In a press release in March this year the Kaiser Foundation released its findings on the emerging generation it named as “Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds
Generation M“ A national Kaiser Family Foundation survey found children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using new media like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with old media like TV, print and music. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they’re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.
The study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, examined media use among a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 3rd through 12th graders who completed detailed questionnaires, including nearly 700 self-selected participants who also maintained seven-day media diaries.
The executive summary of the study (#7250) and the full report on which it is based (#7251) are available on the Kaiser Family Foundation’s website at http://www.kff.org/.
During our first session together, the Emerging Generations in Conversation group identified a number of potential texts to study over the next eight weeks. We included:
1. Reality TV Shows - Survivor, Big Brother, The Mole. What are these shows telling us about the values or aspirations of those who watch them and those who make them? Are they aimed at Millennials or Gen X?
2. Synod in Session. The most recent Synod showed indications of emerging generations of leaders and their approaches to community and decision making. At the same time we were able to see fine examples of postwar generational leaders in action.
3. Television Advertisements over time. We considered, for example, the changes in advertisements on the topic of AIDS. Another possibility is the history of Coke ads.
4. Technological Advances. What does the prevalence of mobile phones and other such devices say about the generation about to leave school (aged 8 - 18)? How will the mp3 player and portable playstation, not to mention the palm top computer, change the way Generation M thinks, acts and interacts?
On Tuesday I met with six staff from YACMU, Youth and Childrens Ministry Unit of Queensland Synod, Uniting Church, to start on an eight week course on emerging generations in conversation. The seven people in the room (+ one on speaker phone) were in their twenties, thirties and forties. We need a few older participants but we managed OK.
One fascinating reflection on Generation X centred around the impact of the Grim Reaper AIDS television commercial in 1987. In the government commissioned advertisement a cowled, bowling-ball-weilding Reaper knocked down men, women and children in a bowling alley.
The solemn voiceover: At first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS, but now we know every one of us could be devastated by it. That’s why you should always use a condom, because you can never be sure just how many people you are really going to bed with.
We reflected on how that ad, more than anything else, got people talking about AIDS in Australia. People who came of age later on have not had the same fear of AIDS.
Here’s a press release from 2002 highlighting the multi-dimensioned impacts of the Grim Reaper ad.
AIDS Pioneer Regrets “Grim Reaper” Demonization of Gay Men
Australia’s 1980s “Grim Reaper” advertising campaign was pivotal in changing heterosexual behavior but had the regrettable consequence of demonizing gay men, according to the country’s leading AIDS pioneer.
Dr. Ron Penny, who diagnosed Australia’s first case of AIDS 20 years ago, was on the government body that approved the campaign’s release in 1987. The Simon Reynolds-designed campaign featured a cowled, bowling ball-wielding Reaper knocking down men, women and children in a bowling alley. The campaign was one of the most effective ever launched in Australia, said Penny, who recently retired as head of Immunology at Sydney’s St. Vincent’s Hospital. But it struck an unfortunate blow to the gay community, which had already taken the lead in AIDS awareness and safe sex practices. “The downside was that the Grim Reaper became identified with gay men rather than as the Reaper. That was what we had unintentionally produced — [the belief] by some that the Reaper was people with HIV infection, rather than the Reaper harvesting the dead,” said Penny.
However, in terms of being “a wake-up call to Australia,” the ad’s impact was astounding, Penny said. “I think there’s never been anything on television or any media that has ever matched it in terms of impact, but no advertising can be without some downside, and that was never intended. But it at least made people aware and probably did change sexual practices of heterosexuals.”
“Prevention is still important, and I think that the new generation of gay men see AIDS as an uncommon disease and therefore taking risk has reappeared,” said Penny. “We’ve got to talk about what is a floor level that you accept — like motor vehicle accidents. You can’t guarantee that people won’t die on the roads, but you’ve got to do better than you’re doing.”
It was hot and dry today in South East Queensland. I heard that it was 40 degrees celsius in Logan this afternoon. Fortunately I was able to work in air conditioned buildings most of the day. On the way home from Redcliffe I noticed that the setting sun shining through the smoke coming from the grass fires in The Gap. What a photo opportunity! Only problem was I was driving on the Gateway motorway. All of a sudden the traffic slowed down and stopped. I wound the window and took a few photos - one of which I’ve included here.
Anyone tried the Bible Society SMS Bible? You download the software that connects with your mobile phone. Every verse from the Contemporary English Version is translated into SMS language. The Bible Society claims that the true meaning and order of the words are retained, 100 % faithful to the original text.
Here’s how it works. If you have your own data cable connecting your computer to a mobile phone you can send your messages directly. If you do not have a data cable or mobile your messages go via the internet to the Bible Society server which will send the messages to your recipients on your behalf.Each message will cost 25c, prepaid.
Despite Peter Kafka’s prediction that the iTunes Store would open in Australia on October 3, nothing has been rolled out. It’s a bit like the second coming of Jesus. Lots of people have theories about what will happen and when it will happen. But in reality, we could be waiting a long time before we see the action.
In the meantime, we have to find alternatives. We can look through the American iTunes store but we can’t buy. We can’t even download free files downunder.
Maybe Australia has to revise its copyright laws before we get iTunes Store. After all, it’s still illegal to videotape anything off the television, let alone copy music from a CD we own to an mp3 player.
The BAD Club (Brisbane Advertising and Design) and the CREAM Awards Committee are holding an awards night at the Powerhouse in Brisbane on Friday night. The CREAM awards celebrate effectiveness fuelled by creativity. BAD awards are designed to raise the bar in advertising and design. It’s $165 a ticket. Unfortunately I won’t be there as I’ll be teaching a course on missional church over the weekend.
I’ll also be missing the Advertising and Design Asia Pacific 4um? events being held during the week. BAD is presenting a series of workshops this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon. I have an appointment at 3.30 pm tomorrow so I’ll miss the power of typography, the power of breaking rules with Jonathan Kneebone, Glue Society. Maybe I’ll get to the power of emotion at 2 pm. I’ve already missed out on the power of photography with Matt Hoyle and the power of research with Dominic Lefebvre.
If only I had two lives. Then I could be a creative making television advertisements for my other me to write up at Duncan’s TV Adland.
Some of my interview with Jenny Swan from ABC Central Queensland, is online in an article by Kim Lester: Church for those who don’t like church. I was in at ABC Coast FM when the producer Anita suggested I do a phone hook up with Rockhampton next. Jenny was keen to explore alternatives to spending lot of money on cathedrals and other purpose-built worship spaces.
Part of my thinking on this was stimulated by an experience I had when training for ministry. We had a Taize service in the park - in a rotunda much like the one pictured here. The atmosphere was great. But afterwards we realised that the content of the service had made no reference at all to the environment we were in. We’d just translated an inside experience to the park.
So what would an ‘in-the-park’ experience be like if it was designed for that environment? There might be more awareness of the sounds of silence for a start. And perhaps more use of the metaphors of the greenery.
I heard an excellent interview on ABC Radio Coast FM this morning. Peter Gooch was talking with a pyschologist about the 11 rules of life often attributed to Bill Gates. He asked if we’re being too soft with our kids, giving them an unbalanced diet of self-esteem teaching that doesn’t take into account hard realities of life. The Baby Boomers, as a generation, have little experience of harsh suffering and as a result have raised their children in cocoons, so to speak.
As Peter said this morning, the 11 rules of life often cited in emails, web sites and newspaper columns, are the work of Charles J. Sykes (pictured here). They first appeared in a column he wrote for the The San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 September 1996.
The rules are not the work of Bill Gates, who never gave such as speech at Mt. Whitney High School in Visalia, California. And they’re not by Kurt Vonnegut, who did not give the sunscreen speech at a college graduation. It was in fact written by Mary Schmich, a columnist for the Sunday Chicago Tribune. See the Snopes article on these urban legends.
And what’s more there are fourteen rules of life written by Sykes. I’ve posted them all below.
I’m sure we have developed a baby boomer soft theology that could do with some reality treatment. What do you think?
Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase “It’s not fair” 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.
Rule No. 2: The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it’s not fair. (See Rule No. 1)
Rule No. 3: Sorry, you won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn’t have a Gap label.
Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.
Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren’t embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.
Rule No. 6: It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of “It’s my life,” and “You’re not the boss of me,” and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it’s on your dime. Don’t whine about it, or you’ll sound like a baby boomer.
Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.
Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)
Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don’t get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we’re at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)
Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.
Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.
Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.
Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.
Brian McLaren’s written the cover article for the latest edition of Sojourners, on building bridges between extremes of liberalism and conservatism. I like what he has to say. He starts by drawing our attention to the commitment Jesus made to entering the culture he lived in. Likewise he looks at Paul’s call to ‘be all things to all kinds of people’, despite our saying that ‘we can’t be all things to all people’.
McLaren’s hunch is that there are four bridges we have to deal with in our hyper-polarized world today:
1. Religious Right and Secular Left.
“On the one side we have people for whom the good news of Jesus and the policies of George W. Bush are bonded with super glue. On the other side we have people who believe that all religion is superstitious mush and wish we would just dispense with the whole business once and for all and trust science and government instead.”
2. Religious Right and Religious Left.
“More and more supposedly “secular Left” folk are coming out of the closet as people of faith. For them, being anti-war is more important than being anti-abortion for religious reasons, and for them, some form of recognition for homosexual couples is a moral issue based in faith. They want to argue these issues not only on the basis of politics and sociology, but also on the basis of the Bible and theology.”
3. Secular Right and Religious Left.
“I suspect that hiding behind some religious conservatives are some secular conservatives who are manipulating their religious colleagues for a secular, cynical, ideological conservatism. These are the people who have (in the worst sense of the word) a relativist-postmodern conservative ideology, best articulated in Ron Suskind’s article “Without a Doubt,” published in The New York Times Magazine last October. These conservative ideologues are happy for religious conservatives to win support for their policies, but in the end it’s ideology, not theology, that guides them. Ironically, they have less in common theologically with those they have the most in common with ideologically, and vice versa.”
4. Secular Right and Secular Left.
“In spite of the widespread assumption that religion is the new politics, there still are secular forces on both sides for whom a thoughtful Christian (or generically spiritual) voice is seen as stupid for actually believing in such unscientific and impractical things as God, hope, forgiveness, sacrifice, and prayer.”
McLaren says that there is a rising ‘purple peoplehood’ out there - people who don’t want to be defined as red or blue, but have elements of both, and for whom faith speaks to both abortion and war, both sexuality and ecology, both family values and fair, respectful treatment for gay people - then we will need to learn new ways of communication. He finishes with suggestions on how to engage in conversation that takes this complexity seriously.
Postkiwi Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
A national Kaiser Family Foundation survey found children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using new media like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with old media like TV, print and music. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they’re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.
One fascinating reflection on 
Dr. Ron Penny, who diagnosed Australia’s first case of AIDS 20 years ago, was on the government body that approved the campaign’s release in 1987. The Simon Reynolds-designed campaign featured a cowled, bowling ball-wielding Reaper knocking down men, women and children in a bowling alley. The campaign was one of the most effective ever launched in Australia, said Penny, who recently retired as head of Immunology at Sydney’s St. Vincent’s Hospital. But it struck an unfortunate blow to the gay community, which had already taken the lead in AIDS awareness and safe sex practices. “The downside was that the Grim Reaper became identified with gay men rather than as the Reaper. That was what we had unintentionally produced — [the belief] by some that the Reaper was people with HIV infection, rather than the Reaper harvesting the dead,” said Penny.
As Peter said this morning, the 11 rules of life often cited in emails, web sites and newspaper columns, are the work of Charles J. Sykes (pictured here). They first appeared in a column he wrote for the 
Charles J. Sykes is the author of the book “
Brian McLaren’s written the cover article for the latest edition of 
Postkiwi Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
