As some of you know I’m a big-time music fan. I produce a monthly concert series and spend a fair amount of money each year on music, albeit now it’s mostly digital downloads (I’m not a country music fan at all, but two of my favorite albums this year tread a fine line between the country and alt country/Americana genres, Kasey Musgraves’ Same Trailer Different Park and Caitlin Rose’s The Stand-In. Give them a listen.). Anyway, I’m a faithful reader of The Lefsetz Letter, a music industry blog. A recent post, “Facebook is for Old People” got me thinking about the e-mail I received a couple a weeks ago about how most of the people on TWII’s Top 40 Most Influential list are older. After reading this blog post, I’m wondering how out of touch many of us on the north-side of 50 really are. Here’s a sampling from the “Facebook is for Old People” blog post, which has nothing to do with music but everything to do with business, technology, and communication. Yes they’re all related.
Oldsters are about yesterday.
Youngsters are about today.
Documenting your entire life history, building a timeline, a shrine to yourself, so that the people you grew up with will be impressed? That’s for baby boomers. Their children want nothing to do with it. Kids are for living, oldsters are for dying.
Baby boomers didn’t start the texting revolution… Want to communicate with your millennial in college? Then you’d better learn how to text, the younger generation barely e-mails. Talking on the phone? Who’d want to waste so much time! The oldsters are rarely early adopters. They know the value of money, they’re set in their ways. For all the old bloviators bemoaning the loss of privacy online, it’s the kids who got the memo, that if they post pictures of illicit activity they might not get a job in the future. Kids believe in evanescence, oldsters believe in the permanent record. Ergo, the growth of Snapchat.
Kind of like the Facebook phone. The business media did not stop trumpeting its arrival. But the truth is a kid has no problem employing Facebook on his phone, assuming he wants to use it, it’s only oldsters who have this problem, oldsters who are not about to switch providers who are still lamenting the loss of physical keyboards. Want to know how someone’s technologically toast? If they still use a BlackBerry. You’re wiping out utilization, because it’s all about apps. E-mailing and texting back and forth is for business people who miss the future, as they plot where to have lunch.
Here’s another interesting comment:
We live in a fluid society. If your result comes up on the second page of Google, it might as well not exist…hell, if it’s not one of the first two or three hits, if not the very first. Bury that information on Facebook, soon no one will see it.
Makes you think and maybe feel old and out of touch?
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