Image by AFP via @daylife

Finally, I thought as I read the Harvard Business Review piece claiming that Gen Y was no more likely to change the face and nature of the American workplace than any generation that had come before it and had been predicted to do likewise. Finally, someone admitting that the more things change and the more we talk about them changing, the more they stay elementally the same, especially in corporate America. As Andrew McAfee states:

…we still have org charts that mean something, jobs with narrowly defined responsibilities, promotions, bosses and subordinates, and most of the other longstanding trappings of organizational life. We also still have office politics and intrigue, careerism, coalitions and rivalries, informal structures and processes, and all the other elements of a dense and hierarchical social system.

The whole plus ça change idea has been (and will continue to be) the underlying thesis of my writing on all things youth-related. The kids are alright. A little strange, a little anxious, filled with hormones and braggadocio and stressed to the hilt about an economy that holds little promise for them, but possessed of the same bedrock desires and doubts that have defined the American psyche throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.  Hell, desires and doubts that have been hardwired into us since we long ago heaved ourselves up onto two legs (Am I good enough? Am I going to be okay? Will I find someone to love me? etc., etc.). Context (historical, technological, social)  changes, human nature does not.

There comes a point where the binding ties of shared age slacken.  Every era’s enfants terribles eventually grow up. We find other characteristics with which to align and define our identity.  Our politics, jobs, sexual orientation, family status and so on eventually take precedence over the decade in which we spent our formative years. We stop tilting at windmills, stop raging against the system and accept that we’ll simply have to do the best we can within its strictures (a realization our Boomer parents eventually came to). In our case, maybe our hacks will be a little more sophisticated and extensive than in the past (we aren’t gamers and ostensible techno savants for nothin’, are we?)  and maybe our critical population mass will be leverage for winning a few more concessions. But reinventing the wheel seems unlikely in light of the failure of every touted game-changing generation before us to pull off such a feat. Perhaps the media narrative around Gen Y is catching on to this? Maybe the HBR piece is a sign that the bloom is fading from the Millennial rose and that the attention will begin shift to greener (younger?) pastures.

Now, that Gen Z. Those kids have potential…

P.S. Thanks for reading, commenting and telling me bullet point by bullet point just how off base I am over the last 11 months. I’ll see you around and maybe you’ll even see me.
P.P.S. I was this close to quoting from Hey Hey, My My. You’re welcome for my uncharacteristic display of restraint.

Image via Wikipedia

The 97th Tour de France finished yesterday and it was a stellar one, with an epic showdown for the yellow jersey, a celebration of 100 years of cycling in the Pyrenees, the cementing of Mark Cavendish’s deserved rep as the most dominant sprinter on the block and Lance Armstrong’s final (this time he really means it!) kick at the grand tour can.  I confess that I’m kind of at loose ends now. Despite not having been on a bicycle since I was 12, I love the Tour unabashedly and will get up at whatever insanely odd hour is necessary to catch its yearly three-week winding around France (and neighboring countries). Chases! Crashes! Crazy fans! Beautiful scenery! Dudes beating each other with bike wheels!

I’ve tried to explain to non-fans what my fascination with this event is, but maybe describing it as “chess on wheels” was the wrong tactic to pique people’s curiosity.  So, this year, I’ve decided to offer up three job-related lessons that I’ve gleaned from following the 2010 Tour de France instead. The things we can learn from spandex-clad men in funny helmets!

The Peter Principle is alive and well

Since I watched the Tour via live internet feeds this year, I was at the mercy of whatever English broadcast happened to be available on a given day. My preference is for the delightful Versus team of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen, but often I was stuck watching the Eurosport feed. And Eurosport means listening to the aural awkwardness of one Sean Kelly. Widely regard as one of the top professional riders of the 80s, Kelly is downright abysmal as a commentator. Immune to the jokes of his fellow Eurosporters and prone to speaking in a flat, affectless monotone that goes on for paragraphs without a pause or breath, whatever the breadth and depth of his cycling knowledge, he just doesn’t have the personality or animation required to provide color commentary. As in the case of excellent workers who are promoted to management as a reward for their efforts but lack the supervisory skills to handle that responsibility, just because you were skilled at a sport, doesn’t  automatically qualify you to call the play-by-play for the viewing or listening audience.

Relatability builds trust

When I heard that Lance Armstrong was coming out of retirement for the 2009 Tour, I couldn’t help but cringe. I’m not a fan and I had gotten used to several happily Lance-free years – no checking in with him before and after each stage, no Bob Roll waxing poetic about his man crush, no clip packages of his greatest moments, etc., etc. I thought 2009 would be a last hurrah; one and done, so to speak. But no, after last year’s third place finish, Armstrong decided to put in an appearance in this year’s Tour. And what an appearance it was. From the beginning, Armstrong was off his storied form. In one memorable stage, he crashed three times. In the end, he finished in 23rd place, almost 40 minutes behind Tour winner Alberto Contador. While personal branding types would roundly condemn Armstrong’s off-peak participation as damaging to his legacy as the preeminent cyclist of his time and one of the all-time greats, it actually bolstered his reputation. Viewers saw not the relentless machine of previous Tours, but an almost 39 year-old man past his physical prime who could no longer keep up with the new generation of elite riders. Lance Armstrong was finally human, obviously fallible and it looked good on him. By letting us see him at less than his best, it made his seven previous victories seem all the more spectacular. They seemed more the product of a phenomenal athlete in his prime than that of a pedal-pushing automaton whose dominance over mere mortals was a foregone conclusion from day one of the race. It worked so well that even I was rooting for Lance to pull out a stage victory this year and exit  the sport with one final burst of glory. Well played, Mr. Armstrong. Perfection is admirable, but a flash of vulnerability is relatable and relatability builds trust or at least convinces coworkers you aren’t a Cylon.

Winning is good, but don’t be gauche about it

Everyone loves a winner (not as much a we love an underdog, but still), but we like to see winning as the triumph of pure talent and individual determination. By contrast, wanting it too much and being willing to do whatever it takes to get it is off-putting. We cling to the belief that we still live and work in a meritocratic environment and will be rewarded accordingly. Enter one Alberto Contador. Three times a Tour winner, he obviously missed this memo. Last year, despite being teammates with Armstrong and ostensibly there to support Armstrong’s quest for an eighth victory, Contador torpedoed Astana team unity by chasing the victory for himself. It paid off, but did nothing for his popularity or reputation as a solid teammate in the process. This year, he was up to his old tricks again – violating Tour etiquette by chasing down one of his own Astana teammates on a breakaway (and robbing him of a stage win) to gain a few precious seconds on tour rival (and fan favorite) Andy Schleck and going on the attack against Schleck while Schleck was in the throes of mechanical difficulty. The latter move earned Contador widespread criticism for unsportsmanlike behavior and led him to offer up a public apology, but the damage was done. Contador earned his third victory and cemented his rep as the kind of guy for whom winning takes precedence above all else and who has no grasp of/no respect for  the unspoken rules governing the Tour and the implied gentlemanly conduct (fisticuffs aside) of its riders. Not exactly the type of colleague you’d trust to have your back  or whose  promotion you’d be keen to celebrate.

Image by alancleaver_2000 via Flickr

This week, a hue and cry went up in the circles of folks who actually care about these things to smugly proclaim that Gen Y was going to put the final nail in the coffin of digital privacy. The fodder for this bold assertion? The latest report in the Pew’s Millennial series indicates that 69% of the “technology stakeholders and critics” surveyed agreed that, by 2020, Generation Y would continue to disclose a “great deal” of personal information and that their enthusiasm for widespread info sharing would remain undimmed even as they segued into a more mature life phase.

Pardon me if I don’t take the talking points of a collection of bloggers, futurists (what I wouldn’t give to see that on a business card) and the guy who started Craigslist as the definitive word on the perceived longevity of social networking and the continuing popularity of digital disclosure . Hand-picked sample (okay, there were a few academics in there, too) aside, the report is flawed in several ways.

Not everyone is currently on the sharing bandwagon
Again, to harp on the fatal flaw of the Pew’s Millennial research in general, there’s a lack of inclusivity when it comes to the experience of Gen Y members outside of the middle-class raised, college-educated, upwardly mobile cohort. This study (ditto, previous ones) assumes that a passion for online info sharing is an across-the-board characteristic that defines the generation as a whole and that this passion is what drives an interest in social networking, as opposed to assumed necessity, peer pressure, a need to access info not available via other channels or a host of other influential factors.

A hell of a lot can happen before (and after) 2020
If you had asked a gaggle of transportation and air safety experts their views on the future of air travel on September 10, 2001, you would have gotten a radically different answer than what’s played out in the last almost-decade. Even futurists can’t accurately predict game-changing events that might occur between now and 2020 to once again redefine our understanding of the public and the private spheres, not to mention account for evolutions and shifts within the technology and the platforms currently used by Gen Y to share the minutiae of their/our lives.

It doesn’t reflect the potential for value shifts
Transparency is arguably king today, but that doesn’t mean that it will still be de rigueur in a decade. For example, critics are already identifying a shift toward more conservative attitudes among young adults re: sexual behavior of their peers ( hence the whole Generation Scold moniker coined by Jessica Grose in Slate). If attitudes around political and religious participation (and yes, sex) can change over the life course and we frequently see the emergence of new values within the collective consciousness (Who was talking about sustainability in a mainstream way 20 years ago?), why should we expect anything different when it comes to the prominence of social networking and the nature of our relationship to it? Assuming stasis is short-sighted.

They skipped the best part
The Pew’s report misses arguably the most interesting aspect of what the implications of a continued emphasis on social networking and info sharing will be, namely the potential effects on our social relationships and collective and individual self-image. If we continue to make public our formerly private lives, will this lead to a normalization of behaviors or attributes that we previously held up as shameful/private (a reduction in social stigma around dropping out of school, having an STI or declaring bankruptcy, perchance)? Will it prop open the door for 24/7 surveillance of the lives of our peers and encourage the culture of comparison that current social networking platforms have already fostered (after all, a running stream of updates on the achievements of peers is never more than a click away)? It’s one thing to declare online sharing is the death knell of digital privacy, but quite another to delve into its long-term offline ramifications.

Image via Wikipedia

Two alarmist teen tales making the recent media rounds gave me quite a chuckle. A weary chuckle, you could even say. In one corner, we have the (now widely ridiculed) FOX Cleveland piece on the possible emerging “trend” of nutmeg huffing among America’s youth. And in the other, we have The Early Show by way of The Washington Post reporting speculating on the increasing popularity of Twilight-inspired biting as a means of showing affection among middle-schoolers. At least the WaPo had the decency to end their headline with a question mark.

The cultural touchpoints may have changed, but the idea of being on edge about the goings-on of our country’s young adults  isn’t unique to the current crop of youth (Have we agreed on calling them Gen Z? Has snot-nosed brats been roundly rejected?), obviously. Long before we had Oprah and Dr. Phil episodes devoted to the perils of sexting, the shock of faux pregnancy pacts and the hidden messages in jelly bracelets, heck, even before Nancy Reagan’s exhortation to just say no, there was the cinematic gem that is Reefer Madness. Clutching our pearls and imploring others to please think of the children never goes out of style.

The media’s appetite for questionably-researched trend pieces aside (it is summer after all), I can’t help but wonder why we’re so inclined to believe the worst (or at least most scandalous) about “kids today” and their intentions. Is it a product of casting our collective memory back (and I’m still pretty young, so mine doesn’t go back that far) to our own youths, thinking of what we got up to (or would have gotten up to), adding in a dose of  To Catch a Predator, a splash of scantily-clad Miley Cyrus and a rarely-admitted lingering paranoia about the reach of technology to come up with a worst case scenario? Is it a function of a parental protective instinct? Are we jealous of their relatively responsibility-free existence and want to convince ourselves that being young is no longer all that it’s cracked up to be?

Maybe it’s simply a fact of human nature that once we pass out of one experience or life stage, our memories of its immediacy, its joys and pains tend to fade, so that we are able to let it go in order to move on to whatever the next challenge or stage throws at us (cue Springsteen’s Glory Days for those who can’t let it drop). Certainly, it explains why folks willingly repeat the miracle of childbirth. And as our memories fade, we conveniently forget that while the social and historical context for today’s youth may not mirror our own, issues of sex, belonging, peer pressure, testing boundaries and forming identities are timeless and the evolving means by which youth confront them are as alluringly dangerous and head-shakingly dumb in hindsight as they’ve ever been.

Yeah, as dumb as sniffing pie spice even.

That entreaty is the last thing Lex Gill says to me at the conclusion of our interview as she bounds out of the coffee shop with fellow G8/G20 documentarian, Justin Giovannetti, in tow to catch the beginning of the first (and most peaceful) of the past weekend’s anti-summit protests held in Toronto, Canada.

Both college students from Montreal’s Concordia University, Gill and Giovannetti needn’t have worried. Far from looking stupid, the two did yeoman’s work on the streets of Canada’s largest city over the course of the following 48 hours. Armed with a Droid phone, a netbook and ready access to Twitter, flickr and a posterous blog and holding the conviction that mainstream media does a “shitty”  job of covering citizen protests, they doggedly and diligently recorded their impressions of the clashes between protesters and police and in a blog post that now has their phones ringing off the hook with media outlets wanting to hear their story, spent hours in the rain outside the city’s makeshift detention center interviewing over 100 arrested protesters as they were released into the night after hours of being held in conditions deplorable enough that Amnesty International has called for the Canadian federal government to mount an independent review of the summit’s security and policing measures.

Gill emailed me on Saturday to clarify that she and Giovannetti shouldn’t be framed as exceptional, that they were simply two out of the thousands recording the civil unrest with handheld technology. And she’s right. This is the new face of both student and citizen journalism. Have smart phone, will report. While tales of seasoned reporters getting caught in the police/protester crossfire have made a splash and awoken mainstream media to the newly distressing (at least for those in North America)  fact that when push comes to shove, their journalistic credentials won’t save them from arrest or intimidation, youthful cynicism and institutional distrust has already clued young reporters into this truth.

“It doesn’t make a difference if you’re media or not. They see the press pass and they search you anyway. As far as basic concern, I’m a protester if I’m there. They can arrest me just like anyone else,” Giovannetti told me with a resigned shrug when we spoke on Friday.

His words would prove to be eerily prophetic for the likes of journalists Jesse Rosenfeld and Amy Miller, who were among the approximately 900 hundred people arrested during the summit, many of whom were youth and not veteran activists.

And yet, it isn’t cynicism that explains why so many young people took to the streets of Toronto to both participate in and document the demonstrations. The politics of the G8/G20 aside and not to belittle the issues of international development, peace and security and financial regulation on which the summit’s official outcomes will be judged, our expectation for instant informational gratification and assumption of default transparency shouldn’t be discounted as impetuses in their own right.

” Our generation, “Gill muses, “we don’t like to be told you can’t see something or you don’t have access.”

But it’s not all talk of development aid, discussions of David Cameron’s swimwear and whatever closed-door corporatist skulduggery the B20 might be up to. In between the protests and photo ops, there’s a fair amount of, well, tedium. And it hasn’t gone undocumented. To pass the time between between breaking news communiques, I’ve been keeping a formal account of the unfolding of my G8 weekend in convenient bullet-list form. The following is the side of international political tete-a-tetes that you won’t see on CNN:

Day 1

• Set out to pick up media accreditation. Realize only thing I’ve consumed in the last 24 hours has been sangria and homemade fudge (oh and a bag of Terra chips on the plane). Hope they don’t administer a breathalyzer at any point.
• Get only slightly lost on the way to the accreditation center. Meet a boy reporter on the streetcar. Get his hopes up that the press swag bags will contain free Blackberries. He probably hates me now.
• Walk approximately one million miles from the streetcar stop to the accreditation center. Offer the Mountie staffing the desk my passport. She is unconvinced at the likeness. Dig around in purse and hand over my driver’s license. She asks what made me opt to grow bangs. Decide a non-committal shrug is the best means of avoiding an international incident.
• Cross the street to the International Media Centre (honoring the Canadian spelling). Security dude scans my pass and rifles through my purse. Doesn’t ask why I have four plastic forks in the bottom of it. I’m oddly disappointed.
• Inside Media Centre. Looks like a ghost town, save for the shambling zombies that are veteran journalists. Lots of wrinkled khakis and Keds.
• Pocket a fistful of free G8 pens and another fistful of G8 pins as souvenirs for friends.
• Wander through huge (and deserted!) feeding area. Drink some water. Drink some Diet Coke. Contemplate photographing the leftover buffet contents. Pass on that.
• Do photograph the much-ballyhooed fake lake. Contemplate dipping my feet in it. Think better of it.
• Attend press briefing. One of the men on the panel is introduced as a Sherpa. He is not Nepalese. Another Canadian gov’t communications flack keeps referring to it as the G7 instead of G8, also mispronounces gallivanting. FOX news rep asks at question. Everyone laughs. At him, not with him.
• Finally give up and call it a day. Vow to bring a yo-yo or at least pick up a magazine for tomorrow.

Day 2

• Wake up to news that International Media Centre is first under lockdown and then evacuated because of bomb scare. No bomb, only an unattended backpack. Shudder at the thought of possibly being cooped up for hours in a convention hall with hundreds of fellow journalists, spotty wifi and a limited supply of coffee. Vow to work remotely.
• Have set up interview with two young activists in town for the protests. Decide to walk to meeting. Realize three blocks in that I’m ill-shod for the undertaking. Distract myself from rocks in my sandals by attempting to spot undercover cops. Is that beardy fellow chowing down on a falafel one of them? How about that shifty-eyed window cleaner on a smoke break?
• Activist interviewees show me their gear. Forget televised, the revolution will be pinged via simultaneous updates from a smart phone to Twitter, Flickr, posterous blog and Facebook. Am transcribing the interview in a hardcover notebook. By hand. With a pen. Suddenly, I feel very old. Were it not summer, I would request to be set adrift on a Canadian ice floe already.
• First major protest of the summit is set to begin momentarily. As I am alone, too short to see above crowds and equipped with a profoundly dumb phone sans data plan and with only rudimentary texting abilities, I opt to skip the street action. Instead, I monitor the demo from indoors via Twitter. More sangria is involved.

Cover of Brave New World

To be young is to be sad is to be trapped in an Orwellian nightmare. Laura Miller advances an interesting  if not wholly surprising theory in a recent New Yorker piece on the upswing in dystopian Young Adult fiction. She posits that novels about grim futures or alt realities populated by savvy teen protagonists capture the sturm und drang of the youth set and resonate with young readers for that very reason.  Evidently, a post-apocalyptic future as a proxy for high school angst and coming-of-age drama where the canny misfits, outcasts and renegades are the ones to challenge the totalitarian system appeals to the rebellious narcissist lurking within the average teen.

Miller’s assertion that dystopian fiction is the new YA It genre and a mirror for formative years flux isn’t without problems.  Firstly, is dystopian fiction really that popular? When did Holden Caulfield battles Big Brother steal the reins from all things vampiric and supernatural? Not that I’d object if Twilight finally went quietly into that good night, but I’m not sure junior editions of The Road would have the same appeal to the teen girl fan base that made Stephanie Meyer her millions.  Miller even admits that the genre is dominated by adults:

It somehow fits the paranoid spirit of these novels that adults are the ones who write them, publish them, stock them in stores and libraries, assign them in classes, and decide which ones win prizes. (Most of the reader reviews posted online seem to be written by adults as well.)

Additionally, what about the entertainment history of bad times (both historical and personal) calling for escapism and diversion over relatability? Do we really want to see an amplified version of our own workaday lives when we could distract ourselves with a brighter, bolder, more glamorous iteration instead? Think of the popularity of Shirley Temple movies during the Great Depression or the insatiable media appetite for Lady Gaga’s everything.  Hell, Las Vegas itself was built on embodying this idea. The desire for escapism instead of representation also plays a part in the youthful Twilight and Harry Potter phenomena (Obsessive love! Magic!).  In fact, I don’t think today’s young readers are necessarily cut out for fictional dystopia in the first place. Rather than coming of age in the protracted and ambiguous tension of the Cold War, today’s teens know what dystopia looks like because there’s ample evidence of its elements in their daily lives.  The genre plays on the fear of the plausible what-if,  but what if the what-if has already happened? We’ve got war(s), terrorism, natural disasters, environmental turmoil, the Patriot Act, Arizona’s immigration law, etc. Utah still executes prisoners by firing squad for heaven’s sake.  Literary merits aside, opting for a broody vamp who watches  the heroine (a proxy for the hormonal young reader herself) while she sleeps vs. picking up The Handmaid’s Tale for a little light reading makes a certain kind of teenage sense.

Image by Seattle Municipal Archives via Flickr

I should offer an apology to the generational analysis gods. Clearly, I’ve been off my game. While I was still fretting about issues such as the persistence of the gendered wage gap or the fact that Gen Y female MBA grads earn, on average, $4600 less than male counterparts upon graduation (it’s enough to drive you to drink!), I failed to realize the cultural and career hardships plaguing Millennial men. As Chip Walker so eloquently put it in AdWeek recently:

Sure, it’s common knowledge that the power and prestige of the male gender is in decline, and that men increasingly feel marginalized in a feminized workforce. But are men now officially the second sex?

That hollow sound you heard was my jaw hitting the floor. Male prestige in decline? A feminized workforce? Women reaping the benefits of a “you go, girl” culture? I’m not sure what America Walker is living in, by I suspect it might be one of those LOST parallel universes that everyone was so hepped up about last month. Or perhaps he’s taken at face value Caitlin Moran’s cheeky assertion from her recent much-lauded profile of Lady Gaga that it will be bloody difficult to oppress a generation of women who have a pop star who shoots fire out of her bra to look up to?

Walker goes on to posit that, in a media landscape that glorifies the man-child archetype, there is a lack of aspirational role models for Gen Y men. I can only assume that he has a certain stoic stereotype of a bygone era in mind (maybe someone has been watching too much Mad Men? Or is a big fan of John Wayne marathons on AMC?), because there’s certainly no dearth of male success in business, politics, sports, entertainment, science (should I go on?) etc. to be found.  He asserts that the pendulum is swinging toward a self-made model of making it where young men embrace the idea of a lone entrepreneur over the upwardly mobile company man. But boot-strapping one’s way to success isn’t so much a throwback to more maverick times as it is a fundamental tenet of the American Dream dating back to the Pilgrims. And if this new model of masculine achievement resonates with the majority of young men, well, it will simply become the future dominant paradigm. Men set the cultural parameters by which other men are judged. If the new guard doesn’t care for the old guard’s talismans, they can simply overthrow the old guard (figuratively as well as by usurping their power positions in all facets of American life) in due course. Not so for Millennial women, whose paradigm of feminine success is A) not entirely within the purview of women themselves (which, as a marketer, Walker should know and acknowledge) and B) predicated in large part on attempting to balance dichotomous or contradictory poles (pure vs. sexy, ambitious but demurring, pretty but not shallow, etc.).

Getting past the WTF? what about the menz? hand-wringing, there is, however, a point to be taken from the AdWeek piece about Millennial role models writ large. Gen Y has come of age in the time of O.J. Simpson, Clinton’s impeachment, both Iraq wars, Enron, the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, the birth of reality tv and the unholy union of celebrity gossip and technological surveillance. The idea of holistic admiration for public figures is a quaint relic of an era in which we didn’t know enough to know that there are very few folks whose lives and times are worth modeling ourselves after. Framing the issue as the lack of an age-appropriate Clint Eastwood for the Millennial guy and tut-tutting about the rise of the immature perma-adolescent utterly misses the point that Gen Yers of both sexes aren’t lacking for heroes, but are perhaps eschewing the idea of them entirely.

Image via Wikipedia

American Idol and the Eurovision Song Contest both recently crowned their 2010 winners and it doesn’t take a genius or an astute cultural critic to figure out the continent has it all over us when it comes to putting on a proper pop spectacle. Sure, Germany’s Lena (think Ellen Page singing a club anthem in character as Regina Spektor) wasn’t exactly a win for the ages (that would be 2006’s Lordi if you’re wondering. I will brook no argument), but I’d still put my money on her over Lee DeWyze (Who? Exactly.) any day. In that spirit, I give you:

Three Reasons the Eurovision Song Contest Puts American Idol to Shame:

It embraces the snark potential
Now, perhaps the Albanian telecast is a staid and thoughtful affair, but if you have the pleasure of watching via the BBC (or the BBC via the internet), you’re treated to comedian Graham Norton’s good-naturedly biting commentary on all 25 acts. Norton mocks everything from the costumes of the performers to their hairstyles (there ain’t no mullet like a Eurovision mullet) to the sobriety of the audience of 120 million viewers. There’s no “Europe, what have you done?” admonishments a la Ryan Seacrest on American Idol’s results night. Yes, national dreams will be crushed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still take the piss, does it?

There is cheese and then there’s Eurovision
17 year-olds in ballgowns and enough make-up for a cougar convention belting out power ballads. Overly hair-gelled, tight-panted men of ambiguous sexuality gyrating to dance hits performed entirely in Greek.  An Angelina Jolie doppelganger singing a song called Apricot Stone while swanning around in front of what looks for all the world like a giant paper-mâché clitoris (hint: I think it was the stone in question). And wind machines, always with the wind machines. The excess of Eurovision makes the likes of Adam Lambert look like a Christian music ingenue singing the national anthem at a NASCAR race.

This is serious business
Sure the Brits like to pretend they’re above such gauche displays (doesn’t explain why they sent Andrew Lloyd Webber to accompany 2009’s entrant on piano) and my Serbian former coworkers tried to play it nonchalantly cool when their own Marija Serifovic claimed top honors in 2007, but there’s a lot of national pride invested in turning in a good showing at Eurovision. None of this “second is better than first because then you get more artistic freedom” bunk that fans of the American Idol also-ran always toss around. Nope, countries pull out all the stops. In addition to the creative mind behind CATS and Phantom of the Opera, 2009’s broadcast featured a burlesque routine from Dita Von Teese as part of the German entrant’s performance. In 2008, Russia’s Dima Bilan’s winning entry included a cameo from Olympic gold medal figure skater Evgeni Plushenko, who showed up to deliver a dramatic on-stage routine atop the world’s tiniest ice rink. And this year? Azerbaijan hired Beyonce’s Single Ladies choreographer to design their stage show (didn’t help, they finished outside the top five) and host country Norway spent so much on mounting the television production that their national broadcaster can’t afford to televise the Word Cup. There is an earnest competitiveness and level of unjaded investment in Eurovision that has long since worn off American Idol (if it was ever there in the first place).

So keep your Lee DeWyzes and your Kris Allens and your David Cooks. I’ll take that strange violin-playing hybrid of Justin Bieber and Michael Buble that is 2009 winner Alexander Rybak. As for 2010? Graham Norton and I agree; France totally got robbed.

P.S. Mr. Norway? Call me!

Image via Wikipedia

I never really stop thinking about digital privacy, but what it brought it back to mind recently wasn’t, surprisingly, the hue and cry about Facebook’s privacy settings, but rather sex and Mark Twain. More specifically, the news that after being sealed at his direction for 100 years, the autobiography of one Samuel Clemens is about to see the light of day. The media has glommed onto the fact that the document contains never-before-revealed details of his affair with his secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. Apparently, she even bought him an “electric vibrating sex toy” (I am using this information as the basis for patenting an exclusive line of steampunk vibrators, so back off). The relationship eventually soured and Twain devotes no less than a 400-page addendum to bitching out his former paramour in what we can only assume is exhaustive (and emo) detail. Where’s STFUDeadAmericanHumorists.com when you need it?

Twain, however, was actually a canny personal brander a century before the term entered common-ish parlance. By making us wait 100 years for the publication of his autobiography,  he gets the best of the public/private bargain – additional posthumous fame but no damage to his reputation while he was living and a century for his legacy to mature into a mythic status that one little sensationalist self-penned tell-all from beyond the grave will hardly topple.

But was Twain being unduly selfish in not sharing the more salacious details of his life sooner? Perhaps future novelists could have referenced his peccadilloes as a cautionary tale? In a recent issue of TIME, Steven Johnson tries to mount an altruistic case for the digital TMI, namely that sharing your pain could lead to someone else’s knowledge gain. And while it might be true that “somewhere in the world there exists another couple that would benefit from reading a transcript of your lover’s quarrel last night, or from watching it live on the webcam. Even a simple what-I-had-for-breakfast tweet might just steer a nearby Twitterer to a good meal,” that simply reads like so much post-hoc justification for uncensored blabbing. Confessing our foibles online isn’t part of our civic duty and no one can convince me otherwise, not even the 32 California families who agreed to have their every moves filmed for the sake of sociology. Conclusion? Dual-income multi-child families function exactly as researchers expected they would.

It all comes down to control, or at least the illusion of it. We voluntarily share much more (sensitive) information and share it more widely and with people we have lesser connections to than that which sites like Facebook would share about us, but we make a distinction between the info we choose to share (even if our choice is influenced by a culture that tells us the openness is the default and that not sharing is a barrier to trust or, worse, a hallmark of paranoia) and that which is shared on our behalf. The former is our prerogative (ill-advised though it may be), the latter is downright intrusive.  It’s becoming more of a hair-splitting distinction (although I suppose the intent of the share does count for a little something) and a quaint little flail at safeguarding what we believe to be our autonomy of identity and public image.  Alas, not half so quaint (or effective) as waiting a hundred years to finally air our dirty laundry ( all of your drunken college hook-ups would surely be safely six feet under by then…). But we can’t all be Mark Twain, can we?