2008 YPulse National Mashup Recap

Last week's 2nd annual YPulse National Mashup was lots of fun, if the schwag pictured above is any indication. Lots of fun folks, pop culture tidbits, and fantastic discussions. There was a ton to distill and I've already written two bite-sized summaries on Spinning Indie about Teen Music Trends and the Go-Gos and MC Hammer, Chess and Hip Hop.

Similar to last year's Mashup, I was struck by the rapid changes in technology over the course of a year. During the conference, attendees were glued to laptops, Blackberries, and iPhones. Secondary conversations took place on Twitter (as Mortified's Dave Nadelburg pointed out, the youthful act of "passing notes is now done through Twitter"), in the YPulse chat room on Meebo, and through blog comments. I spied one young attendee toggling between LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter as he listened to a panelist and indeed, we heard much about all of these social networking tools.

In terms of mobile, the speaker from Blyk pointed out that people say they'd rather leave their wallet at home than their mobile phone and Mei Lin Ng from mig33 said that for many young people, first access to the Internet and email has been via mobile devices. Jacqueline Lane from research group Teen Eyes told us that teens typically send between 50 and 70 text messages a day.

Many have summarized this conference already, so I'm just going to focus this post on my favorite tidbits from the Mashup.

1) American Teen is Required Viewing

American Teen: Attendees were able to catch the premiere of this amazing documentary about teens at an Indiana high school. It was artfully done and did a great job of capturing how teen life today is different from the days before mobile phones, digital cameras and the Internet. Harassment takes on a whole new level with these tools. Most of the stars of the film were on hand to answer questions afterwards, although the break-out star Hannah was unfortunately unable to attend.

2) 100 Young Americans is Required Reading

100 Young Americans: The author of the book 100 Young Americans, Michael Franzini, gave an excellent presentation about his project of interviewing 100 young people from all over the country. The book attempted to provide portraits of all types of teens and young adults, encompassing a wide range of subcultures. Franzini said that there is "an unprecedented lack of understanding of teens by parents and young adults" and blames it on the "biggest generation gap in 50 years," which he says is mainly due to technology.

3) Technology Has Changed Teen/Parent Communication

Because of technology, teens and parents have both more ways to communicate with each other AND more buffers and barriers to communication. Speakers at the YPulse Mashup addressed both sides of this issue.

John Poisson, CEO of Tiny Pictures talked about Radar, a real-time photo sharing service. He mentioned that in their community, young people are sharing photos with family members and parents and that some send parents "photo alibis" when they are away from home. Pretty ingenuous. Similarly, during the "Casual Games" panel, Min Kim of Nexon said that in Korea parents often play online games using their kids' accounts while they're in school in order to help get them to the next level, thereby making the kids "heroes" to their school pals. Others added that many kids and parents play online games to bridge the miles and communicate when a parent is out of town.

It was a bit more controversial when Stephen Saiz from Disney's mobile division said that young people "don't want to communicate with parents directly." I hope he didn't really mean that kids don't want to talk to their own parents. I've certainly heard before that kids do not want to talk to other kids' parents. It's been pointed out that back in the day one had to deal with the gatekeeper parent on the phone, but that now kids are able to bypass that by texting, IMing, or by calling on personal cell phones.

Michael Franzini also acknowledged that there is less parental control today than during Generation X's childhood (he mentioned the example of Gen Xers having to call friends on their parent's landlines, so parents were more aware of friends, etc.). Stemming from this, he said there is more difficulty today with teen/parent communication and based on his presentation, that may in large part be due to technology.

Nikol Hasler and Guy Clark discussed their humor-based "Midwest Teen Sex Show, " an online show where teens can get information about sex and sexuality. They've received very positive feedback from parents and said that that their online episodes can be conversation starters for parents and teens who typically have a hard time discussing issues surrounding sexuality. As with all of these examples, there's an important reminder for parents to not fear new technology. As Linda Burch from Common Sense Media argued during the "Cyberbullying" panel, parents really need to "...understand...kids' media and embrace it."


4) Online World IS the World for Teens

Don't underestimate teens' online experiences, as they are an integral part of their lives. They've grown up with technology and take it for granted. Adults may think about "going online," but for teens, the online world is just as real as the offline world. Online boyfriends and girlfriends are just as real as offline love interests for many. During the fabulous "Are Girls the New Geeks" panel, Ashley Qualls of Whateverlife addressed this generational difference when she pointed out that the term "geek is almost outdated..." For older folks computer whizzes may have been ostracized, but today, being tech savvy is normal and necessary. According to Ashley, "the Internet is our new lives."

5) Teens may not be Watching TV on TV, But It's Still TV

I participated in a great user-generated lunchtime discussion about television. Among the many interesting folks at my table were staff from BBC, Disney, the Kaiser Family Foundation, Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising, and Youth Intelligence. Someone at the table mentioned that teens like to say that they don't own a television or watch TV, but at the same time they have no qualms about viewing TV on iTunes. This may be part of the reason why TV execs are so perplexed by the amazing popularity and buzz around the low-rated "Gossip Girl."

At the table we talked about the relationship between online and offline TV content, including examples of shows like "Quarterlife," which generated buzz online and was then moved to network television, only to fail miserably (and now is an online community). Additionally, there have been online shows like Mark Burnett's reality show "Gold Rush" and the upcoming ABC Family documentary series Plain White T's Meet Me in California (premiering July 30th). Network TV shows are also creating vibrant online communities, such as the ABC Family show "Greek" and its "Virtual Rush" site full of contests and social networking tools. People at the table agreed that "Lost" has one of the best companion sites.

6) MTV is Still Relevant -- Especially Come Election Time

It was great to hear from MTV and to be reminded that they've been very involved in elections and social causes for years and years. According to Ian Rowe of MTV, "Since 1992...we've played a huge role...demonstrating that young people...can be a force [in elections]." Their goal this year is to get 30 million young people to vote. Right now they have a project called Street Team '08, where they've hired 51 citizen journalists from all over the country to cover local and national issues relevant to young people in every state.

Ypulse Mashup 2007 Post 2: Teens are social while in isolation

Throughout the Ypulse Mashup I was feeling older and older. I use email, which definitely marks me as an adult. It became clear that as an adult I am communicating with the world quite differently than teens. We heard over and over again that young people rarely use email and the primary use for email is to communicate with adults and business people. Teens may say that they "emailed" a friend, when in fact they mean that they communicated through a MySpace or Facebook page because they connect with these social networking websites throughout their days.

Cell phones also seem to be more of a lifeline for teens than they are for me and many of my GenX cohorts. 18-year-old teen entrepreneur Aseem Badshah of Scriptovia.com said that he has his phone with him at all times and even made a cuddling gesture while telling the crowd that he sleeps with it and brings it into the bathroom when he showers. He made an interesting point about youth, saying "we like to be social when we're in isolation."

This desire to be always-connected is striking to me about our culture in 2007. It wasn't all that long ago that people walked down the street without phones or iPods, and, yet, today, it seems rare to see people who are walking/driving/waiting alone without some form of technology to connect them or entertain them. Even groups of young people often walk down the street while each is on their own separate phone.

YPulse Mashup 2007

I just had an amazing 2 days at the first YPulse Mashup in San Francisco. Having followed YPulse since the very early days, I was so excited to see Anastasia put on such an amazing conference.

I’ve been to a variety of conferences related to youth culture—from some of the big industry conferences like the Youth Marketing Mega Event (see my 2005 recap on Ypulse) and What Teens Want East (I covered the 2005 event for Ypulse), as well as a Youth Marketing Summit put together by Yahoo! a few years ago, a great conference about youth and technology put on by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism in 2003 called "Connecting with the Wired Generation: Young People, Digital Technology and the Media", and numerous academic conferences about youth culture, popular culture and music.

What really set the YPulse Mashup apart from all of these other events was the diversity of speakers from both the academic realm (Henry Jenkins AND danah boyd!!!) and the corporate world. Additionally, a panel focused on social change seemed just as relevant to the mission of the conference as any other panel, giving the impression that non-profits weren’t just an afterthought (as they often are at standard "marketing" conferences). But…probably the biggest relief of all was that presenters were smart and interesting and I didn't feel like I was sitting through canned presentations where people were trying to hawk their wares.

I ran into friends, former colleagues, scholarly idols, and even someone from Real World Seattle! You may remember Irene from RW Seattle, who most recently was doing a podcast out of San Francisco until a fire burned down her apartment. I hope she didn’t think I was a stalker when I said I was a HUGE Real World fan. I didn't even get the chance to mention to her that I wrote an entire Master's thesis on the show...that really would have scared her.

There are always people at conferences who I'm dying to meet, but don't get the chance to before they race off to their flights. Dixie Feldman from The-N was one such lady. She kicked ass on her panel about old-school media, talking about all the cool things that fans of their programming are creating online, like memorials for fallen Degrassi character JT. She also sass-talked a reporter who asked a pointed question, saying, 'oh CNN lady…' before diving into her answer. I didn't read her profile in the conference booklet until later, but I love this woman even more after seeing that she name-checked Sassy magazine in her bio. My beloved Sassy!

I also would have loved to have reminisced with Amy Gibby from eCrush about some of the playlists that a colleague and I wrote in 2001 while I was at my most favorite job ever at Uplister when we created some special prom and Valentine-themed playlists for teens on eCrush to share with their crushes. Oh the memories of bands like Lifehouse!

And, speaking of Uplister, I didn’t get a chance to meet David Hyman of Mog (and music website Addicted to Noise from back in the day) as I was volunteering on mic runner duties---but his online music community, which he described as a "platform for the hardcore music junkie…to express who they are as musical human beings" is definitely Uplister 2.0, even down to the High Fidelity comparisons. It's pretty astonishing that their Mog-o-matic tool can identify all the music on your hard drive and then find other people in their community based on your collections. He said that he doubted that these music "obsessives" on Mog listen to radio. I'm guessing that his point is that they are more focused on digital music. The thing that I always wonder, though, is what role does college radio and Internet radio play in the lives of these obsessive digital music consumers? I’m a music obsessive and college radio fan, but I'm not as tapped into the digital music scene. Is that common? Are college radio listeners more likely to be older Luddites, still buying CDs and maintaining collections of vinyl?

Beyond the interesting content and attendees, I was intrigued by the use of technology throughout the conference. The space was wired, so folks were on their laptops during the sessions, during breaks and during lunch discussions. Others were tapped in to their Blackberries, iPhones, Treos, etc. During one panel discussion the moderator only accepted questions that were text messaged to his phone. This will definitely be the wave of the future. I also heard about side conversations that were taking place online during the conference. Someone told me that she had commented on one attendee's blog during the conference and he promptly emailed her back, asking where she was sitting.

I remember the days just 2 years ago when I was blogging at What Teens Want in New York City, feeling fairly anonymous. At the YPulse Mashup those days are over---as many people were tapped in to their blogs, the web, IM, and email for the entire time. YPulse contributing editor Chet even told me that he was 'double fisting,' going back and forth between messages on his iPhone and Blackberry. In a comment after the Henry Jenkins/danah boyd keynote Chet also mentioned that he had twittered, posted a conference photo to Flickr, and fielded text messages from friends during the presentation. The speed with which all of this information travels is staggering. I was thinking today about posting about the conference, but I worry that I'm already too late since I'm betting that much has already been posted by live bloggers. The conference ended less than 24 hours ago, but is what I have to say already too late?

More later….if it's not TOO late!