Welcome To Youth Lab

A recent study into how different age groups use the internet came out with an unsurprising conclusion; young people do not use traditional blogs as much as they use social networking sites. Only 14% of teens now say they blog, while some 73% are enthusiastic about social networking.

The percentage of teenage bloggers has dropped by half since 2006, clearly showing a significant shift in online youth behaviour in the last couple of years. Online tools are both being influenced by and influencing how young people consume media and interact with the world around them at large.

For numerous young people blogging is an activity that isn’t instant or quick enough both in production and reaction, especially for a generation where many have grown up with a pophacking mentality that disposes desire instantaneously. Comments and ‘like’ buttons from social networks and mobile phones relate much closer time-wise to this instantaneous desire. A plethora of opinions on a subject can be found and absorbed in seconds merely by searching through Twitter. The attention placed on the rise of Twitter examples how the rate of media consumption is increasing. Yet it is not only media consumption that is changing via social networks.

As we’ve already explored, Facebook and other online networks are now beginning to have significant offline impact. A shining recent example is the new startup that is to be launched after the Facebook group Secret London amassed 180,000 members. Support for important issues can be found readily through young people who use social networking, the proposed Robin Hood Tax, which is gathering support on both Facebook and Twitter is the latest example of this .

While an actualization of social networks has just started happening recently via offline support for online actions, the websites themselves have started to become more than networks purely within the online space. Facebook recently became the fourth largest distributor of news online, even rivaling Google News. Suggestions are beginning to emerge that Facebook may even become a ‘first go-to’ portal for many young people, John Palfrey recently suggested that they are now beginning to get their news through osmosis and “grazing” headlines their friends link to. Young people generally spend more time on social networking sites than they do Google and search engines, so it is no real surprise that shared content on Facebook surged fivefold in the last seven months. Yet the billion-dollar question still remains for Facebook, about whether it’s relatively simple and enjoyable (in comparison to MySpace) user experience can begin to pay similar money to the amount Google has been making for the last few years. Suggestions have varied from asking that question pessimistically, to thinking of it more positively as a centralizing internet force and to constructing a revenue stream that reflects it’s 400+ million users worldwide.

While there is no clear cut answer, hypothesizing about such things is useful to an extent, but Facebook’s users will essentially decide its future. If young people continue to pour on to it for its simple way to connect with friends, share content and for ‘photos and that’ then it will continue to prosper.

Young people want their interactions with such tools to be seamless and not seem like an effort, hence there are now 100 million Facebook mobile phone users. In this regard Facebook is attempting make itself more vital by expanding it’s guarded gate of social networking to web-based email and redesigning it’s aesthetic to centralize search, in what some see as a direct challenge to Gmail and Google. Google has itself fired a volley over to social media with Google Buzz, it’s a large step towards a Google social network.

Google Buzz blends Twitter (in its layout’s simplicity, follow structure and centralization of the status update) and Facebook (in it’s propensity to share links and photos as well as to comment and ‘like’ them) and is integrated into Gmail’s inbox giving the fledgling network an instant 150 million users. Google Buzz has already received criticism from newspapers, digital experts and bloggers alike. Yet whether it is actually used regularly is very dependent on how many of those become active users to the extent where the tool is weaved into their lives seamlessly. . It’s neigh on impossible to tell whether youth desire for instantaneous access is influenced these web innovations, or the tools are influencing youth behaviour, but with Google and Facebook expanding their (now-seemingly ready for war with each other) services to crossover point the relationship between online tools and youth behaviour will continue to merge, especially as these tools become more mobile.

The announcement of the iPad last week was the latest event to receive the Hitler Downfall parody treatment, Mein Fuhrer’s rage wasn’t an isolated incident though as Apple’s latest product caused a  flurry online. By Googling ‘iPad’ you’ll get a plethora of different YouTube videos, latest technology & traditional news as well as thousands of image and blog results. Interestingly one of the related searches is ‘iPad jokes’ – highlighting the mixed response to the details of the iPad. Despite the numerous jokes referring to the products name in connection to a sanitary towel, many have reacted fairly negatively to the features of the iPad.

One of the major gripes came from the fact that the operating system was identical to the iPhone. Although this means that some 140,000 iPhone apps can be used on the iPad, it doesn’t allow for using more than one application at the same time. This will surely be a major sticking point for many young people who naturally multitask on their laptops in behaviour such as writing a document and listening to music at the same time. However, having said this, it perhaps highlights a particular intention of the iPad, to fit into a multitasking lifestyle as opposed to a placing a multi-processing gadget into a multitasking lifestyle. As Charlie Brooker scathingly notes, the iPad is not quite a laptop and not quite a smart phone, but “a weird combination of portable and cumbersome: too small to replace your desktop, too big to fit in your pocket, unless you’re a clown.” Yet it’s easy to imagine young people using the iPad to casually read something while they’re engaging in other offline activities like watching TV or cooking.

The casual space that the iPad attempts to place itself in is typical of Apple products released in the latter half of the last decade. Yet the closed nature of the iPad heavily reflects Apple’s status as a company that portrays itself to foster much open innovation but, in many ways, is very much closed.

The above image highlights one of the major complaints about the iPad. Apple products, especially iTunes, iPods and iPhones, have used Digital Rights Management (DRM) to make it particularly hard to install non-approved applications and share music, video, books and games between users. One website has called for a petition for what it called “a computer than will never belong to its owner,” Apple incorporate a feature that allows them to remotely switch off applications and media in use by a user of the iPad. In some ways this is an extension of the veto system that exists for iPhone apps that are submitted and then rejected. Inevitably however, young people, who have grown up with a pophacking mentality in always being able to find the answers they crave through the internet or video game cheat codes, will almost certainly jailbreak their iPads as they have done with the iPhone. The iPad will ultimately sell because it’s an Apple product. This initial release is only version 1.0 – it took Apple’s engineers 2 years to code copy and paste to the iPhone.

It seems as though young people growing up with these gaming/reading devices will most certainly begin to refer to them as books. The creatively-fueled industries are beginning to change. Young people will no doubt enjoy interacting with the iPad, so it can possibly be suggested that the attitude towards it represents a kind of futureshock.

We’ve already explored how the ease of internet access to music has provided young people with a certain hackers mentality that disposes them to circumvent access rules like cheat-codes used in video games. Legal solutions like Mixcloud, Spotify and an upcoming iTunes cloud streaming service were necessary as soon as young people became ‘pirates’. Yet with an industry as production heavy and reliant on young people as film and cinema, the adaptation period to instantaneous access is not so clear-cut.

Late last year Voddler, a Swedish web-startup, drew comparisons to Spotify as it signed deals with major film studios Paramount and Disney in order to stream their films online to its users for free. Voddler vice-president, Zoran Slavic, brought up the impressive stat that, in Sweden, his application is “adding about 3,000 users a day”. This figure evidences the startup’s belief that file sharing and internet piracy have fundamentally changed youth habits to the point that many expect to be able to see movies online without paying for them. However, while a belief that youth behaviour is both being changed and changing societal behaviour is forward thinking compared to the rest of the industry. It appears from early reviews that due to its slow user interface Voddler is not yet as essential for film as Spotify is for music.

Despite this initial poorly reviewed user experience the significant shift that the Voddler example brings, is the fact that major film studios like Warner Bros. have now begun to realize they will have to compromise to youth behaviour more and vilify the new technologies that young people use less . More and more consumer electronics brands producing TVs are realizing that digital distribution must now begin to be incorporated into the TVs. Meanwhile the video game console war is also being waged amongst young film viewers.

Even actors are beginning to realize the shift within their own industry. Rising star Joeseph Gordon-Levitt announced his open-source film production project, hitRECord.org at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Users can upload their own clips, tweak existing clips, add soundtracks, record new voiceovers, etc. Films can be recorded on anything from a professional grade camera to a mobile phone. Gordon-Levitt or RegularJOE as he’s known on the site, hopes to produce a full project that will be released in some sort of money-making format (DVD, VOD, small theatrical run, online etc) where half the money will go back to the users who selected to work on the project while the other half will go back into funding hitRECord.

The theme of money appearing at the end product is no real surprise in with such a production heavy industry as film. At last weekend’s “Cinemarama Futurama: The Future of the Theatrical Experience” panel Jeffery Winters noted how “the conversation will probably go to money, but the answer we all want is what will the future look like?” A detailed summary of the panel can be found here but it can finally begin to be stated that  that “the thought that increased ways of watching films at home is cannibalizing the theatre business is wrong”. Young people have lead the way in film streaming at home and it seems as though the industry is realizing that digital will give increased exposure to films creating more interest in them generally, allow distribution costs to drop to zero thus giving everyone entrance to the industry, possibly like hitRECord. One negative factor might be the noise of promotion in the larger budget films getting louder while the independent films struggling to be heard. Perhaps we’ll ultimately have to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to bring forth the best films.

A quick search on Google News reveals that the recent earthquake in Haiti has caused, amongst many other horrific problems, thousands of orphans. As we explored last week, young people are terrifically and passionately motivated to help their fellows when they can, with social media beginning to act as a primary means of directing people to how they can help. While it was neigh-on impossible for young people to become involved in an offline way with the controversial 2009 Iran Election, the humanitarian crisis in Haiti has within days spawned beneficial attempts to gather aid.

In the week after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, London’s young music community sprung into action, using social media to promote the donation funded events in a very short space of time. One of the bigger nights, SOMENight, which held a minimum £5 donation upon entry and a raffle once inside, had a huge lineup including some of the UK’s biggest urban acts in Wiley, Donaeo and Shy FX amongst others. It had over 1200 Facebook attendees within three days, evidencing the salient extent to which London’s youth were willing to put forward aid in an offline manner through using online tools. Event organizer Chantelle Fiddy of Ctrl.Alt.Shift, a London based charity who use popular culture to take global action, said that “Proceeds will go to the Ctrl.Alt.Shift Haiti appeal. Hundreds of thousands of people are already feared dead and many more are believed to be critically injured. Countless are homeless. The five partner groups are are targeting areas that are getting little help from other agencies. They will provide food, tents, hygiene kits, blankets, jerry cans for water, water purifiers and medical support.” The very nature of this event provides stout resistance to what is often perceived to be an apathetic generation in traditional media, as young people across the capital are this week giving their precious finances in donating the cause.

As we previously discussed, when offline philanthropic aid is even slightly possible, young people leap at the opportunity. Online activity is now beginning to reflect a precursor to this. The increasingly popular casual gaming company Zynga allowed its users to raise $1.5 million in 5 days for the UN’s World Food Programme within an easy interface that allows the Farmville players to donate while they’re having fun. We’ve already explored how casual gaming is having a significant impact on gaming, and with gaming revenue’s becoming large enough for there to be increasing calls for it to be taken seriously as an industry it is no surprise that games have started taking on this philanthropic sentiment that young people seem to show in abundance online.

Darfur is Dying is a flash game drawing attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. The game or, “narrative based simulation”, as the designers called it, is awkward to play, not giving the user a particularly pleasant experience, perhaps as it shouldn’t. Blunt messages fly up when you fail in your attempts to reach water:

“You have been captured by the militia. You will likely become one of the hundreds of thousands of people lost to this humanitarian crisis. Girls in Darfur face abuse, rape and kidnapping by the Janjaweed. As someone at a far-off computer, and not a child or adult in Sudan, would you like the chance to try again?”

While the game or “narrative based simulation” may not be fun in the traditional sense of the word, it does engage and draw attention to the disparity of a gamer and the crisis surrounding refugees in Darfur.

Suzanne Seggerman, of the organisation Games for Change muses that the word ‘games’ has the wrong connotations for these serious simulations states that “games are systems, and they offer a good way to explore complex systems … by role playing, shifting variables and seeing how outcomes are affected. Games have to be taken on their own terms. They’re not trying to replace the reality of Darfur or Rawana. But people cannot go and experience these places, and the simulated experiences games offer are amazing. I don’t look on games as competing with the real world and human interactions. I see them as a medium and as a path towards actions in the real world”.

As Seggerman suggests, young people are beginning view social media and gaming as compliments to offline activity and in the case of philanthropic aid and charity, as a medium to diffuse the message. This is reflected generally in young people’s view of digital as explored by Tech Tribe 2009. Within a few days over 5,000 people joined a Facebook group calling for Bankers Bonuses to be given to aid Haiti. This rising sentiment that the older generation have failed in attempts to create a better planet for their offspring is reflected in this inspiring blogpost, which calls for a metaphorical divorce:

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There are lots of Haiti benefit events taking place over the weekend and there are sure to be over the next few weeks also. Their successes are already being noted as Chantelle Fiddy thanked the Ctrl+Alt+Shift crowd, ”according to security they’ve not seen a crowd like that since the last rave at The End.” A review of the Ctrl+Alt+Shift party can be found here and a quick Facebook search should begin reveal further fundraising parties should you wish to take part:

The phrase “3D is coming to your living room” was being bandied around freely by the likes of Panasonic, LG, Samsung and Sony in booths worth their weight in gold at the International Consumer Electronics Show last week.

There has been a lot of hype about 3DTV recently. Yet despite the 3D film Avatar having become the second biggest grossing film in history, 3DTV seems more an extension of High-Definition TV and possibly a step towards returning TV to a more unidirectional focus for young people again where the internet has made it multidirectional and periphery. Young people are able to watch programs on the net via their laptops while multi-tasking other activities (homework, music, instant messaging etc). However… 3DTV does hint toward greater possibilities for the next evolutionary entertainment step.

As Tech Tribe 2009 showed us young people are watching TV in a less linear, unidirectional fashion. On average, young people are watching 3.5 hours of TV online a week, compared to 5 hours of average TV consumption and around 20 hours of general online activity. This increasingly multilayered media consumption has clearly had those in the TV industry worried and so it may be suggested that 3DTV is an attempt to reassert the top-down, dominating media style of TV. So what does 3DTV have in stall for us?

With a few possible niche exceptions, it seems as though most of the consumer electronics industry has chosen to implement the active shutter glasses version of 3D as opposed to the lens based passive glasses that are used in current 3D cinemas. The active shutter glasses are powered by a battery which blocks each eye alternately as the display of 3DTV has alternating frames: the left eye then right eye, left eye, right eye etc. The glasses then sync to the display via infrared receivers. Clearly this technology seems a lot more cumbersome than the Buddy Holly time ‘passive glasses’ that are currently being used in the cinema and replacing the battery could well be as annoying and fiddly changing the TV remote.

The advantage of using the active shutter glasses however is that 3DTV has such a fast refresh rate that the set can be used as normal TVs also, which is why 3DTVs will ultimately succeed even if they fail. Similarly to HD it will be hard not to find a 3DTV when you enter go to buy a new Television.

Programming wise it will all be starting this year for definite. Sky used the release of Avatar to advertise Europe’s first 3D channel  and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa is will be shown in 3D. It has been suggested however that watching sports on 3DTV, is “indicative of the format’s limitations. For one the court has depth but the players are quite flat, like a few paper cutouts dribbling a ball back and forth instead of fully corporeal, 6’6” titans.” While promoting 3D through it’s glasses is clearly an attempt to get young people watching TV ‘the old fashioned way’, programming from the top-down once again.

The recent bout of 3D cinema, it could be suggested, initiated an attempt to combat downloading, as the pirates would no longer be able to view the 3D processed films without getting a headache. Yet piracy represents an unmet demand in young people. 3DTV could possibly be suggested to represent an attempt to meet this demand and bring the immersive cinema experience to the living room. Avatar has, since its release in December, gone on to become the second biggest grossing film of all time, making $1,372,993,105 at the box office. Could 3DTV really represent a challenge to cinema? Possibly, if the price, on-demand ease and quality of the sets themselves are to the consumers needs. Yet the current crop of 3DTVs on display at CES seem like a stepping-stone to the fully immersive experience of the near future. One new technology, Intel’s Wireless Display (WiDi) allows your laptop to wirelessly connect to your HDTV, allowing the fully on-demand quality of internet streaming to appear on your TV. While some companies are beginning to invest in non-glasses based 3DTV, which is primarily coming about through gaming technology pushing innovations. Yet the technology that everybody wants to see, 3D holograms, has yet to materialize. Although a lot has been theorized and they are apparently in the pipelines. Yet it appears like young people will continue to use the internet and their laptops to watch films until cheap, accessible and truly immersive alternatives come into function. It feels like this won’t become fully mainstream until the consumer electronic industry recognize exactly what people want out of their products. Youth behaviour is often a good indicator of this.

Tech Tribe 2009 revealed how young people, despite their relatively meager financial situations, are still heavily attentive to philanthropic activities surrounding their environments. Last year was a big year for youth participation and making their voices heard within their communities. Young people in particular have shown an apparent increase in participation in both off and online political protest. Online tools like Facebook and Twitter, have been essential in making clear and obvious this suggested increase. Never before has there been such tools for exercising ones voice and opinion in such a democratic manner. Yet despite this increase or least seeming increase, the integrity of this participation has often been criticized in the last year.

Considering the amount of media attention it received it is no real surprise to find that the controversial 2009 Iran Election made three appearances in the top 10 news events of Twitter’s most used status updates of 2009. Perhaps much of the media attention was because there have never really been any tools quite like this to facilitate an online protest. Yet there was no real revolution in Iran. Protests were suppressed violently and the protested regime is still in control. This suggests that the media may have overestimated the effect of the social network’s ability to dictate the offline revolutionary activities.. Yet while critics would suggest that this ‘armchair Twitter revolution’ is hypocritical and even aiding of the regime, it can be suggested that it is merely not focused as it could be. The shared opinion of many was apparent, yet the ability to carry this sentiment offline was inhibited by the brutal strength and violence used by the Iranian government. In such situations perhaps an awareness that social networking cannot do everything in its current form, yet an appreciation of its ability to proliferate information is the way that it might be best regarded.

The problem with this viewpoint however is that taking part in online protests or petitions may give some the feeling that they have done something and they may do no more. This skeptical viewpoint can be challenged however with the mix of both offline and online protest that the recent UN Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 had. While the conference has been mostly adjudged to have failed horribly in its attempts to reach a global agreement to reduce carbon emissions, the mixture of both offline and online protest impressed some. It showed that to some extent when young people have the opportunity to match their online sentiment with their offline action then they take it in abundance. Online protests were not limited to Twitter this time. With Facebook more likely to have closer friends than Twitter, in having the world’s fifth biggest population at 350 million, and Youtube exhibiting personal video uploads. Twitter took a backseat allowing a more individual approach to be adopted by the young people involved. Facebook status updates included  ‘Hopelesshagen’ and ‘Everyone arrested before lunch. Anti-climax,’ while video updates from the UK Youth Climate Coalition made the protest seemed more real:

Despite the failure of the conference itself, Copenhagen seemed in some ways like a step forward in the growth of online youth protesting, becoming a sign that a mergence of offline protest was possible, and that online could act as a catalyst for actual offline protest. The reasons for failure were not through a lack of effort from young people rather, that again the powers that be, in this case the politics of the various heads of states that refused to compromise. If the viewpoint is taken that the opportunity to take part in offline protest is available, youth protest participation takes a more positive spin. This can be reflected in the protests of young people on a national scale in the UK.

The above video is an example of a UK youth protest organized online. The overwhelming response to the website http://www.voteforchange.co.uk asking for a protest method was that of a Zombie Walk. In this instance young protestors reclaimed public space and marched outside The Houses of Parliament as ‘brain dead politicians,’ recalling the original use of the term zombie, which in literature was an allegory of brain dead consumers who did not think about their consumptions. This generation of young people is clearly politically passionate to a large extent. New technologies have clearly allowed a politically motivated generation to express their sentiment. When this online sentiment is perceived as attainable, then offline action is merged with online sentiment. This is clear within the recent Rage Against the Machine for Christmas Number 1 campaign  recalling a nearly 20 year metal song to beat the current crop of manufactured pop using social networking. The campaign managed to raise £70,000 for the charity Shelter from single sales, against evidencing a political and philanthropic motivation to the campaign. Online organization of political participation is still in it’s infancy for young people, yet if the sentiment is as strong as has been, it can be suggested that offline participation and social cohesion will only continue to become more organized and apparent. Reclaiming public space will continue to spread awareness of positive message rather than negative ones which young people are only too aware that the mainstream media purport. Everything is OK is an online campaign group which aims to spread positive word that mainstream media is creating separatism in people, giving the opposing message that Everything is OK.

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There are increasing official ways and attempts that politics is being merged into new technologies through organizations, crowdsourcing (the Tories are offering £1million on a large-scale  platform) and games (The UK Parliament has created an ‘MP for a Week’ online role playing game) in both positive and cynical ways to include young people in politics but the openness that these new technologies bring will, one hopes, win through democratically.