I recently did an opening keynote in Bergen, Norway for an organization called Norwegian Audience Development. I will write more about audience development in light of generational change in subsequent posts. In my presentation I discuss the works of historians William Strauss and Neil Howe and try to put their findings into a Scandinavian context….
Here’s something that’s going to make you feel instantly old: The oldest X’ers are turning 50 in 2014. In a time when all the buzz is about aging Boomers and flailing Generation Y and Millennials (the youngest adult generation is so mythologized that it has two names!), Generation X is so quickly blending in with…
Our youngest generation, the Homelanders is defined by the Great Recession. According to generational expert Neil Howe, this was the pivotal historic moment that allowed one generational archetype to be succeeded by the next. What makes the recession of 2008 so different was that it cut deeper and lasted longer than any other downturn since the Great…
Last week I spoke to two market and media classes at Texas State University. The topic I presented to the students was how social media habits differ among generations and how I believe it might be linked to changes in the entertainment industry. The narratives of family comedies have shifted from reflecting adults’ views to…
Climber Dallin Smith and his girlfriend are depicted chilling out in their self-made lawn chairs that they attached 350 feet high on a cliff wall in Utah. You can look at the amazing pictures here. Smith weaved his own lawn chairs and explains “the springs aren’t bolted in. They just rest nicely in a crack.” Did someone say…
If you read parenting blogs (and maybe even if you don’t) you might have read the now famous Texas mother Kim Hall’s letter to teenage girls. The post went viral last week and stirred controversy in as crowded parts of the blogosphere as Huffington Post and BlogHer. Apparently she lives right here in Austin, but…
Millennials are more stressed than other generations. All generations worry more now than in the past when the economy looked more promising, but young adults feel the blues the most. With current unemployment and underemployment rates, soaring student loans and generally bleak opportunities, it is hardly surprising that young adulthood in the 2010s is stressful….
A picture is worth a thousand words, but I don’t have near enough infographics on this blog! So here’s my very special Election Day Post that aspires to be the pop-cultural, right brained amateur version of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog. Well not quite exactly, but we can pretend. Actually these are not my graphics at…
If you’re a parent like me you regularly crash into sleep in one of your children’s’ beds after putting them to bed around dusk. Then you wake up a few hours later and drag your sleep drunk self into your own bed where the night trolls start spinning your head with worries that have built…
I Don’t Know How She Does It All. GPS- supported access to caffeine-related refueling stations. That’s how she does it! It turns out parents of the Homeland generation, i.e. the parent demographic who themselves tend to belong to younger Generation X parents and older Millennials, are more likely to use their mobile phones to get…
