dilemmas of millennial parenting

A friend is visiting, to see his daughter who's moved to New York from a small town in New England. She's 27 and making her way in our crazy business and his visit is prompted by dismay that parental phone calls and emails go unanswered for days.

"Text her," I say. "The reponse rate is better."

He shakes his head. "My thumbs are too slow. Imagine if a new invention were announced today. A social networking tool that lets you connect instantly with someone far away. Faster and less awkward than using your thumbs. All you have to do is speak into it. You can hear a person's actual voice! The telephone," he says,"was invented a century too early."

home sweet homepage

I'm baaaaaaaack to the blogosphere after weeks of gadding about China, but as you know if you were kind enough to keep up with me in abstentia, I didn't disconnect altogether but remained helplessly tethered to email and twitter and facebook and tumblr.

The New York Times did an article recently about five scientists who took to the wilderness to escape the relentless bombardment of digital stimulation; in other words, to think. “There’s a real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you,” observed one.

I thought China might provide that same opportunity; I'd heard twitter, blogs, gmail, facebook were firewalled. But vaulting the wall turned out to be as easy as logging into WiTopia. And once over the wall, I found myself powerless to resist partaking in virtual pleasures.

Ironically, the daughter I was travelling with is digital-averse⎯suitably agile on email and facebook, but she dislikes having to use them, preferring to communicate face to face or via printed-on-actual-dimensional paper. Which made for recurrence of an improbable late-night scenario: baby boomer hunched over a desktop, tap-tap-tapping on keyboard while millennial, engrossed in pages of hand-held literary tome, looks up now and then, asking when she'll desist.

Need a proofreader? Hire a monkey.

A recent study shows monkeys have the ability to recognize good grammar from bad. Is this a newly acquired trait? If so, I imagine our species to be on oddly inverse paths: one ascending into heady discussions of literature and philosophy as the other descends into random, disorganized thought engendered by monosyllables and acronyms required of communicating in 140 characters. Hv a gd day!

and for those who still can't find time to twitter

Now there's Flutter. Limited to 26 characters. Imports Twitter and FB posts, editing them to fit. "Sucking last of latte before facing client in meeting" becomes "Sucking client in meeting." Full GPS capabilites auto-announces wherever you are. As in helpfully informative: "In the bathroom."

Of course, it's a (really well done & worth watching) spoof. But it does bring up a serious question being bantered about among many social media-minded. What's the next big thing? Is there life after twitter?


via Huffington Post via new! improved! Slate

if i don't answer your email, maybe its your fault

More and more people are becoming email-immune. That is, opting out of email in favor of IMs, Facebook, Twitter and texts. (Don't you long for the days when checking your mail meant clicking a single inbox?) But for many people, email still remains the primary form of electronic communication. And (as you may have noticed) they can get indignant when their emails aren't answered promptly, or (as is becoming a frequent complaint) even at all.

For them, this post:

1. Don't write long emails. What's a long email? Anything over two paragraphs. Last century, when email was new, it replaced hand-held letters which were typically long and newsy in order for the sender to get his moneys worth out of the stamp. When correspondence went electronic, it took a while for many of the conventions of letter-writing to fall away. ( I still recall getting emails with proper salutations.)

Many people who made the switch late in life still tend to email Dostoevsky-length prose. Which is fine. Often scintillating. But not conducive to eliciting a quick response. Because if you write someone a long, heartfelt message, they'll feel that it's rude to respond to you with a just few dashed-off lines--which, unfortunately, is all they really have time for. They'll push your message to a file folder to "think about" while they attend to more pressing matters, which is all other matters, including rebuilding their photo cache.

If you have something important to discuss with someone, make a call. If you have something important to discuss with lots of people, do a blog. (Do not give in to temptation to write a long, ponderous email you'll cc to the world: see below.)

2. Don't cc someone on a message if you expect a response. Sorry to say, most people on your cc list won't even read it. These days, most people apply a triage approach to opening messages, in order to have time to do things besides read email. They figure if you have something to say to them, you'll put their name in the "To" line. Ironically, for this reason Cc's that are Forwarded to a single recipient stand a better chance of being read and responded to.

3. Don't cram more than one subject into a request email. Remember, your message is one of hundreds in an inbox, and likely to be read on a PDA in motion. It will be skimmed, not parsed. An email inquiring about, say, the best public schools in someone's hometown shouldn't also ask her for that empanada recipe.

4. No forwarded jokes. No exceptions. OK,  if you think something is really, really funny, that is honestly worth someone else's time, take a minute of your own time to think up a new subject heading and delete the 879,988 other email addresses in the message body.

You're not guilty of any of the above, and I still owe you mail?--please resend. My spamblocker is ruthless.