In Growing up with Princess Inc earlier this year I wrote about growing gender polarization. In the post I discussed the idea that shifts between androgynous and more overtly gendered fashion trends and body ideals are linked to social and economic fluctuations. Generational experts Strauss and Howe explained in The Fourth Turning that in eras when society struggles…
How will the unemployment and economic recession (or recessions as it more looks like) affect the New Silents in the U.S.? Amongst several dismal prognoses, over a quarter of this generation is expected to endure child poverty – and that is a conservative estimate. Derek Thompson of the Atlantic discusses how America’s decline from prosperity…
Social change is often extremely slow, especially when deep seated norms are involved. Gender roles have demonstrated their staying power even in sociospheres where gender equality has long been the official mantra. Haven’t we all met the guy who speaks passionately about women’s rights all while parking the kids in front of the TV and leaving…
After numerous studies and reports mapping the Millennial generation and especially their attributes in the workforce, predictions about the post-Millennials are finally starting to pop up in news sources and in market research reports (here, here and here). At After the Millennials, we try not to let this type of fodder escape our radar!
Crowdsourcing is the new outsourcing when it comes to corporate savings. Outsourcing is a way of paying cheaply for services in low cost countries. Crowdsourcing is getting additional savings by engaging vast sources of amateurs and experts anywhere to do it for free – services companies once had to pay for. One of these services…
Eight years to the day after George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished”, President Obama tells us tonight that one huge mission is indeed accomplished. And this time with more hard evidence than last time – and no embarrassing looking bomber jacket. A small U.S. team attacked and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and confirmed…
Remember Aldus Huxley’s ‘decanting bottles’? Or Gattaca? Well, that future is already here – kind of. Two methods of splicing human eggs during in vitro fertilization can rule out diseases linked to mutations in the Mitochondria, or the cellular structures that produce energy for the cell. Mitochondria mutations cause diseases like diabetes, deafness, blindness, and neurological problems. When chromosomes are…
Generational experts Strauss and Howe argue that the kids from the Silent generation (born 1924 -1942) were the most gender-polarized in the 20th century until they became radicalized in the early 1960s. From Shirley Temple’s sausage curls to eerie robotic wives in their squeaky clean Stepford homes, girls and women fit neatly into the gender stereotypes until they…
The file sharing police is doomed to lose against a generation of smug pirates. This is what Swedish research group Cybernorms concludes with after measuring social norms in the file sharing community. The researchers found that 75 percent of 15 – 25 year olds feel no remorse for downloading pirate material from sites like the…
Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technologies are discussing these days the appropriateness of discussing transhumanism with children, or more precisely: Should we tell them that they have a plausible chance of living forever? I remember the first time my oldest daughter asked me if I will ever die. Knowing that life extending technologies probably will…
