ground, ethically speaking. For me, it brought up a rather interesting question – could you get a clear enough picture of someone’s mental state through their social media feed that would allow you to predict pathological behavior? And – even if you could – should you?

If you’re not familiar with the movie, here is the background on this question. In the year 2054, there are three individuals that possess a psychic ability to see events in the future, primarily premeditated murders. These individuals are known at Precognitives, or Precogs. Their predictions are used to set up a PreCrime Division in Washington, DC, where suspects are arrested before they can commit the crime.

Our Social Media Persona

A persona is a social façade – a mask we don that portrays a role we play in our lives. For many of us that now includes the digital stage of social media. Here too we have created a persona, where we share the aspects of ourselves that we feel we need to put out there on our social media platform of choice.

What may surprise us, however, is that even though we supposedly have control over what we share, even that will tell a surprising amount about who we are – both intentionally and unintentionally. And, if those clues are troubling, does our society have a responsibility – or the right – to proactively reach out?

In a commentary published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Shawn McNeil said of social media,

“Scientists should be able to harness the predictive potential of these technologies in identifying those most vulnerable. We should seek to understand the significance of a patient’s interaction with social media when taking a thorough history. Future research should focus on the development of advanced algorithms that can efficiently identify the highest-risk individuals.”

Dr. Shawn McNeil

Along this theme, a 2017 study (Liu & Campbell) found that where we fall in the so-called “Big Five” personality traits – neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness – as well as the “Big Two” metatraits – plasticity and stability – can be a pretty accurate prediction of how we use social media.

But what if we flip this around?  If we just look at a person’s social media feed, could we tell what their personality traits and metatraits are with a reasonable degree of accuracy? Could we, for instance, assess their mental stability and pick up the warning signs that they might be on the verge of doing something destructive, either to themselves or to someone else? Following this logic, could we spot a potential crime before it happens?

Pathological Predictions

Police are already using social media to track suspects and find criminals. But this is typically applied after the crime has occurred. For instance, police departments regularly scan social media using facial recognition technology to track down suspects. They comb a suspect’s social media feeds to establish whereabouts and gather evidence. Of course, you can only scan social content that people are willing to share. But when these platforms are as ubiquitous as they are, it’s constantly astounding that people share as much as they do, even when they’re on the run from the law.

There are certainly ethical questions about mining social media content for law enforcement purposes. For example, facial recognition algorithms tend to have flaws when it comes to false positives with those of darker complexion, leading to racial profiling concerns. But at least this activity tries to stick with the spirit of the tenet that our justice system is built on: you are innocent until proven guilty.

There must be a temptation, however, to go down the same path as Minority Report and try to pre-empt crime – by identifying a “Precrime”.

Take a school shooting, for example. In the May 31 issue of Fortune, senior technology journalist Jeremy Kahn asked this question: “Could A.I. prevent another school shooting?” In the article, Kahn referenced a study where a team at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center used Artificial Intelligence software to analyze transcripts of teens who went through a preliminary interview with psychiatrists. The goal was to see how well the algorithm compared to more extensive assessments by trained psychiatrists to see if the subject had a propensity to commit violence. They found that assessments matched about 91% of the time.

I’ll restate that so the point hits home: An A.I. algorithm that scanned a preliminary assessment could match much more extensive assessments done by expert professionals 9 out of 10 times –  even without access to the extensive records and patient histories that the psychiatrists had at their disposal.

Let’s go one step further and connect those two dots: If social media content could be used to identify potentially pathological behaviors, and if an AI could then scan that content to predict whether those behaviors could lead to criminal activities, what do we do with that?

It puts us squarely on a very slippery down slope, but we have to acknowledge that we are getting very close to a point where technology forces us to ask a question we’ve never been able to ask before: “If we – with a reasonable degree of success – could prevent violent crimes that haven’t happened yet, should we?”

Memories Made by Media

If you said the year 1967 to me, the memory that would pop into my head would be of Haight-Ashbury (ground zero for the counterculture movement), hippies and the summer of love. In fact, that same memory would effectively stand in for the period 1967 to 1969. In my mind, those three years were variations on the theme of Woodstock, the iconic music festival of 1969.

But none of those are my memories. I was alive, but my own memories of that time are indistinct and fuzzy. I was only 6 that year and lived in Alberta, some 1300 miles from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets, so I have discarded my own personal representative memories. The ones I have were all created by images that came via media.

The Swapping of Memories

This is an example of the two types of memories we have – personal or “lived” memories and collective memories. Collective memories are the memories we get from outside, either for other people or, in my example, from media. As we age, there tends to be a flow back and forth between these two types or memories, with one type coloring the other.

One group of academics proposed an hourglass model as a working metaphor to understand this continuous exchange of memories – with some flowing one way and others flowing the other.  Often, we’re not even aware of which type of memory we’re recalling, personal or collective. Our memories are notoriously bad at reflecting reality.

What is true, however, is that our personal memories and our collective memories tend to get all mixed up. The lower our confidence in our personal memories, the more we tend to rely on collective memories. For periods before we were born, we rely solely on images we borrow.

Iconic Memories

What is true for all memories, ours or the ones we borrow from others, is we put them through a process called “leveling and sharpening.” This is a type of memory consolidation where we throw out some of the detail that is not important to us – this is leveling – and exaggerate other details to make it more interesting – i.e. sharpening.

Take my borrowed memories of 1967, for example. There was a lot more happening in the world than whatever was happening in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, but I haven’t retained any of it in my representative memory of that year. For example, there was a military coup in Greece, the first successful human heart transplant, the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a series of deadly tornadoes in Chicago and Typhoon Emma left 140,000 people homeless in the Philippines. But none of that made it into my memory of 1967.

We could call the memories we do keep as “iconic” – which simply means we chose symbols to represent a much bigger and more complex reality – like everything that happened in a 365 day stretch 5 and a half decades ago.

Mass Manufactured Memories

Something else happens when we swap our own personal memories for collective memories – we find much more commonality in our memories. The more removed we become from our own lived experiences, the more our memories become common property.

If I asked you to say the first thing that comes to mind about 2002, you would probably look back through your own personal memory store to see if there was anything there. Chances are it would be a significant event from your own life, and this would make it unique to you. If we had a group of 50 people in a room and I asked that question, I would probably end up with 50 different answers.

But if I asked that same group what the first thing is that comes to mind when I say the year 1967, we would find much more common ground. And that ground would probably be defined by how each of us identify ourselves. For some you might have the same iconic memory that I do – that of the Haight Ashbury and the Summer of Love. Others may have picked the Vietnam War as the iconic memory from that year. But I would venture to guess that in our group of 50, we would end up with only a handful of answers.

When Memories are Made of Media

I am taking this walk down Memory Lane because I want to highlight how much we rely on the media to supply our collective memories. This dependency is critical, because once media images are processed by us and become part of our collective memories, they hold tremendous sway over our beliefs. These memories become the foundation for how we make sense of the world.

This is true for all media, including social media. A study in 2018 (Birkner & Donk) found that “alternative realities” can be formed through social media to run counter to collective memories formed from mainstream media. Often, these collective memories formed through social media are polarized by nature and are adopted by outlier fringes to justify extreme beliefs and viewpoints. This shows that collective memories are not frozen in time but are malleable – continually being rewritten by different media platforms.

Like most things mediated by technology, collective memories are splintering into smaller and smaller groupings, just like the media that are instrumental in their formation.

Sarcastic Much?

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.”

Oscar Wilde

I fear the death of sarcasm is nigh. The alarm bells started going when I saw a tweet from John Cleese that referenced a bit from “The Daily Show.”  In it, Trevor Noah used sarcasm to run circles around the logic of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had opined that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, essentially booting the question down to the state level to decide.

Against my better judgement, I started scrolling through the comments on the thread — and, within the first couple, found that many of those commenting had completely missed Noah’s point. They didn’t pick up on the sarcasm — at all. In fact, to say they missed the point is like saying Columbus “missed” India. They weren’t even in the same ocean. Perhaps not the same planet.

Sarcasm is my mother tongue. I am fluent in it. So I’m very comfortable with sarcasm. I tend to get nervous in overly sincere environments.

I find sarcasm requires almost a type of meta-cognition, where you have to be able to mentally separate the speaker’s intention from what they’re saying. If you can hold the two apart in your head, you can truly appreciate the art of sarcasm. It’s this finely balanced and recurrent series of contradictions — with tongue firmly placed in cheek — that makes sarcasm so potentially powerful. As used by Trevor Noah, it allows us to air out politically charged issues and consider them at a mental level at least one step removed from our emotional gut reactions.

As Oscar Wilde knew — judging by his quote at the beginning of the post — sarcasm can be a nasty form of humor, but it does require some brain work. It’s a bit of a mental puzzle, forcing us to twist an issue in our heads like a cognitive Rubik’s Cube, looking at it from different angles. Because of this, it’s not for everyone. Some people are just too earnest (again, with a nod to Mr. Wilde) to appreciate sarcasm.

The British excel at sarcasm. John Cleese is a high priest of sarcasm. That’s why I follow him on Twitter. Wilde, of course, turned sarcasm into art. But as Ricky Gervais (who has his own black belt in sarcasm) explains in this piece for Time, sarcasm — and, to be more expansive, all types of irony — have been built into the British psyche over many centuries. This isn’t necessarily true for Americans. 

“There’s a received wisdom in the U.K. that Americans don’t get irony. This is of course not true. But what is true is that they don’t use it all the time. It shows up in the smarter comedies but Americans don’t use it as much socially as Brits. We use it as liberally as prepositions in everyday speech. We tease our friends. We use sarcasm as a shield and a weapon. We avoid sincerity until it’s absolutely necessary. We mercilessly take the piss out of people we like or dislike basically. And ourselves. This is very important. Our brashness and swagger is laden with equal portions of self-deprecation. This is our license to hand it out.”

Ricky Gervais – Time, November 9, 2011

That was written just over a decade ago. I believe it’s even more true today. If you chose to use sarcasm in our age of fake news and social media, you do so at your peril. Here are three reasons why:

First, as Gervais points out, sarcasm doesn’t play equally across all cultures.  Americans — as one example — tend to be more sincere and, as such, take many things meant as sarcastic at face value. Sarcasm might hit home with a percentage of an U.S. audience, but it will go over a lot of American heads. It’s probably not a coincidence that many of those heads might be wearing MAGA hats.

Also, sarcasm can be fatally hamstrung by our TL;DR rush to scroll to the next thing. Sarcasm typically saves its payoff until the end. It intentionally creates a cognitive gap, and you have to be willing to stay with it to realize that someone is, in the words of Gervais, taking the “piss out of you.” Bail too early and you might never recognize it as sarcasm. I suspect more than a few of those who watched Trevor Noah’s piece didn’t stick through to the end before posting a comment.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, social media tends to strip sarcasm of its context, leaving it hanging out there to be misinterpreted. If you are a regular watcher of “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” or “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” or even “Late Night with Seth Meyers” (who is one American that’s a master of sarcasm), you realize that sarcasm is part and parcel of it all. But when you repost any bit from any of these shows to social media, moving it beyond its typical audience, you have also removed all the warning signs that say “warning: sarcastic content ahead.” You are leaving the audience to their own devices to “get it.” And that almost never turns out well on social media.

You may say that this is all for the good. The world doesn’t really need more sarcasm. An academic study found that sarcastic messages can be more hurtful to the recipient than a sincere message. Sarcasm can cut deep, and because of this, it can lead to more interpersonal conflict.

But there’s another side to sarcasm. That same study also found that sarcasm can require us to be more creative. The mental mechanisms you use to understand sarcasm are the very same ones we need to use to be more thoughtful about important issues. It de-weaponizes these issues by using humor, while it also forces us to look at them in new ways.

Personally, I believe our world needs more Trevor Noahs, John Olivers and Seth Meyers. Sarcasm, used well, can make us a little smarter, a little more open-minded, and — believe it or not — a little more compassionate.

Using Science for Selling: Sometimes Yes, Sometimes No

A recent study out of Ohio State University seems like one of those that the world really didn’t need. The researchers were exploring whether introducing science into the marketing would help sell chocolate chip cookies.

And to us who make a living in marketing, this is one of those things that might make us say “Duh, you needed research to tell us that? Of course you don’t use science to sell chocolate chip cookies!”

But bear with me, because if we keep asking why enough, we can come up with some answers that might surprise us.

So, what did the researchers learn? I quote,

“Specifically, since hedonic attributes are associated with warmth, the coldness associated with science is conceptually disfluent with the anticipated warmth of hedonic products and attributes, reducing product valuation.”

Ohio State Study

In other words – much simpler and fewer in number – science doesn’t help sell cookies. And it’s because our brains think differently about some things than other.

For example, a study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior (Casado-Aranda, Sanchez-Fernandez and Garcia) found that when we’re exposed to “hedonic” ads – ads that appeal to pleasurable sensations – the parts of our brain that retrieve memories kicks in. This isn’t true when we see utilitarian ads. Predictably, we approach those ads as a problem to be solved and engage the parts of our brain that control working memory and the ability to focus our attention.

Essentially, these two advertising approaches take two different paths in our awareness, one takes the “thinking” path and one takes the “feeling” path. Or, as Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman would say, one takes the “thinking slow” path and one takes the “thinking fast” path.

Yet another study begins to show why this may be so. Let’s go back to chocolate chip cookies for a moment. When you smell a fresh baked cookie, it’s not just the sensory appeal “in the moment” that makes the cookie irresistible. It’s also the memories it brings back for you. We know that how things smell is a particularly effective way to trigger this connection with the past. Certain smells – like that of cookies just out of the oven – can be the shortest path between today and some childhood memory. These are called associative memories. And they’re a big part of “feeling” something rather than just “thinking” about it.

At the University of California – Irvine – Neuroscientists discovered a very specific type of neuron in our memory centers that oversee the creation of new associative memories. They’re called “fan cells” and it seems that these neurons are responsible for creating the link between new input and those emotion-inducing memories that we may have tucked away from our past. And – critically – it seems that dopamine is the key to linking the two. When our brains “smell” a potential reward, it kicks these fan cells into gear and our brain is bathed in the “warm fuzzies.” Lead research Kei Igarashi, said,

“We never expected that dopamine is involved in the memory circuit. However, when the evidence accumulated, it gradually became clear that dopamine is involved. These experiments were like a detective story for us, and we are excited about the results.”

Kei Igarashi – University of California – Irvine

Not surprisingly – as our first study found – introducing science into this whole process can be a bit of a buzz kill. It would be like inviting Bill Nye the Science Guy to teach you about quantum physics during your Saturday morning cuddle time.

All of this probably seems overwhelmingly academic to you. Selling something like chocolate chip cookies isn’t something that should take three different scientific studies and strapping several people inside a fMRI machine to explain. We should be able to rely on our guts, and our guts know that science has no place in a campaign built on an emotional appeal.

But there is a point to all this. Different marketing approaches are handled by different parts of the brain, and knowing that allows us to reinforce our marketing intuition with a better understanding of why we humans do the things we do.

Utilitarian appeals activate the parts of the brain that are front and center, the data crunching, evaluating and rational parts of our cognitive machinery.

Hedonic appeals probe the subterranean depths of our brains, unpacking memories and prodding emotions below the thresholds of us being conscious of the process. We respond viscerally – which literally means “from our guts”.

If we’re talking about selling chocolate chip cookies, we have moved about as far towards the hedonic end of the scale as we can. At the other end we would find something like motor oil – where scientific messaging such as “advanced formulation” or “proven engine protection” would be more persuasive. But almost all other products fall somewhere in between. They are a mix of hedonic and utilitarian factors. And we haven’t even factored in the most significant of all consumer considerations – risk and how to avoid it. Think how complex things would get in our brains if we were buying a new car!

Buying chocolate chip cookies might seem like a no brainer – because – well – it almost is. Beyond dosing our neural pathways with dopamine, our brains barely kick in when considering whether to grab a bag of Chips Ahoy on our next trip to the store. In fact, the last thing you want your brain to do when you’re craving chewy chocolate is to kick in. Then you would start considering things like caloric intake and how you should be cutting down on processed sugar. Chocolate chip cookies might be a no-brainer, but almost nothing else in the consumer world is that simple.

Marketing is relying more and more on data. But data is typically restricted to answering “who”, “what”, “when” and “where” questions. It’s studies like the ones I shared here that start to pick apart the “why” of marketing.

And when things get complex, asking “why” is exactly what we need to do.

Sensationalizing Scam Culture

We seem to be fascinated by bad behavior. Our popular culture is all agog with grifters and assholes. As TV Blog’s Adam Buckman wrote in March: “Two brand-new limited series premiering this week appear to be part of a growing trend in which some of recent history’s most notorious innovators and disruptors are getting the scripted-TV treatment.”

The two series Buckman was talking about were “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” about Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and “The Dropout,” about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

But those are just two examples from a bumper crop of shows about bad behavior. My streaming services are stuffed with stories of scammers. In addition to the two series Buckman mentioned, I just finished Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix series “Inventing Anna,” about Anna Sorokin, who posed as an heiress named Anna Delvey.

All these treatments tread a tight wire of moral judgement, where the examples are presented as antisocial, but in a wink-and-a-nod kind of way, where we not so secretly admire these behaviors. Much as the actions are harmful to well-being of the collective “we,” they do appeal to the selfishness and ambition of “me.”

Most of the examples given are rags to riches to retribution stores (Holmes was an exception with her upper-middle-class background). The sky-high ambitions of Kalanick Holmes and Sorokin were all eventually brought back down to earth. Sorokin and Holmes both ended up in prison, and Kalanick was ousted from the company he founded.

But with the subtlest of twists, they didn’t have to end this way. They could have been the story of almost any corporate America hustler who triumphed. With a little more substance and a little less scam, you could swap Elizabeth Holmes for Steve Jobs. They even dressed the same.

Obviously, scamming seems to sell. These people fascinate us. Part of the appeal is no doubt due a class conflict narrative: the scrappy hustler climbing the social ranks by whatever means possible. We love to watch “one of us” pull the wool over the eyes of the social elite.

In the case of Anna Sorokin, Laura Craik dissects our fascination in a piece published in the UK’s Evening Standard:

“The reason people are so obsessed with Sorokin is simple: she had the balls to pull off on a grand scale what so many people try and fail to pull off on a small one. To use a phrase popular on social media, Sorokin succeeded in living her best life — right down to the clothes she wore in court, chosen by a stylist. Like Jay Gatsby, she was a deeply flawed embodiment of The American Dream: a person from humble beginnings who rose to achieve wealth and social status. Only her wealth was borrowed and her social status was conferred via a chimera of untruths.”

Laura Craik – UK Evening Standard

This type of behavior is nothing new. It’s always been a part of us. In 1513, a Florentine bureaucrat named Niccolo Machiavelli gave it a name — actually, his name. In writing “The Prince,” he condoned bad behavior as long as the end goal was to elevate oneself. In a Machiavellian world, it’s always open season on suckers: “One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”

For the past five centuries, Machiavellianism was always synonymous with evil. It was a recognized character flaw, described as “a personality trait that denotes cunningness, the ability to be manipulative, and a drive to use whatever means necessary to gain power. Machiavellianism is one of the traits that forms the Dark Triad, along with narcissism and psychopathy.”

Now, however, that stigma seems to be disappearing. In a culture obsessed with success, Machiavellianism becomes a justifiable means to an end, so much so that we’ve given this culture its own hashtag: #scamculture: “A scam culture is one in which scamming has not only lost its stigma but is also valorized. We rebrand scamming as ‘hustle,’ or the willingness to commodify all social ties, and this is because the ‘legitimate’ economy and the political system simply do not work for millions of Americans.”

It’s a culture that’s very much at home in Silicon Valley. The tech world is steeped in Machiavellianism. Its tenets are accepted — even encouraged — business practices in the Valley. “Fake it til you make it” is tech’s modus operandi. The example of Niccolo Machiavelli has gone from being a cautionary tale to a how-to manual.

But these predatory practices come at a price. Doing business this way destroys trust. And trust is still, by far, the best strategy for our mutual benefit. In behavioral economics, there’s something called “tit for tat,” which according to Wikipedia “posits that a person is more successful if they cooperate with another person. Implementing a tit-for-tat strategy occurs when one agent cooperates with another agent in the very first interaction and then mimics their subsequent moves. This strategy is based on the concepts of retaliation and altruism.”

In countless game theory simulations, tit for tat has proven to be the most successful strategy for long-term success. It assumes a default position of trust, only moving to retaliation if required.

Our society needs trust to function properly. In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Why We Need to Address Scam Culture,” Tressie McMillan Cottom writes,  

“Scams weaken our trust in social institutions, but their going mainstream — divorced from empathy for the victims or stigma for the perpetrators — means that we have accepted scams as institutions themselves.”

Tressie McMillan Cottom – NY Times

The reason that trust is more effective than scamming is that predatory practices are self-limiting. You can only be a predator if you have enough prey. In a purely Machiavellian world, trust disappears — and there are no easy marks to prey upon.

I am Generation Jones

I was born in 1961. I always thought that technically made me a baby boomer. But I recently discovered that I am, in fact, part of Generation Jones.

If you haven’t heard of that term (as I had not, until I read a post on it a few weeks ago) Generation Jones refers to people born from 1955 to 1964 — a cusp generation squeezed between the massive boomer block and Gen X.

That squares with me. I always somehow knew I wasn’t really a boomer, but I also knew I wasn’t Gen X. And now I know why. I, along with Barack Obama and Wayne Gretzky, was squarely in the middle of Generation Jones.

I always felt the long shadow of World War II defined baby boomers, but it didn’t define me. My childhood felt like eons removed from the war. Most of the more-traumatic wounds had healed by the time I was riding my trike through the relatively quiet suburban streets of Calgary, Alberta.

I didn’t appreciate the OK Boomer memes, not because I was the butt of them, but more because I didn’t really feel they applied to me. They didn’t hit me where I live. It was like I was winged by a shot meant for someone else.

OK Boomer digs didn’t really apply to my friends and contemporaries either, all of whom are also part of Generation Jones. For the most part, we’re trying to do our best dealing with climate change, racial inequality, more fluid gender identification and political polarization. We get it. Is there entitlement? Yeah, more than a little. But we’re trying.

And I also wasn’t part of Gen X. I wasn’t a latchkey kid. My parents didn’t obsess over the almighty dollar, so I didn’t feel a need to push back against it. My friends and I worked a zillion hours, because we were — admittedly — still materialistic. But it was a different kind of materialism, one edged with more than a little anxiety.

I hit the workforce in the early ‘80s, right in the middle of a worldwide recession. Generation Jones certainly wanted to get ahead, but we also wanted to keep our jobs, because if we lost them, there was no guarantee we’d find another.

When boomers were entering the workforce, through the 1970s, Canada’s unemployment rate hovered in the 6% to 8% range (U.S. numbers varied but roughly followed the same pattern). In 1982, the year I tried to start my career, it suddenly shot up to 13%. Through the ‘80s, as Gen X started to get their first jobs, it declined again to the 8% range. Generation Jones started looking for work just when a job was historically the hardest to find.

It wasn’t just the jobless rate. Interest rates also skyrocketed to historic levels in the early ‘80s. Again, using data from the Bank of Canada, their benchmark rate peaked at an astronomical 20.78% the same month I turned 20, in 1981. Not only couldn’t we find a job, we couldn’t have afforded credit even if we could get a job.

So yes, we were trying to keep up with the Joneses — this is where the name for our generation comes from, coined by social commentator Jonathon Pontell — but it wasn’t all about getting ahead. A lot of it was just trying to keep our heads above water.

We were a generation moving into adulthood at the beginning of HIV/Aids, Reaganomics, globalization and the mass deindustrialization of North American. All the social revolutions of the ‘60s and ‘70s had crystallized to the point where they now had real-world consequences. We were figuring out a world that seemed to be pivoting sharply.

As I said, I always felt that I was somewhat accidentally lodged between baby boomer and Gen X, wading my way through the transition.

Part of that transition involved the explosion of technology that became much more personal at the beginning of the 1980s.  To paraphrase Shakespeare in “Twelfth Night”: Some are born with technology, some achieve technology, and some have technology thrust upon them.

Generation Jones is in the last group.

True boomers could make the decision to ignore technology and drift through life just adopting what they absolutely had to. Gen X grew up with the rudiments of technology, making it more familiar territory for them. The leading edge of that generation started entering the workforce in the mid 80’s. Computers were becoming more common. The Motorala “brick” cellphone had debuted. Technology was becoming ubiquitous – unable to be ignored. 

But we were caught in between. We had to make a decision: Do we embrace technology, or do we fight against it? A lot of that decision depended on what we wanted to do for a living. Through the ‘80s, one by one, industries were being transformed by computers and digitalization.

Often, we of Generation Jones got into our first jobs working on the technology of yesterday — and very early in our careers, we were forced to adopt the technologies of tomorrow. Often, we of Generation Jones got into our first jobs working on the technology of yesterday and very early in our careers, we were forced to adopt the technologies of tomorrow.

I started as a radio copywriter in 1982, and my first ads were written on an IBM Selectric and produced by cutting and patching two-track audio tape together on reel-to-reel machine with razor blades and splicing tape. Just a few years later, I was writing on an Apple IIe, and ads were starting to be recorded digitally. That shift in technology happened just when our generation was beginning our careers.  Some of us went willingly, some of us went kicking and screaming.

This straddling two very different worlds seems to personify my generation. I think, with the hindsight of history, we will identify the early ‘80s as a period of significant transition in almost every aspect of our culture. Obviously, all generations had to navigate that transition, but for Generation Jones, that period just happened to coincide with what is typically the biggest transition for anyone in any generation: the passing from childhood to adulthood. It is during this time when we take the experiences of growing up and crystallize them into the foundations of who we will be for the rest of our lives.

For Generation Jones, those foundations had to be built on the fly, as the ground kept moving beneath our feet.

Making Time for Quadrant Two

Several years ago, I read Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” It had a lasting impact on me. Through my life, I have found myself relearning those lessons over and over again.

One of them was the four quadrants of time management. How we spend our time in these quadrants determines how effective we are.

 Imagine a box split into four quarters. On the upper left box, we’ll put a label: “Important and Urgent.” Next to it, in the upper right, we’ll put a label saying “Important But Not Urgent.” The label for the lower left is “Urgent but Not Important.” And the last quadrant — in the lower right — is labeled “Not Important nor Urgent.”

The upper left quadrant — “Important and Urgent” — is our firefighting quadrant. It’s the stuff that is critical and can’t be put off, the emergencies in our life.

We’ll skip over quadrant two — “Important But Not Urgent” — for a moment and come back to it.

In quadrant three — “Urgent But Not Important” — are the interruptions that other people brings to us. These are the times we should say, “That sounds like a you problem, not a me problem.”

Quadrant four is where we unwind and relax, occupying our minds with nothing at all in order to give our brains and body a chance to recharge. Bingeing Netflix, scrolling through Facebook or playing a game on our phones all fall into this quadrant.

And finally, let’s go back to quadrant two: “Important But Not Urgent.” This is the key quadrant. It’s here where long-term planning and strategy live. This is where we can see the big picture.

The secret of effective time management is finding ways to shift time spent from all the other quadrants into quadrant two. It’s managing and delegating emergencies from quadrant one, so we spend less time fire-fighting. It’s prioritizing our time above the emergencies of others, so we minimize interruptions in quadrant three. And it’s keeping just enough time in quadrant four to minimize stress and keep from being overwhelmed.

The lesson of the four quadrants came back to me when I was listening to an interview with Dr. Sandro Galea, epidemiologist and author of “The Contagion Next Time.” Dr. Galea was talking about how our health care system responded to the COVID pandemic. The entire system was suddenly forced into quadrant one. It was in crisis mode, trying desperately to keep from crashing. Galea reminded us that we were forced into this mode, despite there being hundreds of lengthy reports from previous pandemics — notably the SARS crisis–– containing thousands of suggestions that could have helped to partially mitigate the impact of COVID.

Few of those suggestions were ever implemented. Our health care system, Galea noted, tends to continually lurch back and forth within quadrant one, veering from crisis to crisis. When a crisis is over, rather than go to quadrant two and make the changes necessary to avoid similar catastrophes in the future, we put the inevitable reports on a shelf where they’re ignored until it is — once again — too late.

For me, that paralleled a theme I have talked about often in the past — how we tend to avoid grappling with complexity. Quadrant two stuff is, inevitably, complex in nature. The quadrant is jammed with what we call wicked problems. In a previous column, I described these as, “complex, dynamic problems that defy black-and-white solutions. These are questions that can’t be answered by yes or no — the answer always seems to be maybe.  There is no linear path to solve them. You just keep going in loops, hopefully getting closer to an answer but never quite arriving at one. Usually, the optimal solution to a wicked problem is ‘good enough — for now.’”

That’s quadrant two in a nutshell. Quadrant-one problems must be triaged into a sort of false clarity. You have to deal with the critical stuff first. The nuances and complexity are, by necessity, ignored. That all gets pushed to quadrant two, where we say we will deal with it “someday.”

Of course, someday never comes. We either stay in quadrant one, are hijacked into quadrant three, or collapse through sheer burn-out into quadrant four. The stuff that waits for us in quadrant two is just too daunting to even consider tackling.

This has direct implications for technology and every aspect of the online world. Our industry, because of its hyper-compressed timelines and the huge dollars at stake, seems firmly lodged in the urgency of quadrant one. Everything on our to-do list tends to be a fire we have to put out. And that’s true even if we only consider the things we intentionally plan for. When we factor in the unplanned emergencies, quadrant one is a time-sucking vortex that leaves nothing for any of the other quadrants.

But there is a seemingly infinite number of quadrant two things we should be thinking about. Take social media and privacy, for example. When an online platform has a massive data breach, that is a classic quadrant one catastrophe. It’s all hands on deck to deal with the crisis. But all the complex questions around what our privacy might look like in a data-inundated world falls into quadrant two. As such, they are things we don’t think much about. It’s important, but it’s not urgent.

Quadrant two thinking is systemic thinking, long-term and far-reaching. It allows us to build the foundations that helps to mitigate crisis and minimize unintended consequences.

In a world that seems to rush from fire to fire, it is this type of thinking that could save our asses.

The News Cycle, Our Attention Span and that Oscar Slap

If your social media feed is like mine, it was burning up this Monday with the slap heard around the world. Was Will Smith displaying toxic masculinity? Was “it was a joke” sufficient defence for Chris Rock’s staggering lack of ability to read the room? Was Smith’s acceptance speech legendary or just really, really lame?

More than a few people just sighed and chalked it up as another scandal up for the beleaguered awards show. This was one post I saw from a friend on Facebook, “People smiling and applauding as if an assault never happened is probably Hollywood in a nutshell.”

Whatever your opinion, the world was fascinated by what happened. The slap trended number one on Twitter through Sunday night and Monday morning. On CNN, the top trending stories on Monday morning were all about the “slap.” You would have thought that there was nothing happening in the world that was more important than one person slapping another. Not the world teetering on the edge of a potential world war. Not a global economy that can’t seem to get itself in gear. Not a worldwide pandemic that just won’t go away and has just pushed Shanghai – a city of 30 million – back into a total lock down.

And the spectre of an onrushing climactic disaster? Nary a peep in Monday’s news cycle.

We commonly acknowledge – when we do take the time to stop and think about it – that our news cycles have about the same attention span as a 4-year-old on Christmas morning. No matter what we have in our hands, there’s always something brighter and shinier waiting for us under the tree. We typically attribute this to the declining state of journalism. But we – the consumers of news – are the ones that continually ignore the stories that matter in favour of gossipy tidbits.

This is just the latest example of that. It is nothing more than human nature. But there is a troubling trend here that is being accelerated by the impact of social media. This is definitely something we should pay attention to.

The Confounding Nature of Complexity

Just last week, I talked about something psychologists call a locus of control. Essentially it is defined by the amount of control you feel you have over your life. In times of stress, unpredictability or upheaval, our own perceived span of control tends to narrow to the things we have confidence we can manage. Our ability to cope draws inward, essentially circling the wagons around the last vestiges of our capability to direct our own circumstances. 

I believe the same is true with our ability to focus attention. The more complex the world gets, the more we tend to focus on things that we can easily wrap our minds around. It has been shown repeatedly that anxiety impacts the ability of our brain to focus on things. A study from Finland’s Abo Akademi University showed that anxiety reduces the ability of the brain to focus on tasks. It eats away at our working memory, leaving us with a reduced capacity to integrate concepts and work things out. Complex, unpredictable situations natural raise our level of anxiety, leading us to retreat to things we don’t have to work too hard to understand.

The irony here is the more we are aware of complex and threatening news stories, the more we go right past them to things like the Smith-Rock story. It’s like catnip to a brain that’s trying to retreat from the real news because we can’t cope with it.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of journalism, it’s more a limitation of our own brains. On Monday morning, CNN offered plenty of coverage dealing with the new airstrikes in Ukraine, Biden’s inflammatory remarks about Putin, Trump’s attempts to block Congress from counting votes and the restriction of LGBTQ awareness in the classrooms of Florida. But none of those stories were trending. What was trending were three stories about Rock and Smith, one about the Oscar winners and another about a 1600-pound shark. That’s what we were collectively reading.

False Familiarity

It’s not just that the news is too complex for us to handle that made the Rock/Smith story so compelling. Our built-in social instincts also made it irresistible.

Evolution has equipped us with a highly attuned social antennae. Humans are herders and when you travel in a herd, your ability to survive is highly dependent on picking up signals from your fellow herders. We have highly evolved instincts to help us determine who we can trust and who we should protect ourselves from. We are quick to judge others, and even quicker to gossip about behavior that steps over those invisible boundaries we call social norms.

For generations, these instincts were essential when we had keep tabs on the people closest to us. But with the rise of celebrity culture in the last century, we now apply those same instincts to people we think we know. We pass judgement on the faces we see on TV and in social media. We have a voracious appetite for gossip about the super-rich and the super famous.

Those foibles may be ours and ours alone, but they not helped by the fact that certain celebrities – namely one Mr. Smith – feels compelled to share way too much about himself with the public at large. Witness his long and tear-laden acceptance speech. Even though I have only a passing interest in the comings and goings of Will and Jada, I know more about their sex lives than that of my closest friends. The social norm that restricts bedroom talk amongst our friends and family is not there with the celebrities we follow. We salivate over salacious details.

No Foul, No Harm?

That’s the one-two punch (sorry, I had to go there) that made the little Oscar ruckus such a hot news item. But what’s the harm? It’s just a momentary distraction for the never-ending shit-storm that defines our daily existence, right?

Not quite.

The more we continually take the path of least resistance in our pursuit of information, the harder it becomes for us to process the complex concepts that make up our reality. When that happens, we tend to attribute too much importance and meaning to these easily digestible nuggets of gossip. As we try to understand complex situations (which covers pretty much everything of importance in our world today) we start relying too much on cognitive short cuts like availability bias and representative bias. In the first case, we apply whatever information we have at hand to every situation and in the second we resort to substituting stereotypes and easy labels in place of trying to understand the reality of an individual or group.

Ironically, it’s exactly this tendency towards cognitive laziness that was skewered in one of Sunday night’s nominated features, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up.

Of course, it was ignored. As Will Smith said, sometimes, “art imitates life.”

Pursuing a Plastic Perfection

“Within every dystopia, there’s a little utopia”

— novelist Margaret Atwood

We’re a little obsessed with perfection. For myself, this has taken the form of a lifelong crush on Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews from the 1964 movie), who is “practically perfect in every way.”

We’ve been seeking perfection for some time now. The idea of creating Utopia, a place where everything is perfect, has been with us since the Garden of Eden. As humans have trodden down our timeline, we have been desperately seeking mythical Utopias, then religious ones, which then led to ideological ones.

Some time at the beginning of the last century, we started turning to technology and science for perfection. Then, in the middle of the 20th century, we abruptly swung the other way, veering towards Dystopia while fearing that technology would take us to the dark side, a la George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

Lately, other than futurist Ray Kurzweil and the starry-eyed engineers of Silicon Valley, I think it’s fair to say that most of us have accepted that technology is probably a mixed bag at best: some good and some bad. Hopefully, when the intended consequences are tallied with the unintended ones, we net out a little to the positive. But we can all agree that it’s a long way from perfection.

This quest for perfection is taking some bizarre twists. Ultimately, it comes down to what we feel we can control, focusing our lives on the thinnest of experiences: that handful of seconds that someone pays attention to our social media posts.

It’s a common psychological reaction: the more we feel that our fate is beyond our control, the more we obsess about those things we feel we can control. And on social media, if we can’t control our world, our country, our town or even our own lives, perhaps our locus of control becomes narrowed to the point where the only thing left is our own appearance.

This effect is exacerbated by our cultural obsession with physical attractiveness. Beauty may only be skin deep, but in our world, it seems to count for everything that matters. Especially on Snapchat and Instagram.

And where there’s a need, there is a technological way. Snapchat filters that offer digitally altered perfection have proliferated. One is Facetune 2,  a retouching app that takes your selfie and adjusts lighting, removes blemishes, whitens teeth and nudges you closer and closer to perfection.

In one blog post, the Facetune team, inspired by Paris Hilton, encourages you to start “sliving.” Not sure what the hell “sliving” is? Apparently, it’s a combination of “slaying it” and “living your best life.” It’s an updated version of “that’s hot” for a new audience.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt if you happen to look like Ms. Hilton or Kim Kardashian. The post assures us that it’s not all about appearance. Apparently, “owning it” and “being kind to yourself” are also among the steps to better “sliving.” But as you read down the post, it does ultimately come back to how you look, reinforced with this pearl of wisdom: “a true sliv’ is also going to look their absolute best when it counts”

And if that sounds about as deep as Saran Wrap, what do you expect when you turn to Paris Hilton for your philosophy of life? Plato she’s not.

Other social filter apps go even farther, essentially altering your picture until it’s no longer recognizable. Bulges are gone, to be replaced by chiseled torsos and optimally rounded butts. Cheeks are digitally sucked in and noses are planed to perfection. Eyes sparkle and teeth gleam. The end product? Sure, it looks amazing. It’s just not you anymore.

With all this pressure put on having a perfect appearance, it’s little wonder that it’s royally messing with our heads (what’s inside the head, not the outside). Hence the new disease of Snapchat Dysmorphia. I wish it were harder to believe in this syndrome — but it’s when people, many of them young girls, book a consultation with a plastic surgeon, wanting to look exactly like the result of their filtered Snapchat selfies.

According to one academic article, one in 50 Americans suffers from body dysmorphic disorder, where sufferers

“are preoccupied with at least one nonexistent or slight defect in physical appearance. This can lead them to think about the defect for at least one hour a day, therefore impacting their social, occupational, and other levels of functioning. The individual also should have repetitive and compulsive behaviors due to concerns arising from their appearances. This includes mirror checking and reassurance seeking among others.”

There’s nothing wrong with wanting perfection. As the old saying goes, it might be the enemy of good, but it can be a catalyst for better. We just have to go on knowing that perfection is never going to be attainable.

But social media is selling us a bogus bill of goods: The idea that perfect is possible and that everyone but us has figured it out.  

The Canary in the Casino

It may not seem like it if you’ve watched the news lately, but there are signs we’re balanced on the edge of a gigantic party. We’re all ready to treat ourselves with a little hedonistic indulging.

As I mentioned in a previous column (rerun last week), physician, epidemiologist and sociologist Nicholas Christakis predicted this behavior, but not for a few years yet. Christakis predicted a sort of global “letting loose” starting some time in 2024:

“What typically happens is people get less religious. They will relentlessly seek out social interactions in nightclubs and restaurants and sporting events and political rallies. There’ll be some sexual licentiousness. People will start spending their money after having saved it. They’ll be joie de vivre and a kind of risk-taking, a kind of efflorescence of the arts, I think.”

So, there is light at the end of the pandemic tunnel — but, according to a report just out from the American Gaming Association, some of us can’t wait a couple of years. First out of the gate were gamblers. Well before we started emerging from the pandemic, they were already rolling the dice and starting the party.

According to the report from the AGA, U.S. commercial gaming revenue hit a record $53 billion in 2021. That was more than 21% higher than the previous record, set in 2019, and a huge rebound of 77% from 2020 numbers, when COVID forced casinos to shut down for months at a time.

You might think online gaming accounts for the jump, but you’d be wrong. In-casino gambling underpins this huge spike, accounting for $45.6 billion of the $53 billion total. People were saying to hell with health mandates and streaming into casinos across the country, with most of the top markets seeing significant gains from pre-COVID 2019.

While some of us might not be ready to ditch the masks and belly up to the bar, I suspect these gamblers are an early indicator of things to come. Call them a canary in a coal mine, if you will.

Because I can’t resist interesting historical tidbits, I thought I’d share the story behind this saying about how canaries ended up in coal mines in the first place. Early in the last century, canaries were used as an early warning system for poison gas in England. John Scott Haldane, who was researching the effects of carbon monoxide on humans, suggested using canaries as a “sentinel species,” an animal more sensitive to the impact of poisonous gases. They were kept in cages throughout the mines — and if a canary died, the miners were warned to evacuate the mine.

But why canaries?

Canaries, like most birds, need tremendous amounts of oxygen to fly and to avoid altitude sickness. They actually take in oxygen twice on each breath, once while inhaling and again when exhaling. This, combined with their relatively small size, make them hyper-sensitive to the impact of a poisonous gas. Also, canaries were easy to come by in England and convenient to transport. So, they were recruited to help keep humans alive.

This makes them analogous to gamblers in the following way: Gamblers, by their nature, are built to be more willing to take some risk in search of a reward. You could say they are hyper-sensitive to the rush that comes from rewarding themselves. As such, they are the early adopters in the onrushing desire to put bad news behind them and let loose with a little hedonistic hell-raising. They are not atypical; they’re just ahead of the curve in this one respect.

Sooner or later, the rest of us will follow. Look for similar huge rebounds in the travel and hospitality sectors, entertainment, events and other industries focused on providing pleasure. The world will become one giant spring break party.

Which is perhaps only fitting, coming after a two-year-long winter of our discontent.