Could You Be Any Ruder, Commuter?

Days like Patriot's Day, aka Marathon Monday, in Boston remind me of why I think there should be an etiquette handbook printed on the back of subway cards and tickets, or a crash course in politeness before you can enter a train station. Most YoPros have to take some form of public transportation in order to get to and from work each day, and the bozos we're forced to ride with daily are bad enough. When you multiply that with a Red Sox game and the Boston Marathon, you have a regular idiot convention trapped in Park Street station. This problem isn't confined to Boston, and exists in DC, New York City, and in other cities. For those of you moving to the big city when you graduate or for those who drive to work but catch the subway to see the occasional sports game, here are the 10 Commandments of Public Transportation:

Quarter Life Crisis On the Set of HBO's "Girls

HBO and just about every media outlet out there has been promoting the new show "Girls"for the last couple weeks. The show, created by Lena Dunham and produced by Judd Apatow from 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up fame, takes a brutally honest look at the life of a quartet of underpaid and overprivileged girls living in Brooklyn two years out of college. The show has drawn comparisons to Sex and the City, but with more beer and fewer cosmos, and tackles issues of money, jobs, sex, relationships, and the respective lacks thereof.

While its refreshing to see an honest look at how unglamorous life after college actually is, many of the audience reactions after the first three episodes called out the "Girls" for leeching off their parents and blaming the economy two years after it imploded. I also get the feeling that the sex and relationship depictions are pretty realistic in their awkwardness, but pretty degrading in the way these girls let guys kick them around. This might be part of the reason why a lot of critics are panning "Girls" for lacking a sense of "joy." As a young semi-professional and a person with a solid amount of friends in Brooklyn (and comparable places like Somerville in Boston, Columbia Heights in DC, and The Mission in San Francisco), I can identify with the daily struggles of trying to figure out what the f*ck I should be doing with my life, but I also know that there are a few small victories sprinkled in there that perhaps "Girls" doesn't capture. What are your reactions to this depiction of the quarter life crisis?

Tech Ability and Access: How YoPros Have An Edge and Why We Need to Give Back

In my New Media and PR class last week we touched on the corporate trend of establishing highly responsive customer service teams on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Several classmates shared examples of how they tweeted to various companies like JetBlue about flight delays or booking issues and were responded to within minutes; they even occasionally received additional perks and touchpoints from those customer service reps. It's an amazing innovation in customer service, and as someone who has used Twitter to praise and bring up issues with companies like Zappos, Comcast, Peter Pan and Greyhound Bus lines, and HootSuite, it is refreshingly satisfying to receive a direct response (even if it isn't a solution) from an identifiable person. But when I think about the hours I have wasted on the phone to get someone at Sprint to pick up the phone and then get transferred to eight different departments, I began to wonder if other people are still forced to endure that lack of customer service because of the mediums they utilize? Does (unintentional) discrimination exist for communities that either don't have the tech literacy (e.g. the elderly) or access (e.g. low-income families) to use social media?

Plugging In and Bugging Out: Addendum

This was too good not to share. I heart me some Portlandia (who doesn't want to be Carrie Brownstein?) and this "Did You Read?" sketch was spot-on about our culture's demand to keep up with today's headlines and the two-fold pressure to be culturally superior and more well-read than our peers. My friend Julia over at PR Sugar shared it with me and said "If this is the future of PR, I don't know if I can keep up!" Amen, sister. A PR YoPro's job now requires constant news monitoring in addition to a million other responsibilities to juggle and sometimes I feel like I can't keep up. But I think this is indicative of YoPros in general. It reminds me of a particular set of friends from back home who had subscriptions to the New Yorker by the time we were 13 and another set of friends from college who are in the music industry who love to casually mention obscure bands and their reviews on Pitchfork. And like I mentioned in my previous post, my classmates at school are dominant at reading every article, seeing every video, and sharing every meme in the book and I'm sure they get personal satisfaction every time they can say, "Did you read? Oh you haven't?" Hoping I can keep up!

Facebook Buys Instagram for $1B: Is Tech Worth It?

The times they are a'changing. On Monday, it was announced that Facebook was willing to pay $1 billion for sepia toned photos of hipsters in fields. The actual announcement was that Facebook forked over $1 billion to buy photo-sharing platform Instagram, specifically its active, passionate community and its dominance with mobile users. The Internet caught wind of the news in some pretty delightfully funny ways, but a general consensus emerged that digital/mobile technology and social media have undeniably changed, and will continue to change, how our world operates. These digital innovations took down former corporate giants like Kodak (which filed for bankruptcy filing in 2011) and may be taking down other media behemoths such as the New York Times: Instagram's $1 billion valuation edges out the NYT's $970 million. Yet some Instagram users fled and deleted their accounts to stay out from under the thumb of Mark Zuckerberg and many questioned whether users' photos were now the property of Zuckerberg and Facebook. It seems digital innovations may also be taking down our levels of privacy (whether we like it or not). While I am holding on to my privacy for dear life, I've been pretty cooperative being swept up in the tide of tech. But this deal made me think-- is Instagram really worth that much? Was Groupon worth that much? And what is the mark that these tech companies plan on leaving on the world?

Kids These Days: One Direction

This past Saturday, the new "It" band, One Direction, played on Saturday Night Live. Apparently in pre-teen girl land, this was a momentous occasion, so I decided to see what the hype was about and why these lads were bringing back the boy band craze with a vengeance.



After watching their two performances, I was a bit underwhelmed. Well, a lot underwhelmed. Admittedly, they're cute, and it seems like they can all carry a tune. They're screwed when they hit puberty though because I don't think any of their voices have dropped. They have the antics of 15-year old boys, which was pretty refreshing, but could get annoying right quick (cheek poke? fake mustache in the end credits?) But I didn't quite understand the mix of modern-day Newsie with Bruno Mars ensembles, the lack of choreography beyond switching places on stage and the hand clap, and the kid who kept flipping and shaking his hair at the end of every performance. You're not the Biebs, not by a long shot. And the Biebs' hair looks clean. Yours looks like a Gremlin adopted by the Lost Boys in Neverland.

I grew up on the tail end of NKOTB and right in the thick of BSB and NSYNC. Now these guys wore floor-length duster leather trench coats, space suits, rhinestone track pants, matching denim with Brit Brit, and corn rows and ski goggles, but they OWNED them. And they danced in them. Hard. Who doesn't remember the choreography to "Oh oh oh-ohhh" from The Right Stuff or the hand chomp in "Bye Bye Bye"? Those were boy bands. That was music. And I want it that way, not One Direction. Kids these days...

Why Didn't I Land That Job?

A friend and I were chatting over beers this week about the frustrations of our internship hunt this summer. We heard a whole lot of nothing back from the 10+ internships we each applied to, with the exception of my mass BCC email I received saying that I didn't get it (not even a first-round interview). The whole experience was a little demoralizing because we had no idea what criteria we didn't fulfill for the employers and what distinguished our friends who did receive interviews from us (because on paper, we have more professional work experience). I understand that hiring is a very subjective process and there are a lot of factors that go into it, but not receiving any contact or feedback had our minds running wild about all the reasons we didn't land those internships.