New York Magazine journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman team up to add commentary and more information to their articles in this new book published by Twelve, a division of the Hachette Book Group.
The last page of the book has this blurb about Twelve:
“TWELVE was established in August 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than one book per month. We strive to publish the singular book, by authors who have a unique perspective and compelling authority.”
They lost me at “compelling authority.”
Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman are journalists, not scientists. This book isn’t a synthesis of research; it’s an opinion piece with a conservative bent (indeed, Ashley Merryman’s back-flap bio boasts that she “lives in Los Angeles, where she runs a church-based tutoring program for inner-city children.”)
I’m not advocating gatekeeping; there’s definitely a place for independent research and grass-roots efforts. Child Psychology isn’t one of those places. NutureShock is just another parenting book in a long line of books written by reporters for profit. The authors have a reputation for reporting on overlooked studies with rare results, as they boast in their chapter notes that their New York Magazine articles were popular. Compiling and expounding on past work seems to be the best way to write a book these days; this doesn’t mean that the articles, as a book, make a cohesive or worthy statement.
Basically, I found the book to be the amateur, armchair science that is fun to read in small bites while on the train. Read it for entertainment purposes, but don’t implement the few approaches outlined at home; they aren’t tested enough, and the results have yet to be repeated to gain respect in academia.
The book does, unwittingly, bring up some good points about statistics, studies, and systemic judgments based on those studies. Statistics and study results are nothing to respect when presented alone. The best way to make decisions about anything is to weigh multiple instances of evidence, to never rely on one event. The authors do their best to rip up school district decisions on testing, anti-obesity and anti-bullying programs, by claiming these decisions were not based on scientific results but just made using traditional thought and instinct. While some programs in districts may be made more based on hope than science, the majority of IQ testing and other educational programs are based on years of study and a large meta-analysis of results of hundreds of studies. To suggest otherwise, as the authors do, is hasty, irresponsible, and insulting to educational scholars, teachers, and parents.
The authors proceed to cite a study here, a successful preschool program there, to illustrate their point that decisions about children should be based on evidence. I agree. But A LOT of evidence. Not an anecdotal story or two (which the authors provide), nor 1 or 2 labs that keep getting the same results for their handful of articles. The authors bemoan the lack of long-term studies in almost every chapter, yet fail to mention the very sophisticated and accurate methods of behavioral statistics answers this issue. They sing praises of a preschool program called Tools of the Mind, but conveniently forget to list the challenges associated with the program. This book is a thinly disguised attempt to steer the conversation toward a conservative agenda in education.
The writing is ok. Their lack of academic tone in parts is jarring. For example, on page 190, the authors use colloquial language where they shouldn’t have:
“… a separate word to distinguish the kind of popular teen who diminishes others –in Dutch, for instance, the idiomatic expression popie-jopie refers to teens who are bitchy, slutty, cocky, loud and arrogant.”
An academic article would have used words like “promiscuous,” “disagreeable,” and “condescending,” especially since the Dutch don’t use the English colloquial words that are listed. I also question the choice of listing the derogatory words for females first, or at all.
At times the authors conduct their own “studies,” but we should disregard these results. We have no idea what the sampling was, what the control group was given (if there even was a control group), or how the study was designed at all. Until their results can be repeated many times, then one-off studies should merely bring up ideas for further study.
The only good that comes out NutureShock is the reminder to hold studies, especially those recounted by non-scientist media, in suspicion. If you are planning to pick up this book, read it for entertainment purposes only. It may make you think a bit differently in some aspects of child-rearing, like how your teen may see arguing as the opposite of lying, or how we whites actively avoid talking about race. The authors should have stayed with reflecting trends in traditional parenting, and avoided passing themselves off as authorities.
Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxietyby Dalton Conley [Pantheon Books, New York 2008]
Hear ye, you wordsmiths of the web, you purveyors of pages, you iterators of information: Welcome to Elsewhere, U.S.A., a state of mind in which you are constantly moving; You are slinging nothing but ideas and giving up your leisure time to do it; You are working from home but are always available to the company via your Blackberry (which you are using to schedule your babysitters and manage your children); You hold the fear of the layoff or of lost earnings if you dare close your laptop long enough to have a McMeal with your family; You love your loft space or your recently-converted suburban bedroom/home office, until, of course, you get a look at your neighbors’, after which you shall work more feverishly than ever to stave off the envy and hopefully get that promotion or new account that will allow you, too, to put in the latest in soundproofing technology and remote-control window shades. Your very personality is being pulled apart by millions of messages. Welcome to Elsewhere, that constant state of motion and distraction that takes you anywhere and everywhere but here.
Dalton Conley, NYU sociologist, sounds the welcoming bell to you and me, the Weberati. We can do our jobs from anywhere with a decent internet connection. We work in information and produce ideas for a living. If we work for a manufacturer of actual physical products, we work far from the production line, most likely never experiencing a factory even on a training tour. We are today’s middle-class, white-collar worker. We work from home, we take our laptop on vacation, and we answer emails on our iPhones during the time-outs of our kid’s basketball game. We have this idea that if we just “get one more thing done” before bed, that our hours are well-spent, that our everlasting souls will be cleaned by hard work and that God will shower us with prosperity.
This latest book from prolific writer and academic researcher Conley traces the history behind the combination of work and leisure (“weisure”). Conley starts out the book unflinchingly nostalgic for the good ol’ days, when loyal IBM-ers were admired for their willingness to sing company songs and wear ties, as long as they had their nights and weekends free to play bridge and golf. Conley waxes on a bit about how leisure time was actually once meant for relaxation, instead of the multi-tasking work space it is today (I personally found this nostalgia to be a bit contrite, as Conley and I are both members of Generation X and only experienced those so-called halcyon days via our parents’ memories.)
Leisure and work are becoming mixed, says Conley, as companies like Google increasingly become one-stop shops for their employees. There is on-site laundry, showers, meals (which are free at Google, something Conley was amazed by), doctors, nurses, tax accountants and sometimes daycare. Practically any service the company can help you outsource will be available to you so you can spend more time working. You can “work from home” to spend more time with your kids, but your kids say you won’t look up from the laptop, and your co-workers can hear Rock Band II in the background of your conference call. Meanwhile, you notice your neighbor that holds the same job you do but for another company, has a new Mercedes in her driveway and you wonder how she earns twice your salary. You work harder and longer, ticking away any hours you aren’t working as lost income. You get so used to this state of always looking at the next thing you must do/have/say/be, you never look inward. You get splintered into many different roles, shattering your one individual into what Conley calls an “intravidual.” Nostalgia aside, Dalton has a point.
Still, even though I know Conley was addressing me and my fellow techie folk, I couldn’t help but be a bit offended by the characterization. The term “Blackberry Mom,” [cover/title, pg 1] is as offensive and marginalizing as “Soccer Mom,” and it should’ve tipped me off on the tone of the book. If you are in my Weberati crowd, you will probably be offended on page 56 when Conley calls open-source software “communism” without noting how open-source actually spurred innovation in the private sector. You’ll also probably (well, hopefully) be offended on page 73 when he treats the modern norm of working women and their influence on the workplace with this line: “You can take the woman out of the kitchen but you can’t take the kitchen out of the woman.” That’s really the only media bait in the book, though.
The book reads like a textbook, but the it deserves the effort just on the amount of information it contains. The Appendix alone, with its collection of intriguingly titled articles, is a fair exchange for the purchase price. Unfortunately, Dalton takes a while to get to his main point. The long introduction lays down loads of social history to set up the story. The first 62 pages lay thick groundwork for his theory of what is happening with the state of the working person today. He goes through American social history, namely the social changes brought on by the industrial revolution, and emphasizes the occasional example to demonstrate how our work/life balance and our politics have changed, like the dwindling participation in unions over the last 50 years.
The author’s purpose of the book isn’t found until page 63:
“WHERE WE ARE AT
So, we have gone from a country with high ceilings and fans to low ceilings and air-conditioning; we have gone from an economy where many workers serviced one machine to one in which each American has dozens of machines working for them over the course of a given day; we have gone from being a nation of wandering renters to ever more tooted homeowners; we have gone from a country that experienced race riots in the 1960s–during a period of economic growth spread relatively equally across income deciles–to a country of almost Third World levels of economic inequality, where solid majorities vote to repeal the estate tax. We used to enjoy our free time and left the Europeans to work more than us; now we have more kids to take care of than they do, even as we work significantly more hours.*
No one single factor–not air-conditioning or computers; not female labor force participation; not tax policy alone or immigration–has caused these dramatic shifts. In fact, it is probably a futile exercise to ask how much tax policy drove the development of computers, how much computers drive income inequality, and how much income inequality drives commuting distances. Better to take a deep breath and unfocus the eyes to try to take in the entire mosaic that makes up the social landscape of today.
*Americans work an average of 25.1 hours per week (averaged across all working-age persons) in contrast to Germans, for instance, who average 18.6 hours, We work over 6 more weeks than the French per year. See Alberto ALessina, Edward L. Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, ‘Work and Leisure in the U.S. And Europe: Why So Different?’ Working Paper no 11278, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., 2005.”
I wish those two paragraphs and the citation were on page 1; they would’ve helped me parse out Conley’s academic prose. Although I appreciate the book being chock-full of information, as I read I kept wondering when he’d reveal his point.
Conley does get to his point, eventually, but at times his logic seemed a bit dubious. I was taken aback on page 56 when Conley cited a 2005 study, using the results as a base for his claim that most people still work for the same company for over 20 years. This may be true for the Baby Boomers, but not for any of us under 40 right now. I’m in my 30’s and I don’t know anyone who has worked for any 1 company in their careers, not even my friends who are medical doctors. We are consistently told by career advisors that after 5 years we should be looking for another opportunity, lest we appear habitual, lazy, and unwilling to learn. We believe that the retirement age will be raised to 75, there will be no social security pensions, and we will have worked at so many different companies and had so many varied careers that we will have lost count. Looking at Conley’s one-company-for-20-years claim in detail, the facts become clear. The study, cited from Working Paper #11878 from the National Bureau of Economic Research (where Conley holds a Research Associate position), looked at retirement age workers (ages 58-62) in 1969, and found that they had worked, on average, for one company for 21.9 years. The study then compared their 58-62 years old counterparts in 2002, and found that they had worked, on average, for one company for 21.4 years. Conley claims that despite our hectic schedules and our 24/7 mobile offices, we’re still all working for the same company, just like the IBM Man in 1950. When we, the GenXers, get to be 58-62, my guess is that number will drop from 21.4 to about 10.6. I’d like to see a similar study of people who are 42 years of age right now and see how many different places they’ve worked. Then I’d like to see the same data on people aged 32 today. 21.4 years at one company is a pipe dream for the average Generation Xer. Conley’s choice to cite this study to support his everything-old-is-new-again-but-we-work-more-than-the-IBMer-of-1950 was misleading at best. This slight massaging of statistics is common practice for academics, economists and media members alike, so it’s difficult to make a case against Conley for doing it. There are infinite ways of massaging statistics and relegating the details of data to footnotes in order to support your point, so when numbers are involved, caveat emptor.
Despite the nostalgia and the numbers games, Elsewhere U.S.A. and Professor Conley earn respect. Conley’s points about materialism and the ever-increasing gap between the classes are a sharp slap upside our credit-busting heads. Conley is, plain and simple, one of us, and he keeps us well informed of the changes in our lives that we are too busy to notice. Although Conley avoids Twitter, he knows the scene. He references some books that are well-known in the social media circles I run in (e.g., Anderson’s The Long Tail) and knows the pressures we face in an outsourcing, all-consuming workplace. He’s just as guilty as the rest of us, but he’s a sane voice in the fog of our all-too-modern, fast-motion lives.
(If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, hop on over to Common Craft and watch this video.)
How to Start Using Twitter.
So you’ve gone over to Twitter.com and signed up. Congratulations, you’re a Tweeter! Now what? What do you use it for? How do you find people to follow? How to get people to follow back?
First things first. You must do the following 3 things when you sign up to Twitter:
1. Upload a picture (any picture will do, but one of your face is best. G-rated helps too).
2. Fill out a bio, including Location.
3. Provide a URL, even if it is your MySpace page.
A picture, a bio, and a URL go a long way in making you appear to be someone who wants to join the community. (I also advise new users to keep away from putting numbers in their username as this tends to look spammy.)
TIP: Don’t be afraid to change your bio sometimes. I personally change my bio every few weeks. It gives my followers some variety and a way to learn a little bit more about me with every tweak. Still, I keep the common elements in the bio field (e.g. “writer” and “techie geek”).
OK, you’re all set up. Now what?
Now you start following people. To follow a person means that you subscribe to their feed; you see everything they tweet out in the public timeline.
Hopefully you know a person or two to follow to get you started. If you don’t know a soul on Twitter, follow me! If that isn’t enough for you (which, I can’t imagine), then start searching for people who share your interests. You can do this in a few ways.
Search locally. An ADOBE AIR application called TwitterLocal will show you tweets from people in whatever area you specify. It doesn’t work that well but it does work enough for you to find some local people.
TIP: After you’ve downloaded the free AIR application, check out Twhirl and Tweetdeck for great Twitter interfaces.
Search Google with the following syntax to find a bunch of people to follow: Term location site:twitter.com (replace “term” with “writer” “doctor” “juggler” or whatever you’re looking for, and put your city in the “location” part. My favorite search is writer philadelphia site:twitter.com).
Twitter Grader allows you to put in your city and see the top Tweeters (I’m usually around #12 for Philly). Follow a few that sound interesting. Tweet them (type @ then their username, no spaces. Type your message, then hit send). Start conversations. Most people usually follow back.
Twellow is a service that helps people find niches on Twitter. There are so many of these types of sites popping up everyday. Just look for them.
TIP: Under the Notices tab in your Twitter Settings is the word “@Replies” next to a little pulldown menu. [See picture]. Until you are very familiar with Twitter, I suggest that you set it to “Show me all @replies.” This helps you find new people to follow. If someone sends an @reply to someone else that seems interesting, check out the person they are @replying to. Do this by clicking on the username or typing http://twitter.com/username in your browser’s URL (replace “username” with whatever came after the @ in the person’s tweet). You may find that the person on the other side of the conversation may be just the kind of person you’re looking for. Once you are comfortable with Twitter and have found enough interesting people to follow, then you can change this setting to “Show me @replies to people I’m following.” Doing so will keep the noise in your stream to a minimum.
How to get people to follow back?
Usually people will follow back once you follow them. If they don’t, don’t worry about it. There’s way too much emphasis in the social media world about number of followers. Follower numbers are not trustworthy; as cool as Twitter is, spammers abound, which send follower rates through the roof but make those rates totally bogus. Don’t waste your 140 characters per tweet on desperate pleas for followers either. Just Tweet out things that interest you: links, quotes, musings, etc.
TIP: Under settings at the very bottom of the page is a checkbox next to Protect My Updates. Don’t check this box. If you protect your updates right away, you won’t get any followers and it will be nearly impossible for people to have conversations with you. Private tweeting is more of an advanced Twitter function and requires a little learning curve.
Don’t follow thousands of people. To start out, try about 20 people on for size. See how the timeline suits you. See if people are following back. One of the biggest mistakes that I see constantly is the Major Follow Move. Newbies start on Twitter then click follow buttons all up and down the timeline like a squirrel hoarding nuts in November. DO NOT DO THIS. That’s a dead give-away for “spammer.” In fact, the spammer Major Follow Move had gotten to be such a problem that the Twitter.com staff have now put a 2,000 person cap on new follows. You can’t follow more than 2000 people if your follower::followee ratio is too out of whack.
So, as people follow you back, follow more people. Grow your network slowly. You can always watch the humongous public timeline if you’re bored (Japanese kids are writing novels on Twitter, so be forewarned if you want to absorb the world’s public tweets).
Last but not least, the big question: What the heck do I use this for?
Great question. Once you are familiar with tweeting, you’ll have learned that the simple answers to “What are you doing?” don’t really elicit intellectually stimulating conversations. I don’t use that prompt much anymore myself. Telling my followers “I’m getting my roots done” doesn’t really keep my anyone interested. As a freelancer and stay-at-home mom, I use Twitter as my water-cooler, my board room, my lunch table, and my happy hour. I send out questions to the group that sometime roll into heated debates among many users. Sometimes I retweet a funny link someone else sent me. Just wing it for now. You’ll get into the swing of things.
TIP: Search the internet for 3rd party tools that work with Twitter (it’s ok to give your password to the apps, just make sure your Twitter password isn’t the same as your banking or email or any other password). The Twitter search functions may help you figure out what you want to do with your account and who you may want to follow. Check out this wiki to get started.
Twitter is one of those litmus tests in life: what you put into it will be what you get out of it. Find your people. Start connecting.
And try your hardest to avoid addiction.
Here’s the Better Philly video segment. It’s definitely a very cursory introduction and it is geared toward stay-at-home moms:
Second video, learn about Joey Fortman’s bubble tweet:
Have no fear if your IQ score in 2nd grade was less than ideal! Don’t worry if your main character is a dud! Below are some interesting skills that can liven up any party, fictional or non!
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
Doubleday Business (2008), Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN: 9780385524382
PurpleCar’s Review:
Have you ever driven through a snowstorm, against all logic, to get to a meeting? Held onto a tanking stock? Reading Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior may help you understand why. An easy read in the style of The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), Sway uses anecdotes and popular psychology research to outline some common behavioral pitfalls. Although the book lacks in-depth analysis and contradictory research to be considered serious academic fair, it gives familiar examples of illogical actions in the face of mounting evidence. Sway explains concepts like loss aversion, commitment, and diagnosis bias and how they play out in individuals and groups. Personally, I found a lot of value in being reminded of how important dissenters are, even if the dissenters are wrong, and how “stay the course” is usually the worst option.
NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children
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