Recently in Values & Attitudes Category

We had a little fun recently with a news release from the World Values Survey, which ranks Denmark as the world's happiest nation. Some of us questioned, based on our own observations of Danes, whether they seemed all that happy--"reserved" and "cool" were a few of the adjectives that came up in the discussion. But the findings were self-reported, so perhaps the Danish need some coaching about happiness?

Not at all! In our study of The Future of Youth Happiness for MTV last year, we adopted a happiness model that is fairly well accepted in the research literature and makes intuitive sense to us. The components of the happiness model are: 

1. one's natural or genetic endowments,
2. the pleasure of the moment,
3. relationships with family and friends, and
4. the longer-term search for meaning.

The importance of the components vary according to the individual. As we learned in our study, for some it's mostly about "pleasure of the moment," while for others it may be that their key drivers of happiness are mostly relationships or the search for meaning (typically religion or some form of spirituality).

I suspect that the Danish, based on their fairly strong adoption of postmodern values, are more strongly focused on "search for meaning." This is a bit more serious approach than the more hedonistic pursuit of the "pleasure of the moment," so it might appear to observers that they are having less fun and thus less happy. But really, its how we define happiness. And as more and more people and nations focus on the search for happiness, we are well advised to keep the happiness model in mind and remember that happiness is more than just having fun. Seriously!

Image: (c) 2008 JupiterImages Corp.

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.

We're in the final stages of prepping for our June Futures Consortium event this Thursday, where we'll explore the future of transparency and it's impacts on consumers and organizations. We've got a great event planned and will look at a range of topics including:

• personal medical transparency (one of our team will report out on what kinds of info a $1,000 genetic test actually yielded about him)
• the hype and reality of consumer data collection services
• the future of transparency technologies

We'll also present some consumer personas, developed to express different viewpoints on transparency, and explore the future of transparency via scenario archetypes. We'll have more on this after the event, but all of these workstreams have us tracking transparency closely and have yielded some interesting scanning hits.

One I found particularly interesting was this mention of a transparent newsroom on the the Guardian's greenslade blog. The Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review webcasts its editorial conferences publicly, invites local bloggers to critique its work, and has a journalism professor review its reporting. The paper's editor reports it has "improved the newspaper's credibility and made it more relevant to readers' lives."

Could this be the future of all news organizations? If this move towards transparency is improving the experience for readers, it's definitely worth considering, given the deep uncertainty about the future of newspapers (as in this post from Jeff Bercovici's Mixed Media blog). 

Image: James Abbott (www.sxc.hu)

Apparently, some old gas pumps are confused: they were never designed to have gas priced over $3.99/gallon. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, the manufacturers could never imagine that prices could go beyond $3.99, so they didn't bother to make the gas gauge go higher.

Oops.

This little anecdote reminded us at S)T how people limit their concept of the future: clearly, back in the 50s it was unimaginable that gas prices would ever be higher than $3.99/gallon.

The bottom line? The improbable can and does happen. That's why we futurists set out to consider all possibilities, and urge our clients to think about the consequences of even the improbable.

Image: Jonny Hunter (Flickr)

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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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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)

 "Facebook's new privacy controls will add an extra incentive for the many users who are now using ... LinkedIn for business contacts, Facebook for friends and school contacts, MySpace for everything else, to invest most of their time in one social networking site where they can fine-tune who sees what information," Social Technologies' analyst Kyle Spector said in an E-Commerce Times/ TechNewsWorld article by Erika Morphy on March 19.

If marketed correctly, he added, these controls could become a competitive advantage for Facebook.

"This move could certainly force other social networks to follow suit and make it potentially difficult for niche networks to compete with Facebook," he said.

Read the entire article.

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)

A few weeks ago, I spoke to a reporter from 1to1 Media's Inside Privacy about the future of privacy. One of the points I stressed is that the proliferation of private and public-sector surveillance (mall security cameras, subway and highway cameras, as well as archiving of email and Internet searches) is inuring people to the introduction of new security or tracking measures that intrude even further on the traditional privacy space (domestic wiretapping, for instance).

There are increasingly fewer times and spaces where you won't be subject to surveillance, but the news isn't all bad. While surveillance can be abused by people in positions of authority, the increased transparency that comes as a result of such a system can also work against those who would abuse it.

With this in mind, I recently came across a trailer for the movie "Look," a fictional feature film told through the eyes of security cameras. From the film's website:

The Post 9/11 world has forever changed the notion of privacy. There are now approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States generating more than 4 billion hours of footage every week. And the numbers are growing. The average American is now captured over 200 times a day, in department stores, gas stations, changing rooms, even public bathrooms. No one is spared from the relentless, unblinking eye of the cameras that are hidden in every nook and cranny of day-to-day life."

Check out the trailer:

Image: FacebookSocial Technologies futurist Simeon Spearman was recently featured in an E-Commerce Times article, Privacy Flap Bedevils Facebook, by reporter Erika Morphy.

Spearman said the current controversy over Facebook's Beacon ad program resulted from "the creepiness factor."

Morphy wrote:

Facebook's Beacon was a service that provided no value to users and strictly catered to advertisers, [Spearman] told TechNewsWorld. "The service did not allow users to opt out as easily as it should have, and the creepiness factor of the service quickly emerged after its launch. Users would log in and see that their activities on sites outside of Facebook were being broadcast to their friends."

Despite the willingness of many social network users to display private information for everyone to see, they want to remain in control of that information--and they still value privacy in their online activities, the protests show.

Furthermore, other social networking sites are likely to take note as they and the larger industry continue to edge toward what is basically a paradigm shift in Web advertising .

"The failure of Facebook's service could make other social networking sites more cautious when using user data to devise new revenue strategies," Spearman said. "Facebook is currently valued at (US)$15 billion, but it could lose value as advertisers come to believe that the opportunities for hypertargeted ads are restricted by demands for greater privacy and responsibility in using information made available by users of these sites."

Social Technologies' Director of Consulting, Andy Hines, appeared yesterday morning on The Early Show (CBS) to discuss our recent seven-month study for MTV Research, "The Future of Happiness."

The CBS News video is available here.

For more information on the study, check out our website or take a look at Andy's five-part blog post series on the subject.

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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