The technological octogenarian

A man, a plan, a canal ... er, an iPhone and Facebook.

My father turned 80 on Saturday, and my sister and I and our spouses went out to The Holmstad, my parents’ retirement community in Batavia, for the occasion. Shortly after 5, we were in the Holmstad dining room, the 6 of us armed with our 5 iPhones and high expectations for a festive meal.

Festive meals can, of course, take a while to arrive; so, as photo opportunities go, the one at right was way easier to seize than most. When I grabbed this image with my iPhone camera, I suspected that all I had to do was write the right caption, upload it to Facebook, and wait for my thousand or so Facebook friends to decide if they, too, found it interesting.

“Dad checks Facebook on his iPhone while waiting for 80th birthday dinner to arrive….”

It was just a few minutes after 5 p.m. By the time we got home from Symphony Center (where we went after the birthday bash ended), it had more interaction than any other single thing I’d ever posted on Facebook. “Awesome,” wrote Don. “Dad rocks,” noted Marie. “So that’s the old block off of which you are a chip,” observed Eric.

And then there were all the folks merely clicking Facebook’s thumbs-up “Like” icon. It should be noted that many of them don’t even know him!

It had already been a big day online in Owen World; a very complimentary link from Scot McKnight’s popular beliefnet.com blog, “Jesus Creed,” was sending my Feb. 27 essay on past and future literary artifacts into the top 5 of my posts over the last year. (Scot drove about 4% of my overall traffic in 2009, and at this rate he’s going to achieve his tongue-in-cheek goal of sending me more readers than does Northwestern.)

So is an octogenarian iPhone-ing Facebooker really all that noteworthy? As Linda observed at home tonight, people born in 1930 have had to adapt to changes that are in many ways more dramatic and less incremental then any of us younger whippersnappers. Television, for one. Church-run retirement homes with waitstaffs and Starbucks counters, for two.

So what are you waiting for, gentle readers? Get your dads and moms their own smart phones and social network accounts. And then send them to owenyoungman.com.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Not dead yet, but for how much longer?

As I have mentioned here a couple of times, the students of the fall Interactive Innovation Project at Medill have been studying the past, assessing the present, and projecting the future of obituaries as a form of journalism and as a source of audience and revenue for publishers. Today on its Web site, obitresearch.com, the class released a white paper, “The State of the American Obituary,” that contains their findings.

They report that the central position that newspapers have held in communicating the news of Americans’ deaths is substantially threatened by changes in technology and audience behavior. Unlike other categories of aggregated listings, this is an area where newspapers today still retain a dominant market share. In fact, Legacy.com Inc. – the Evanston-based aggregator of newspaper death notices that sponsored the research project, and where (disclosure) I am an independent board member – hosts death notices for 7 of every 10 Americans who die each year.

The class found that new user- and family-driven forms of remembering the dead, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as standalone memorial sites and services, are attracting audience members who want not only to read about their friends and loved ones, but also to participate in their memorialization. While this began happening as soon as the first Web browsers appeared, the growth of social media, particularly among the Baby Boom generation, is causing an acceleration.

In preparing their report, the eight students who worked on this project conducted quantitative and qualitative surveys, reviewed scholarly and industry research, and conducted interviews with employees at newspapers nationwide. Based on their findings, they conclude with recommendations to media stakeholders on how to adapt to the many changes in the landscape of grieving, remembering and memorializing the dead.

You can download the report here. It was principally written and edited by Ashley Bates, Ian Monroe, and Ming Zhuang. Contributing researchers were Jake Bressler, Alina Dain, Chris Deaton, Tiffany Glick, and Kate Goshorn.

This is your brain. This is your brain on Twitter.

My colleague Ellen Shearer posted a link to the Medill faculty listserv yesterday about a recent academic study in Scotland with a headline-grabbing conclusion. In fact, let me quote the headline from the Telegraph:

Facebook ‘enhances intelligence’ but Twitter ‘diminishes it’, claims psychologist

Dr. Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, did the study with 11- to 14-year-olds. It indicates that, more specifically,

Playing video war games and solving Sudoku may have the same effect as keeping up to date with Facebook . . . But text messaging, micro-blogging on Twitter and watching YouTube were all likely to weaken ”working memory.”

”On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it’s also very succinct,” said Dr. Alloway. ”You don’t have to process that information. Your attention span is being reduced and you’re not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections.”

This matter of how the brain processes information is of great interest to many people. One of them is my former Tribune boss Jack Fuller, who in fact has devoted the last several years to this topic himself, particularly to the piece that explores how people absorb and understand news. Indeed, he has a book coming out next April from the University of Chicago, What Has Been Happening to News, that explores the topic in depth.

He allowed me to read it in typescript, and I won’t steal of any of its thunder now. But more than two years ago, in a Tribune Perspective piece entitled “Reasoning With Feeling: Boosters of the Internet see it as a perfect forum for reasoned debate. But neuroscience tells us that emotions keep popping up,” he began to explore what he was learning.

Neuroscience came into its own at about the same time the Internet did. In the past couple decades, new techniques for peering into brain processes haveled to extraordinary advances in understanding the mind. These have profoundly refigured the picture that came down to us from philosophers and early generations of psychologists.

One area is particularly fascinating: The new model of the mind offers important but unsettling insights into why people respond to today’s media as they do.

The archived piece is worth a spin (though the parser that put it up on the Tribune archive site does a lousy job with word spacing every 80 characters or so). Essentially, Jack is exploring a different issue than the Scottish researcher: not the diminishment of intelligence, but the primacy of emotion “[w]hen the brain is challenged to process very difficult information – let’s say, multitasking amid an overload of information.”

Come the spring, you will want to read Jack’s book. In the meantime, however, I guess I will feel good that I spend more time on Facebook than either Twitter or YouTube.

Though you could argue it might be a better demonstration of intelligence, diminishing or otherwise, to spend less time with both.