It’s official. My family has become the latest victim of “green noise,” that cacophony of conflicting environmental messages and concerns lobbed at consumers by marketers, environmental groups, and well-intentioned do-gooders. It’s simply become impossible to decide which eco-friendly choice is the best.

Here’s how it goes for me. I walk into a grocery store with a vague idea of what I need to get. I head to the produce section and meet with my first roadblock: which organics should I buy? The ol’ grocery budget forces me to pick and choose. The organic bananas seem like a steal at 89 cents a pound--but I’ve read that the less expensive conventionally grown bananas have only minimal levels of pesticide residues, and if I’m worried about the environment, don’t I need to consider that the bananas have racked up a considerable carbon footprint after being transported from South America? Hmm…peaches? The peaches are almost in season and at least were grown in the continental US. Easy decision ‘til – good Lord! Who can afford organic peaches?!

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Next time someone repeats that old adage "money can't buy you happiness," tell them you're not so sure. As long as you know where to spend it, it just might do some good.

That's what Harvard marketing professor Michael I. Norton and his colleagues found in their happiness research, concluding that "how people choose to spend their money is at least as important as how much money they make."

The article ("Spending on Happiness") in HBS Working Knowledge reports that "money can buy happiness, when people spend that money prosocially on others (giving gifts to friends, donating to charities) rather than on themselves (buying flat-screen televisions)."

Interesting results, which dovetail with our findings in studying youth happiness for  MTV Research -- we concluded that money is increasingly seen by Millennials as a means rather than an end. See the full report in pdf and our webpage about the study.

The case of the “MySpace suicide" has finally found its way to the courts. (Quick recap: Neighbor-mother creates fake Myspace account to spy-on/harass neighbor girl who was once friends with her daughter. After tricking the 13 year-old neighbor into thinking she was in an online relationship with a boy, the neighbor lady ended the “romance” with series of hurtful emails, after which the 13 year-old killed herself.)

This case could be interesting for all sorts of precedents it might set. For example: where is cyberspace? According to the legal filings, it is physically co-located with the Internet server farms that support it. That raises other questions: if the perpetrators were in Missouri, but the alleged crime occurs and the charges are filed in California, where the server farm is located, how is the case affected? Does California have stricter or laxer laws regarding the charges? Stricter/laxer sentencing guidelines? Could the defendant appeal based on the fact she committed no crime in California?

As more daily interactions and transactions occur online and in virtual worlds, more questions about what is legal and what is not are being raised. How do you apply laws and bring justice to what we call World 0? And are crimes that take place only in virtual spaces still crimes? For instance, is creating online images depicting child-like avatars in sexual situations child pornography? No child is involved, but some governments say yes.

The charges brought in this case reflect the difficulty in applying real-world laws online: the defendant is charged with technicalities (conspiracy, unlawfully gaining access to a computer) in her misuse of MySpace in representing herself as someone else. And, as some have mentioned, the defendant herself seems guilty or nothing more than childish behavior, poor judgment, and cruelty. But looking at the issues this case raises, it could be an important step in developing online legal codes. I myself think some old-time justice is merited -- perhaps some time in the stockade or a public flogging?

Image: Bloomsberries (Flickr) 

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Italy’s love for life? Apparently, it's gone. Italians are now the least happy people in Western Europe.

Italians are older, poorer, and more in debt, contributing to their unhappiness. Italians' average age is 42, and they’re not having kids (there is a 0% growth rate). This year, Italy dropped three places to 20^th on the Human Development Index. The unemployment rate (7%) is high for a World 1 country. Italians have 106% public debt in proportion to their GDP (the sixth highest in the world). Even Italian staples aren’t selling well: sales of pasta and bread were down in 2007.

The Italian economy has relied on small, family-owned businesses that use cheap labor and produce high-quality products. But with competition from countries like China, these firms aren’t prospering in a globalized economy.

The nation seems angst-ridden and unsure how or whether to change. One Italian has devoted his entire blog to his country’s demise. At one level, it seems like Italy is just in a funk, but will it be able to get out? And, more importantly, is this what is going to happen to all aging World 1 countries? Or is Italy an outlier, while most of World 1 will adapt to new global realities?

Image: José Goulão (Flickr)

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Seven years ago, discussing about the towering cityscapes of the movie Blade Runner, I wrote:

It is not clear what the future of the mega-skyscraper is, in reality. Americans and Europeans may be mostly done with it, and more interested in creating urban landscapes people actually want to live in and around. But there is still a desire to build landmarks and symbolize progress and power in the developing world – witness Malaysia's Petronas towers, the world's tallest buildings. It is there that more extravagances will go up, sometimes amidst squalor.

So I was interested to read this passage in the New York Times last week, about the Japanese architect about to complete another of the world's tallest buildings, in Shanghai:

At a time when urban planners in the West frown on hulking high-rises as forbidding, Mr. Mori presents a new Asian urban sensibility, where architecture reflects soaring economic ambition, leading to mighty projects that dwarf the individual. “Asia is different from the United States and Europe,” Mr. Mori said in an interview in his Roppongi Hills office. “We dream of more vertical cities."

And this belief in the techno-future extends beyond architecture: I happened on an article about flying cars yesterday, and it noted that "interest, and investors, mostly comes from outside the United States -- namely Dubai, a wealthy Middle Eastern country known for its modern skyline."

This is a profound cultural shift -- and it will shape responses to myriad issues in the future, from biotechnology to global warming.

Image courtesy Montrasio International (Flickr)

This will be an interesting case to watch: the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF), which serves as the governing body for the Olympic Games, has ruled Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee South African sprinter who uses prosthetic legs to compete against able-bodied sprinters, ineligible for future IAAF contests.

The ruling, which Pistorius is appealing, would disqualify the sprinter from 2008 Olympic trials, though not from the Paralympic Games. A study commissioned by the IAAF found that Pistorius, who finished second in the 2007 South African 400 meter championships, has an unfair advantage because his prostheses allow him to use 25% less energy than able-bodied runners at comparable speeds. Check out this YouTube video to see him in action. 

Pistorius' case sits at a nexus of values and technology. Apart from the initial shock to the casual reader that a double amputee is competing at world-class levels in a sport centered on the limbs he lacks, there is the matter of how society relates to people like Pistorius when technology advances to such a degree that the previously inconceivable becomes mundane reality.

Will technology pull social development and values into new territory? Do we create, as the IAAF seems to be suggesting, a segrated system in sports, so that the able-bodied and those with prosthetics or other enhancements never compete against one another? Or do we just throw them all together and see what happens? I tend to be a come-what-may guy, but governing bodies like the IAAF are cautious and conservative. Of course, one way or another, athletes will find a way to compete to test their own limits, so any segregated system is likely to be short-lived.

Should more cases like Pistorius' arise as technology becomes more sophisticated, there will surely be either a groundswell of support to change the IAAF rules, or the advent of some kind of Überlympics where elite Olympic athletes compete against elite Paralympic athletes.

Image: soldiersmediacenter (Flickr) 

The Washington Post recently ran an interesting story about the last operational telephone booth in the greater DC region. The story detailed the reasons behind the decline of the phone booth in our society, which can be neatly summed up as: the rise of the inexpensive mobile phone.

What interested me about this were the shifting cultural norms implicit in the end of the phone booth. We’ve written a lot about the Internet and its role in the erosion of both privacy and the expectation of privacy. But the rise of the mobile phone actually may be another prime mover. Looking at a picture of the phone booth, I am struck by one thing: telephone conversations were once considered private. Callers wanted to discuss their business free from eavesdroppers, and everyone else wanted to avoid the inanity we are now inundated with daily due to mobile phones. (Is there any worse sentence in the English language than, “Hello, we’ve just landed”?)

For all the talk of the Internet eroding privacy, we are more complicit than we like to believe: by embracing convenience and mobility (“Mom, you used to talk on the phone standing still?”) our mobile phone society has set privacy aside. Plus, we’ve made things more difficult for Superman.

Image: Lee McCain (Flickr)

Though the super-macho deer hunter seems like an unlikely ally for the proponents of organic, community-supported agriculture, this op-ed from the New York Times argues that hunters could do themselves a favor by aligning their interests closely with that of the local food movement:

In New York State alone, roughly half a million hunters harvest around 190,000 deer in the fall deer hunting season — that’s close to eight million pounds of venison. In the traditional vernacular, we’d call that “game meat.” But, in keeping with the times, it might be better to relabel it as free-range, grass-fed, organic, locally produced, locally harvested, sustainable, native, low-stress, low-impact, humanely slaughtered meat.

It will be interesting to see what other kinds of groups that don't readily seem to fit the tradtional notion of environmentalist start to realign their "branding" as green goes mainstream.

Image: Odalaigh (Flickr)

Want to know what product transparency will look like in the future? Check out Patagonia’s website, The Footprint Chronicles. On the site you can learn about the journey of five products and discover the transport, CO2, waste, and energy impacts of each item.

Image: Screenshot of www.patagonia.com/usa/footprint/index.jsp  So…say I’m thinking of buying my brother-in-law a Wool 2 Crew shirt this Christmas. Well, thanks to Patagonia I can integrate some pretty amazing info into my decision process, such as the fact that each shirt:

• travels 16,280 miles from the sheep in New Zealand until the finished product hits the distribution center in Reno, NV
• creates about 47 pounds of CO2 emissions due to manufacturing and transportation
• generates 9 oz. of waste as the fiber is created and the shirt is sewn, which is “2 oz. more than weight of the final garment”
• requires 89 megajoules of energy to create the shirt, “equivalent to powering the average American household for 20 hours”

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Image: Social TechnologiesOver the weekend I had my first positive experience with an automated self-checkout at a grocery store. No starting over, no need for the self-checkout's human helper to pay a visit; the machine accepted cash and distributed change as it should. Perfect. So the use of automation for customer service was something I’d been mulling when I read this story about the proliferation of bank branches in Washington, DC. Apparently, the driver for this is customer service:

In the 1990s, a period of mergers in the financial industry, many banks promoted online services and closed branches. But industry studies showed that customers wanted personal contact when managing their money, and banks began opening more branches in a surge fueled by new players such as Commerce, which models itself as a retail store.

This was surprising for a number of reasons: bank are not known for their service, which tended toward long lines and bored tellers; ATMs have had the ability to perform most banking services since the mid-1980s; and the rise of the Internet has been transformative for the banking and finance industry, allowing customers to go beyond the convenience of ATMs to conduct almost any transaction from the convenience of their desks. Except for opening an account, closing an account, or securing a loan, there is almost no need to go into a bank (and even these services are increasingly offered online).

Many industries would love to harness the cost, convenience, and time savings that the Internet enables, but due to the vagaries of their business sector they cannot. Finance and banking have been able to exploit these savings, only to be undone by user-fueled nostalgia for customer service that, frankly, has never been that great. But the idea of the banker as a pillar of the community and someone one should know, even if he or she behaves like Mr. Potter, is apparently ingrained in the American consumer psyche, along with the “family farm.”

This raises a number of questions for retailers in the digital age: what does this mean for retail in the future? Are there other businesses that will be unable to reduce costs and increase convenience via the Internet because consumer tradition dictates face-to-face contact? To what extent does human contact trump convenience and why? And conversely, where do retailers draw the line between offering human contact and seizing the advantages the Internet provides?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to transfer funds into my checking account. Done!

By Andy Hines, Director of Custom Projects

Part 5 of a 5-part series on The Future of Happiness

Our study on the Future of Happiness found that 12-to-24 year olds are pursuing four principal pathways to happiness. The final path can be called “Virtual Community” — they are integrating the online and virtual worlds seamlessly into their pursuit of happiness.

It is useful to think of youths' relationship with technology as a native language: unlike most Americans, they have grown up with it. For older folks like me, technology is typically a second language. It can be learned, but the relationship is never as quite as comfortable. In fact, when we suggest to some of our clients that youth are total comfortable being immersed with technology, they almost feel bad for them. “Poor kids, all alone one with their technology,” they muse. Au contraire! Participating in social networking and virtual worlds is quite natural for these youth, and a great source of happiness.

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By Andy Hines, Director of Custom Projects

Part 4 of a 5-part series on The Future of Happiness

According to our research, 12-to-24-year-olds are pursuing four principal pathways to happiness. The first two paths included "Transitional Traditional," and "All About Me."

The third path is “ MyLife, MyTime, MyWay," for we will see this group take control of their pursuit of happiness. They are not expecting society or anyone or anything else to provide happiness for them. This notion of taking control of happiness differs from previous generations, where happiness was more seen as a birthright. For these youth, it’s not taken for granted, but is something that needs to be planned for and worked towards.

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By Andy Hines, Director of Custom Projects

Part 3 of a 5-part series on The Future of Happiness

According to our research, 12-to-24-year-olds are pursuing four principal pathways to happiness. The second of these is “All About Me,” or a focus on personal development and a “what’s in it for me” perspective on the world.

Whereas the youth on the "Transitional Traditional" pathway rely on family, friends, and faith for support, these youth rely on themselves. Dreams of beauty, fame, and fortune are central to those on this pathway, but here we also we see their practical nature kicking in. They realize that not everyone can be rich and famous, and therefore they have developed a “Plan B.” Do they want to appear on MTV’s “Real World?” Absolutely. But are they going to jump off a bridge if they don’t? Absolutely not.

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Part 2 of a 5-part series on The Future of Happiness

According to our research 12-24-year-olds are pursuing four principal pathways to happiness. The first is what we call “transitional traditional.”

In fact, this group appreciates tradition, in the sense that they value the cultural structures they are growing up with. They like the familiarity of cultural activities and rituals, such as Thanksgiving and family reunions, but they aren’t necessarily attached to the specifics of how these traditions are carried out.

So in the future we’ll see them celebrating Thanksgiving – but instead of wearing a new sport coat and serving a 15-poiund turkey, they’ll be donning Birkenstocks and eating the latest vegan tofu recipe. Instead of watching the Dallas Cowboys on a network TV station, the group might gather around and participate in a multiplayer online game.

At first glance, this pathway may look like old news. But on further investigation, we foresee that the reinterpretation of traditional will lead to different approaches to the pursuit of happiness.

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Part 1 in a 5-part series on The Future of Happiness

By Andy Hines, Director of Custom Projects

What do today’s 12 to 24 year olds consider to be happiness? That was a question MTV hired us to look at earlier this year, and the findings were intriguing.

We discovered that, like most people, this group pursues happiness with a combination of three strategies: the pleasure of the moment, relationships with family and friends, and the long-term search for meaning and purpose.

After probing more deeply, though, we found that more than any generation that has come before them, today’s youths recognize that happiness is something that can and should worked toward. In short, we found they have adopted a very practical approach to happiness.

They see an uncertain and rapidly changing world and recognize they can’t do it alone, and thus are highly reliant on friends, and perhaps more than is recognized, on family—and perhaps a bit more surprisingly—on spirituality or faith. Thus, the tools youth use to pursue happiness could be summed up as friends, family, and faith.

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