Open Letters from Michael Muse

You know NOTHING about where the daily deal industry is headed

2011-06-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

Maybe the title of this post sounds true for you personally, maybe you think you've got it covered. Hear me out, I think I can convince you its true. In the last 2 years, Groupon and LivingSocial have grown into billion dollar companies and become household names, bringing new life to the long awaited digitization of local. While some will argue that these companies are members of the next wave of blue-chip internet businesses, others point to the 450+ 'clones' and argue that users are feeling deal fatigue while merchants aren't renewing. Is this industry a one hit wonder, the Macarena of this decade?

Doubtful. There's just too much money in the migration of local ad dollars to online. And the economic phenomenon of group buying isn't new, but the social and real time web has enabled it to finally blossom in the consumer market. While naysayers abound, there are too many smart people with too much to lose for this market to implode. It just needs to evolve. A few companies are leading the way, helping this industry grow up the same way it came into this world: at lightning speed. Here are the winds of change:

A better deal seeker experience:
For one, the way consumers 'sign up for deals' is overly simplified- find/buy a deal, and count on an egregious amount of noise hitting your mailbox thereafter. Most users don't realize that daily deals companies use 'loss leaders' - extra good deals with A+ merchants- that get you to sign up but that aren't indicative of what you'll get on the average day. A leading aggregator, Yipit, rates deals so they can suggest the best ones and optimize the deal-seeker experience. They minimize noise by allowing you specify your interests/location so you only get stuff near you that you like, and even let you augment your email frequency or do it all sans-email via their web-based search engine. But beyond email newsletters and web, there should be better (other) opt-in channels for those looking for deals. Groupon and LivingSocial have already recognized this, and begun experimenting with mobile apps that let users request deals on demand. Its a new behavior for both end users and merchants, so stay tuned.

New (non-opt-in) delivery channels:
These deals don't need to be daily, or even opt-in. They can be one time, group buying deep discounts. Which means that publishers (traditional media) with established audiences can run them too, as display ads (and they are). Since publishers aren't experts in daily deals but are increasingly running them, they need a partner who can help them conquer this ad unit. A great example of this is GroupCommerce - who essentially help merchants and publishers connect and execute campaigns, much like a traditional ad network. Getting past the email opt-in could tremendously grow the reach of these types of deals, particularly with whitelabelers activating traditional publishers.

Deal-creators deserve data:
If you're going to go to all the effort of creating a disrupting marketing push by offering a daily deal, and deliver a huge spike of traffic with unclear profitability hurdles, you need as many performance metrics as possible. Surprisingly, tracking redemptions is almost always done by hand (and usually a complete disaster). Point of sale systems like the one Groupon is rolling out help with redemption validation & analytics, and Offermatic takes it a step further by making redemption completely seamless - straight to the credit card (no coupons!). But probably the most important piece of data is knowing which of your deal takers actually come back, since you basically only make money when you can create repeat business. So clearly repeat customer data is important, and its certainly one application of our technology at LocalResponse, which we have been exploring with daily deal companies.

Market pressure on the infamous 'cut':
There are rumors that the big two are lowering the cut they take, but even more rumors indicate this may be a sales tactic to lock in merchants with an exclusive (and shut out other deals companies). There needs to be a more earnest, ROI based cost structure for running a deal. With no data, there hasn't been. One of the most interesting companies re-envisioning the revshare is Scoutmob, which runs familiar 50% daily deals but earns money more like OpenTable, charging a per lead value instead of taking a percentage of gross proceeds. They let the merchant swipe the credit card, and charge the merchant a flat per-customer fee. While their lower margins make it harder to market competitively, their users and merchants get a better deal than anyone else out there, so perhaps their efforts to scale both sales and userbase are more cost-efficient.

Putting deal customization in the hands of merchants:
How long will daily deal companies be able to keep bullying merchants on when and how they can offer deals? Merchants deserve on-demand deal delivery, as often as they want. Perry Evans, CEO of Closely, writes on his blog that often with discount marketing, WHEN is actually the most important part of discounting. Closely lets you customize just that, and promote them on your own terms. The downside is that you need to build your own audience, but the upside is you can get to bring in business on demand and control your voice. Another fascinating wrinkle of customization is being able to control when customers can redeem said discounts. Signpost offers not only day/week parting, but set-your-own ceilings on the total number of eligible deals, letting merchants focus on filling off-peak hours. Deal customization lets businesses optimize their traffic, a scary-cool idea.

Focus moving to loyalty and customer lifetime value:
For now, daily deals have been all about new customers. Yet all the hype in location based services (who of course also are offering deals) is around loyalty. There is a huge disconnect between these concurrent hype storms. One exception is LevelUp, a daily deal service created by some LBS-industry-peeps, a cross-pollination of these storms that helps merchants reward loyalty by giving customers increasingly bigger discounts for each incremental visit (up to three visits). At LocalResponse, our roots are also in LBS, and we believe you can market to an existing customer without cannibalizing your business: via smaller, lightweight offers. You probably wouldn't call ours 'daily deals', but that moniker was old the first time I heard it.

These (among many other) innovations are changing the face of a highly lucrative industry which is still only in its infancy. Local 2.0 hasn't even started yet - the products above are just the tip of the iceberg. "Groupons" as you know them are first-drafts, like carphones, which will evolve: to pagers, cellphones, PDAs, feature phones, smartphones, tablets, and onwards. Local online is only beginning to be underway. The real hype is that people (shareholders?) think they know where Groupon or anyone else is headed, with so much at stake even this early on. That's like calling a winner on the first step of the Kentucky Derby. Google just started doing daily deals. While that makes some folks shudder, consider that one time, Google were 'just another' search engine me-too. With that in mind, which Groupon me-too could be the next Google? So, I hope I've convinced you: You know NOTHING about where the daily deal industry is headed. Note: me neither :)

**Originally posted in edited form on DigiDay**

Two Ways the Web is FAILING Local Businesses

2011-05-10T07:31:00.000-07:00

Local business owners are frustrated with the web. Yet it holds so much promise. Whats wrong here?

Generally, there is a common theme: everyone.com and their mother is trying to separate a business from their customers, rather than bring them together. Isn't this the exact opposite of what the web is supposed to do?
Let me explain. For years, online dot-coms have built portals for customers to talk to each other, talk to strangers, talk to experts, all to get information about businesses. All this communication, but as soon as the businesses get involved, suddenly there is this awkward middleman. He talks on behalf of your business, tells you what you can say, when & where you can say it, and to whom. What just happened? Whose customers are they? Consider if you owned a business and you heard these pitches:

Scenario 1 - Borrowing customers & renting out your business model)
"Hey! Want to run a daily deal? We'll email a list of our customers (consider who has the credit card numbers) and resell them your services, LocalBiz. We can guarantee hundreds of our customers will use your services! The cost? All you have to do is let us use your business model at a 75% (!) discount. Assuming you dont have 90% margins, your job is then to convince MY daily deal customers to come back, to become YOUR regular old customers. Of course when you do, you'll be charging them twice as much for the exact same thing."
--No wonder 400+ daily deal sites can afford to call business owners every day. Their customers pay them a lot to do so.

Scenario 2 - Cross promotion, to brand dilution, to appreciation fraud)
We have a hot new app that all the kids are 'checking in' to your business on. Wanna run a deal for free? No problem, LocalBiz! Just tell your customers to become my customers- to 'download SocialBizFriend.com!' Put signs up in your store, in fact, make it look like a Nascar for dot-coms, because as it turns out there are hundreds of apps like mine. If you do, we'll let you engage with... wait for it ...your (now our) customers. People you brought me. Go ahead and offer them a deal. When you do, I'll tell 'em for you & fraudulently take the credit. "This deal brought to you by SocialBizFriend.com!"
--Local Businesses are somehow left running ads for dot-coms, for free... not the other way around.

What?
This is the crux of the problem with both scenarios: Businesses deserve to own that customer relationship. To talk to their customers directly. When they get a sales call that mentions the word "customers", they should ask the question - "will I be able to contact this audience directly?". If the answer is 'no', it means they arent your customers at all, and there is almost definitely a 'catch', no matter how hidden.

The good news? This will change. The bad news? A lot has to change before we get there. Its our vision at LocalResponse. But we'll be the first to admit that we are just one fish in the largest of ponds. Local Businesses need to demand they own the customer relationship, and support the businesses that help them do so (there's our shameless plug).

Local businesses get online-savvier every day. When enough are asking for Local 2.0, the floodgates will come crashing down.

**Originally posted on BusinessInsider**

Open letter to OEMs that develop on Android

2010-07-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

I am hearing rumors that big corporates and investment banks are toying with the idea of migrating to iPhones from BlackBerrys. I don't think this would be wise, but thats not what's top of mind. If this were to happen - it would be a massive indictment of BlackBerry's OS and developer relations. But the hardware (and obviously enterprise compatibility) usually wins the fight for RIM.

BlackBerry promises a lot with its new OS 6.0 - but lets be fair, the only reason I use a BB is that is has a PERFECT keyboard - the software just isn't compelling. And 6.0 probably wont move the needle there.

The Android OS on 2.2 is so nice that I have been wanting to switch. But gimme a real keyboard. I dont need a giant screen. Basically the hardware on my Blackberry Tour is exactly what I want - I wouldn't mind some minor upgrades but its fantastic as it is and never leaves me wanting. Except I want to be running Android.

To be clear - I dont want a Moto Droid, with its sidekick-esque keyboard that makes me feel like I'm texting the Olsen twins every time I use it. Not to mention the fact that i have to slide it out and that its VERY clunky and slow to type.

Please somebody build a phone that is shaped like my BlackBerry Tour, with a decent camera, a GPS chip, an accelerometer and a keyboard as close as possible to the perfection that BlackBerry has achieved over the years. And make it run Android. Ill buy it at full price, since Im under contract. As long as its on Verizon.

Alternatively - GOOG please buy RIM if you want to do mobile hardware right. That Nexus One deal baffled me. A RIM acquisition would be a death blow to AAPL.

Who's with me??

Open letter to location based services

2009-09-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

After a hiatus from blogging, I wanted to announce a new side project I have been working on with some of my colleagues at buzzd.com. The side project is called HashCeratops.org, which I will explain after a brief explanation of how the project came about:

Genesis:
At buzzd, we have been feverishly working at creating a compelling platform built around finding the very coolest places & events around you. Our newest application, on the iPhone, is really great at doing just that, and I am very proud of what the buzzd team has put together. Building this product made us really confront an implicit problem that a lot of location based services (LBS) know about but haven’t gotten around to addressing quite yet.

The problem:
This problem is that organizing the plethora of venue “data” created by all these varying services is a messy job. The industry knows that a high degree of convergence is inevitable, but not easy. All of our individual services can be made better if we can compare public buzzes, tweets, check-ins, or whatever else you want to call it – at the same place. Take it from me - we aggregate over 10 content providers and then merge, clean, and de-duplicate venues - its a royal pain. The difficulty is in identifying what the ‘same place’ really is on different services and content providers. We are in desperate need of some better standards – essentially, synchronization tools.

Industry best practices typically involve matching venues based on a phone number. There are other solutions, but this is the most typical. Briefly, let me explain why this is ‘messy’: Phone numbers change, venues get new names but don’t change phone numbers, venues have multiple phone numbers, or even multiple venues have the same phone number (see Webster Hall vs. The Studio). Similar problems arise with other methodologies. Even geotagged data is problematic: with all the different technologies: different geocoder databases, GPS, CellID, etc. – a latitude/longitude of a business or an end user isn’t as precise as you think - you aren’t really looking apples to apples.

So what we need is a better way to match a place on two different services. And creating a random string of numbers (Webster Hall = 8018765) isn’t gonna cut it. The identifier needs to be simple, something that makes sense to both databases and end users. To put it another way - it needs to be tweetable. There are tons of challenges in creating a great set of identifiers that meet these standards, and you would expect, the best solution cannot really be machine generated – it is, in the words of a colleague, a ‘heuristic problem’. The solution needs to be human.

The project:
What we have done with the HashCeratops project is to build a prototype of this solution. We have manually looked up thousands of popular venues, and picked out our very best shot at a great unique identifier. Our methodology insures the identifiers are unique, clean, readable, and as short as possible. We did this for thousands of venues. Let me tell you from personal experience – it is a painstaking ordeal, but a valuable undertaking nonetheless.

The result is a first start – a database of thousands of places with unique identifiers – and a public, open, community resource where anyone can contribute to the project and access the work that has already been accomplished.

We have made this wiki publicly available: we gave it a silly name and logo, created a website and built an API. Now we are asking the community to get involved. Use it, and contribute to it. Buzzd has given us the APIs to get the project off the ground, and is already using our database of identifiers to create twitter hashtags to associate tweets with venues. We have already gotten a few partners on board and look to make an announcement about it soon.

This is a resource for everybody, but it is only a start. We need help - we cant do this alone. I am excited to see how the project evolves.

Open letter to microfinance

2009-06-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

My biggest frustration with my (limited) sense of microfinance is the following:

Connecting funds with eligible individuals is annoyingly resource intensive. Whats more, educating microborrowers on how to better USE that money is almost only a cherry on top, executed individually by each MFI. There needs to be a more scalable solution for pairing training with microloans. What if we could do that using the software/internet business model. Build the right answer once - and then distribute it everywhere efficiently, cheaply, electronically.

I am interested to know if anyone has heard of someone that is building an online school for microborrowers, to establish a curriculum that adequately addresses vocational and financial training and then distributes it electronically (online or through software). I understand that there are plenty of challenges to this idea. I would be interested in building a test case - think of it as a wiki 'school', built by the best academic minds in the industry, that MFIs could use to educate. Eventually, the end user could be the borrower themselves.

So I made a $25 loan on both kiva.org and myc4.com, just to understand the process a little better. There was a major thing I thought about when I was picking out who to make loans to: How do I have any certainty that this person knows how to run a business? How can I tell that they are hard working? Even if everyone pays back the loan - isn't there a better way to prioritize which opportunity you are financing? Do MFI's have substantially more clarity?

In my last job hunt, I marketed myself with my G.P.A., SAT scores, university name, previous employer pedigree, etc. Now I realize that not much of the rest of the world comes close to the same silly resume-building practices that I have become used to. But shouldnt microborrowers be able to 'pad their resume' in an apples to apples manner that could help them be more eligible to receive microfinancing for their project? Couldnt you offer them accreditation in vocational schools to that end? And isnt this the EXACT kind of school that you could put online / in software? At a netbook kiosk in the local MFI, maybe a certain number of hours logged and a final exam to pass. Wouldnt this be a way to get expert opinion on best practices for various new ventures, instead of the entrepreneur going with the 'common knowledge'. I thought of this after seeing a bunch of competing 'jewelry' or 'arts and crafts' businesses. Do this people have any idea how saturated the market might be? I imagine MFIs do provide advice on site - but isnt a online, centralized, specialized authority a more efficient way of doing this than leaving it up to individual MFIs?

Now all the work to put vocational schools in multiple languages and online in an easy to use and secure format is a tall (expensive) order. Moreover, you would have to reinvent a user interface that is built for people who dont know computers. But these are fun challenges. A school like this might have a cost.

But couldnt you use MFIs to grant "student loans" to these entrepreneurs-to-be? And if students paid for this school, you could fund the buildout of new vocations or provide scholarships to existing programs. Plus, the more topics you cover, the more overlap you get on basic business advice. And wouldnt people borrow for education if they thought it would 1) make it easier to raise money and 2) actually improve their business?

I realize my proposal presupposes a lot of things we take for granted in America. But where there isnt a system - create the need with infrastructure.

Open Letter to match.com

2009-01-12T09:06:00.001-08:00

Dating websites are growing in popularity, and much of the talk centers around the subscription/ad-supported debate -- but the bigger issue is a seemingly insurmountable hurdle – culture. How to become a part of the mainstream? There is a lingering aversion to e-dating – probably solely because it carries the social stigma of being ‘unusual’. This is a common issue in the social web – how do you make it to the mainstream?

I had an idea: Reality TV. I know what you are thinking – everybody you know hates reality TV. But you’re wrong. Everybody you know SAYS they hate reality TV. But they watch it. And even if they don’t, it seeps into their everyday life. A lot of very normal people would confess to not having ever checked out an e-dating site, but nobody could credibly claim they haven’t watched a little reality TV.

I don’t for the most part watch reality TV. I have watched all of ten minutes of American Idol. But I know who the winners have been. I know the premise of the Real World, and a bunch of “lesser known” ones: The Biggest Loser, The Pickup Artist, The Flavor of Love, Temptation Island, Iron Chef, etc. They are unavoidably pop culture. So I propose the perfect cultural acquisition. The social web on reality TV.

Specifically – here is my elevator pitch. Field a team for The Amazing Race with a blind date set up by one of the e-dating sites. On the Amazing Race, every time they show a team they show the caption Mother/Daughter, Frat Brothers, etc. – here you would show match.com blind date (instant marketing). Much of the drama from this show is on how a relationship can be strengthened/stressed by the competition – I would love to see how a blind date could fare. Better yet, have multiple e-dating sites field teams, and increase sexual tension between OTHER teams by making the couples stay in the same place and meet each other. That makes it a challenge show AND a romantic interest reality TV show all in one. The romance element becomes more compelling to both contestants and viewers because the bonding develops via teamwork through adversity. Plus you don’t have to eliminate romantic interests, like in most romance reality shows. There will be the added element of seeing which dating sites field the best couples for romance AND for teamwork. And this is the MOST important part: Sponsorship won’t be irrelevant like when The Real World cast gets a job ‘promoting delicious Rockstar Energy Drink’. The sponsors will be part of the game, pitted against each other in the task of both fielding an attractive, successful team that more importantly hits it off with each other and not another group during the competition. This will be the cheapest, most sponsored, most interesting reality TV show ever. And it will be educating and engaging your REAL target demographic – culture consumers. This is a low cost, high impact way to market a truly underrated service.

Calling all my readers!!

2008-12-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

Please pardon my departure from the standard 'open letter' format of this blog in this post. This holiday season, I wanted to encourage all of my readers to give a very reasonable $10 (each square represents $10) to a charity called the Grameen Foundation.

The Grameen Foundation is a non-profit organization built to replicate globally the success of the Grameen Bank, a microfinance institute started by 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Your donation will support the continued development and implementation of microfinance in underserved areas. Unique from other charitable causes, this cause promotes self-actualization of the worlds poor.

To give, please visit www.stoppovertynow.org. Microfinance currently relies heavily on traditional 'big ticket' philanthropists to support new and ongoing efforts. The goal of this campaign is to engage people like YOU to participate and give, no matter how small the amount. The internet has enabled the power of the 'little guy' in making a big difference (most recently in the US presidential election). The Grameen Foundation needs YOU to help leverage that same potential to enable this truly powerful cause.

Add a comment to this post if it inspired you to give!

Open Letter to Pluribo

2008-11-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

Pluribo, you guys rock. Your technology is very cool. At very least, I have a good example to help explain the semantic web to friends and family.

Your widget is just so powerful, it seems like it should be Patriot Act-ing my emails and telling the government about me. I imagine your biggest problem with the current widget is just that it isn't that essential to consumers, even if it is cool.

In a tough market like this, I am guessing that like so many other startups, you can only focus on one thing - path to monetization. I wanted to come up with a few suggestions as to how to do it.

1) First and foremost - licensing your technology to a site that has a steady stream of consumer generated content and wants a quick analysis of it.
I am sure you already talked to Amazon; but I recently noticed that Yelp themselves are actually already trying to do a similar thing in the 'Review Snapshot' portion of the page, giving you an overview of reviews. License the summary to Yelp instead of making consumers download a widget to do it. What if you could sell to Yelp a more complex version, but with less categories than what you do on Amazon: like Ambiance/Price/Service/Food the way Zagats does it? You could quickly apply the same categories to all restaurants.
The reason I mention this is that I think your current product might be too detailed to be cost effective - sometimes what gets built is 'what it should be' instead of 'what it needs to be'. You are fixing a pain point, but in some ways the analysis may be overkill for the average consumer (not me!).

2) Market the analysis to consulting companies that would lump in the cost of your service with their astronomical expense accounts and use to strengthen their analysis.
Comp out what similar research should cost. If you do a more shallow dive, across a broader spectrum, it might make you more of a 'market analysis' -type firm.
Build out the broader categories of sentiment - brand appeal, durability, support, etc - stuff that you will be able to use on all products.
What if you did something similar to Rotten Tomatoes? There may be business applications to that, as it would take less time.
Could you do your analysis on Google Local? What if you got less technical - I know this is destroying the art of your technology but perhaps taking a step in the shallow end will lead you to the deep parts in due time.

3) Finding a way to sell to the companies themselves. This may be the toughest, but perhaps the most lucrative method. The biggest issue here will be establishing relationships with every player - the challenge is indeed huge. Here is how I think you can do it:

***Expand Consumer-facing widget as cost effectively as possible:
First, build functionality on the consumer facing widget to do a similar (perhaps less complex) analysis, but this time on GetSatisfaction as opposed to Amazon. My opinion is that GetSatisfaction is an ideal data source - they do a lot of tagging, sentiment association, and grouping/organization up front so you dont have to. Garret Dimon had an excellent blog post to this end, a few months back. GetSatisfaction tells me the most about what Customer Service / Tech Support will be like at a company, before I buy the product.
No need to do it by every product (although GetSatisfaction also organizes its topics by product!), just rank the brand vs. its competitors. So for example, if I am on the Amazon page, and your widget unhides with the standard analysis but additionally says 'Compare the Customer service experience at __[brand]___' and then clicking on it takes me to the GetSatisfaction page and the widget gives me some simple analysis about whether I will be left in the dark after clicking 'buy', then I might really like that. Similarly, on the GetSatisfaction page, you could link to Amazon reviews (search for similar GetSatisfaction issues on Amazon review pages, vice versa?).
Target first companies that have a hardware and software element - ie: cameras, mp3 players, printers/scanners, hard drives, gaming peripherals, VOIP headsets, PDAs, etc. You want products that have a lot of different factors that go into the buying decision (hardware, software, cust service, etc.)
Start simple, but have a consumer facing widget that gives you a snapshot of the overall 'buyer experience' - what the product is like (Amazon) and what support is like (GetSatisfaction). THEN:
***Build out reports to sell to businesses to help them analyze/manage what their customers see on your widget:
Create an even more complex and detailed statistical breakdown, that may be too much information for consumers, but not for the businesses they describe. Using this tool, come up with a surprising fact about a company you want to sell your analysis to. Go to that company and divulge the fact, show them that your service gives their customer more advanced analysis than they have internally, and tell them you can in turn give them EVEN DEEPER analysis. Give them rankings of feedback items by importance, and demonstrate these items' contribution to an overall ranking, so they can manage/respond to problems and improve their ranking.
Tell them you'll give them a deep dive into what their customers are saying, and that that message can be useful in SO many ways. Marketing, Customer Service, Tech Support, Design, Sales, Supply Chain, Management oversight of the employee-->customer message, etc.
And do them one better. Tell them youll give them the same breakdown for their competitors.
Tell them you will also, if so desired, run cu$tom analy$i$ on private data that wont get to their competitors, such as: proprietary systems, email, blogger reviews, focus groups, surveys, beta tests, whatever).
***Market your product by holding companies hostage:
Tell them their customers will already have access to this info (at least using the widget on Amazon and GetSatisfaction), and their competitors may or may not be using your service.
Tell them that their internal analysis isnt apples to apples in context with their competitors like yours is.
Tell them that if they aren't on GetSatisfaction, then their customers are all alone there. Just like GetSatsfaction is essentially blackmailing companies to 'join the conversation', you are doing the same to get companies to pay you to run analysis on what is being said.
***Monetize by offering companies a few standard options or offer to design custom analysis:
When you have them interested, charge them on a one off basis for each statistical run. Offer a few packages, (give 'Company A' examples of what you can tell them about their own company/products, Competitor Analysis Packages, Custom run ideas, etc).
Pass some of the costs of building out a new analysis to the company, and then tell them they can run it at a discount after you initially set it up. Helps you fund the buildout of new analysis

It remains to be seen what kind of price point you would need to make money, what is the actual size of a market for this service, how hard of a sell it will be to a company, etc. But this suggestion is intended to add the most value with the least amount of new work. I look forward to seeing where you guys go with Pluribo. It is a fantastic technology!

Open Letter to iminlikewithyou.com

2008-10-08T07:33:00.000-07:00

OK iminlikewithyou.com, your website is absolutely awesome.

I loved your presentation at the October 2008 NY Tech Meetup. You are really on to something. The most important part is obviously picking the right bets for games. I know that not every game is a winner, but I will tell you two that are guaranteed:

(1) A simple version of the longtime hit Subspace Continuum, which has been an MMO since way before it was cool. And by cool I mean popular:

(2) At the meetup, you showed a 1st person driving game demo that was in the works. Don’t forget to add guns/mines/turbo, etc. Also the ability to upgrade your car would be fantastic. These dynamics make simple games so addictive. Growing up, all my favorite racing games had them – I spent untold hours playing the following games:

Super Off Road

Top Gear 3000

Rock n' Roll Racing

Open Letter to Twitter

2008-10-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

===================
**Update (10/22/09):

Of course, this post was written over a year ago, before self promoters like celebrities, bands, restaurants, politicians etc got on Twitter, which opened the window for a lot of 'normal' people to derive value from what was often nothing more than a collection of marketing messages. What has happened is that this mechanism has cause Twitter to evovle into the massive, mainstream medium we know today. In my defense, it's hard to predict that everyone has a little desire for self promotion, and that the sum total of all of that would be well received. So while part of what I was saying was wrong - mostly what I was saying was right. That is, the really interesting part of all this has become the people who have been able to structure that data - whether the early movers like StockTwits, my own company buzzd, or now Google and Bing. And its getting pretty interesting!
===================
10/3/08

Historically I start this blog with a sentence about how much I like the company I have addressed my open letter to. But Twitter, you aren’t going to hear that from me. If my blog was about innovation for the sake of the tech community, then I might be able to say how much I like you. You are beloved by a community of early adopters who also happen to have career incentives for broadcasting their interactions with the world.

But don’t be fooled. I don’t like you, and neither do my friends. We aren’t tempted by the promise of self promotion, so to us, Twitter seems kinda useless. Your website isn’t slick. Your “social network” is diluted by Johnny Networker, follow/refollow politics, and username aliases. You provide attention seekers with an excuse to get their name out with less effort and less substance. If I wanted to communicate among friends, there are many better (private) forums. If not solely to build a name in an industry, then why microblog? I am trying to call upon a criticism that others have executed better – that Twitter Isnt For Normal People, so I wont expand any further. So if I have such beef with Twitter, what is the point of this 'open letter'? Is it an open letter to cease and desist? Is Twitter doomed?
__________________

Twitter is NOT doomed. You do have something here, but its not obvious, and you don’t seem to be focused on it. So what is good about Twitter, for a guy like me?

At first glance, nothing (!). For the average person, there is far more value in communicating privately, and little to gain from communicating publicly. Better to give an example: I have this friend named Lucas. He loves football, and steak, and the Beastie Boys, and Terminator movies and …well lets just get general and say ‘popular things’. One of his favorite things to say is how much he ‘loves the mainstream’, which I in turn love him for. He is a great example of Joe internet user. He has TONS of friends, and he is my feasibility test for any new technology. Would Lucas use it? Does Twitter pass the Lucas test? Lets try it:

Does Lucas want to tweet about him listening to ‘Fight For Your Right to Party’ for the one thousandth time? Does he have an unfulfilled need to opine publicly that Terminator 2 is a good movie? Hell no! Anyone he is friends with already knows that he these things are awesome, agree they are awesome, so its just not worth talking about, particularly over the internet (nerd!). Lucas doesn’t want an avatar, or to set some kind of new internet meme, his persona is obvious to the real world. He has enough trouble remembering to call real friends on their birthdays (because he has lots and is cool). But Lucas is no Luddite – so he does matter, and you should care what he thinks. Turns out he spends a lot of his free time on the internet - on Facebook, various well known media content sites like Citysearch, Hulu, ESPN.com, and other popular online services such as Ticketmaster, SeamlessWeb, Pandora, etc. And he dabbles in quirky internet services like woot and iConcertCal and if he knew it existed, probably a Facebook birthday reminder app as long as they (1) get him straight to what he wants and (2) when he gets there, the thing he sees seems instantly useful. I assure you, that is a high barometer, but that’s really the beauty of the Lucas test. Lucas really doesn’t care how good your developers are or if you are funded or if Arrington linked to you. To figure out how Twitter can be useful to Lucas, we need to reconsider what Twitter really is.

***Twitter is an open-ended wiki for real people’s ideas and thoughts

So how do I demonstrate this idea? Say Lucas is looking to buy a new phone, and wants to compare the iPhone and Blackberry. I know this may be hard to swallow, but Lucas doesn’t exactly subscribe to RSS feeds for Engadget and Gizmodo. His first go-to is a Google search. But what if I told him that you can search on Twitter to see everyday people comparing the two phones. Or that people often post their fantasy football picks. He *might* find that information useful (though probably still wouldn’t think to look there). At least in this world, Twitter has theoretical utility to him, instead of being entirely NOT useful.

Now… getting him to contribute would be infinitely harder. But when I think about it, he does do this already. On ESPN.com, when they have a user poll, he votes. He shares his thoughts with the world for free because he appreciates the data it creates and he wants to understand the dataset it belongs to. So perhaps that sports poll data is valuable… In fact, there is a company that mines and analyzes and yes, even sells that data.

Here is my point. The primary purpose of publishing versus communicating privately is adding your thoughts to the great pool of human knowledge - sharing ideas, opinions and thoughts. By publicly storing interpersonal communication, you turn it into data. Think of Twitter as a sloppy, open-ended wiki of blurbs, habits, opinions, activities. So why doesn’t the average person appreciate this depository of information?

***You need to redefine what sharing on Twitter means to people

The way Twitter is used now, much of what is shared is not useful. This medium has been built around the needs of a very unique and small community of early adopters. Twitter is not just a place where I can tweet about my iPhone. It’s a place where thousands of people are tweeting about iPhones, which is a different thing entirely. To reach the mass market, two things need to happen:

(1) People need to learn what the medium is useful for (outside of self promotion) – aggregating information through public communication.
(2) People need easier ways to track the big picture on Twitter

Imagine if people wrote tweets knowing that they would be analyzed; if there were more ways to analyse, sort, organize, discover, compare, dissect, graph, measure, contextualize and understand this amalgamation of thoughts. The key to Twitter’s future is context and meaning. There is just too much data out there, and not enough synthesis of that data. I have made this point before (geeks: think Semantic Web/Web 3.0). Because why else publish?
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All this in mind, how do you shape Twitter going forward? The site has enough problems just keeping up with its own traffic. I realize my head is in the clouds. But with no good business model, shouldn’t you at least be aiming in a cardinal direction (up!), no matter how far down the road? At this point, it is this blogger’s opinion that Twitter might do well to decrease focus on growing traffic and building its community of early adopters. Third parties like Summize have been quick to home in on what Twitter has been missing, and Twitter was wise to snatch up Summize. Summize was ‘Answer v1.0’ to the question ‘What is the point of Twitter’? Remember, my point is that communication alone is not the point of Twitter, because there are always better means for doing so (instant message, chat rooms, email, facebook status updates, or other means of communication through similarly entrenched and ‘traditional social networks’). Why else publish? So what is in store for ‘Answer v2.0’, and beyond?

I will give a good example. My very good friend Vinicius Vacanti was in line at Shake Shack, a famous burger joint in NYC with an infamous (long) line. Two guys behind him were talking about how they just don’t see the point in Twitter. How they would never use it. Then one of them interjected “The only useful thing I ever saw come out of Twitter, was some crazy guy who had graphed the Twitter posts describing the line here at Shake Shack to show the best time of day to go”. He was referring to Vinicius’ own post (!!!). Besides being serendipitous, this was something special. It was a couple of regular guys finding use in Twitter. The ‘data’ in the tweets got lost in the mosh pit of too much information. But because Vinicius did the work to analyze and graphically represent what was happening, it made it to lunch line conversation for these average Joes. Suddenly Twitter was useful. This idea is already being noticed, but nobody is very smart about it yet. Im sure people would love to see (and participate) in metrics about the election, the federal bailout debate, etc. Watching the tag #factcheck on Twitter during the Vice Presidential debates, it was interesting to see how quickly everyone jumped on VP candidate Joe Biden for (correctly) using the word ‘Bosniacs’, and then how the tide turned when everyone realized that it was a real word. Goes to show you that there is a lot of junk out there, but another good thing about publishing publicly is that it promotes accountability, which not ironically was the idea behind the #factcheck tag itself.
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But what about growing the community? A lot of the discussion about Twitter revolves around the Rogers Adoption curve. It is true, if you are focused on growing Twitter today, then the most important challenge is bridging the ‘Adoption Gap’. But the current version of Twitter doesn’t make any money, and doesn’t seem likely to ever make any money in its current form. So why grow something that loses money? Focus on how it is that you will make money (suggestions to follow). Don’t focus on how many users you have. Who knows what cultural meme will help your technology jump that gap, and lead everyday people to want to contribute. What if Twitter becomes the next platform for American Idol voting? You will bridge the gap in your adoption curve faster than you can blink, and you will be wishing you had spent more time thinking about what your product means rather than trying to build your (fickle) community of users. As long as you focus on your differentiator, (in this case the public data) then you are aiming to monetize on a mission statement instead of a social fad.

So how do you monetize? Make sense of the data you are creating, and make people pay you for it. To get any traction, you will certainly need to make a few changes to the product. Some ideas:

A ‘smart box’ on the sidebar that, similar to Gmail advertisements, provides feedback on the things you write about. Example: I tweet ‘Bush[thumbs down]’ – and in the box I see a chronological graph of people ranking the word Bush, or the box tells me “people who agree with you also said ___”, or the box tells me “number of times ‘Bush’ has been tweeted in the last 24 hours”, or the box provides a “ranked list of the top people tweeting the word ‘Bush’”, etc. Think stock traders using Twitter. Think instant rewards for sharing your opinion.

Guest accounts/anonymous tweets: You want as much contribution as possible, with as little startup cost. Get Joe Internet to contribute. Guest tweets would have to go through a spam filter first, perhaps.

The ability to Flag objectionable tweets: registered users should be able to provide anonymous feedback (red flag) to both Twitter the service and the person is misusing the right to tweet. When a tweet is flagged, other users can see that it has been marked as such, and it is removed from the data. Misuse of flagging can result in the termination of your username and removal of your flags.

Value Tags to help quantify/qualify data: add to your existing tags (@, #) a Thumbs up/down (+/-) which you attach to a word or phrase that can assign it a binary value.

Geotagging tweets to attribute a geographic value to the data that is being collected.

Ability to submit anonymous demographic information to enhance the data being created (optional, create incentive for doing this)

Semantic understanding of free-form text. This is OBVIOUSLY very difficult, but it would be really cool if a computer could begin to aggregate, classify and interpret opinions, and create discrete data. Twitter data would become one of the best single sources of information on the internet.
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The goal being that eventually you could send anonymous, smart statistics to marketers, the media, hedge funds, whoever wants data about what people think. Make the business model this: analysis, and underneath: Powered by Twitter Analytics

The key point I hope to have made is that the only differentiator for Twitter is that the service makes it easy to share one’s thoughts with the world. The only (financial) value in being able to do so is that people will pay to know and measure what those thoughts are. In its current form, Twitter only helps you understand tweets on an individual basis. In aggregate, tweets will tell a much more meaningful story.

Open Letter to Google Reader

2008-09-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

Why do you not allow me to save searches within Reader and set them up like feeds?

Say I like to read stories about DRM, or am waiting for news to come out on the latest Blackberry phone, or whatever. It would be great to have a 'Folder' (read: label) that allows me to specify a few search terms for a given topic (Blackberry Bold), and tells me when I have new articles that match - kind of like Google Alerts but for my Reader subscriptions (while I am at it, give me Google Alerts within my Reader and not just my inbox). I am certain that other readers do this. You would think Google would be all over search.

***Update: Google has added Google Alerts RSS functionality, as I predicted.

Open Letter to Bank of America

2008-09-22T06:48:00.000-07:00

Time to rebrand to reflect the merger:

Open Letter to Howcast Media

2008-09-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I really love your site Howcast. By establishing standards for quality and content, the site has become perhaps even harder to navigate away from than YouTube, or similar short video content sites. In doing so, your company has become the gold standard in online instructional video, differentiating itself from the likes of ExpertVillage and 5min, which rely heavily in User Generated Content, dilute the content with popups, and do not specialize in quality. Howcast is polished and differentiated (love the step by step video player!), and most of it is pretty fun to watch. But is there a business segment that is missing here?

By specializing in the production of easy to follow instructional video, you have a unique opportunity. As the best provider of production video instructions, you should outsource this specialty to corporations that might be in need of your help, who could pay you for the content. Allow me to provide an example.

A friend of mine bought a “QuickPitch” tent that just explodes open when you need it. Folding it back into its case is a modern mystery, and the instructions on the tent are hilariously opaque (see in particular step 5 – ha!):

I found a video online that was created by the company as a response to customer outrage over these instructions, which tries to unravel the mystery. The guy in the video makes it look easy, but trying to replicate the process with my actual tent was [in actuality] still a HUGE challenge. It took me 30 minutes to get the tent back in its case, and I am good at stuff like this (I was the KING of LEGOs as a kid). The video has no sound, is fuzzy and really oversimplifies the hard parts:

QuickPitch tent instructions

Howcast is far better suited to do this video than these jokers. I imagine that the tent company would love to quell unsatisfied customers, but were just unsuited to do production videos in house and this was the best they could do. Howcast should lend their expertise. Doing this would allow you to get paid to CREATE the content, not just to host it. Getting businesses to back the content could allow you also to pass along the costs of search engine optimization, and gain you the 'Google juice' that you are currently lacking. Lastly, you could become THE go-to in quality instructional video outsourcing. Im sure there are plently of products in need of good instructions that you could pitch (LEGO??, search Yahoo answers for common problems), and plenty more companies that would come to you once this piece of your business gains in popularity.

Lastly, swing on down the subway on the 4/5/6 train to the NYU Tisch Film School (my alma mater!) and offer ca$h to students that might help you get your content put together on a deadline. I used to work for peanuts doing experiments for the psych department. I could earn cash in my free periods with no long term commitments to a job or emails from a boss at 9PM on a Friday night. The production process at Howcast is formulaic and clear, and could easily be outsourced one project at a time to poor, smart, commitment-averse college students and then QA’ed by your team.

Think of it as the GetSatisfaction of instructions. If you don’t do it, SOMEBODY should…

***UPDATE: Howcast has taken my advice: http://info.howcast.com/howcast-solutions***

Open Letter to nomee

2008-07-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

Thesis: Increasingly, there are has been a concurrent expansion and fragmentation of 'online presence' for the social networker. And nearly everything thinks it is free. But nothing is free. I pay for it with my time. If you want to be a social network aggregator – you are in the low margin business of distribution. Give me a cheaper online experience. Be my Web 2.0 Wal-Mart.

*I am not an expert on technology. I simply know what I want, and like it or not, my theory is that in the long run, what I want is exactly what I will end up getting.
*I am not an expert in history either, but my guess is it confirms this theory.
*Here is a list of what I want. I have done my best to translate it into tech jibberish so geeks can understand:

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Distinguish functionality that achieves growth rates for early adopters vs. the average internet user
Early adopters in the online world are like rich people. They don't need Wal-Mart because they can pay for what they want. They can afford more expensive (i.e.: time intensive) services because it is their job, hobby, passion, etc. But your average Joe wants it to be cheap and easy. If you target the "poor" demographic, you get a Wal-Mart instead of the luxury store that all those rich people (geeks) shop at.

There are plenty of ways to notify your contacts
There are relatively fewer ways to aggregate and notify contacts about non essential information on an elective basis. A social networking aggregator is a good way to broadcast that new info is available without necessarily requiring a response. If someone emails me pictures, I have to write back. If a social networking aggregator lets me decide to look for who has posted new pictures on any one of their accounts, this is something special. There is simply too much information for me to pay attention to it all. Don't email me about things I don’t want to be emailed about, and allow me to choose if my updates are something my contacts seek out or an interruption. Set defaults to be non-intrusive. Trust that less intrusive will actually lead to more usage, because the added value (just like any organizer) is in reducing clutter and saving time.

The key being: Don't barrage me with notifications. Stay out of my way until I need you, and then quickly open up my online world. Don't make me pay attention, let me choose to give it.

Social networks are only as valuable if people you know use them.
Make initial sign up super easy. Get people to set up accounts even if they don't really need the service. I want over 20 of my contacts to have it if I am going to use it, because at least 15 of them are probably not worth following. Allow users to build their usage of the service over time instead of asking for it upfront. Let me pay for sub-services individually, instead of upfront in some 'package' deal. If I want to make a large time investment at initial set up, make it seem like an 'extra option'. Consider Google's homepage. Minimal clutter means low initial investment. Search is simple, but if I want to do something more complicated, I am willing to click "Advanced Search". The goal is to have everyone on, even if they don't use it much. Use things like logging into other accounts (Gmail) and searching those networks for email addresses that are on your network, Google Social Graph API to suggest potential connections. Allow users to embed an object (i.e. logo) on their favorite social network that shows they are on your aggregator service and lets people who click on it notify the other party that a connection is possible.

The key being: More users means more useful, which means users use it more. Reduce my overhead!

User generated content belongs to the user, not the network they enter it into
Is any of my social data public already? I want initial signup to seek out things I have already "paid for", and take it with me. Take those assets (data I created) and save the data locally and with it take a first crack at autopopulating fields when users are setting up new accounts on other services. Also - track what I enter into my various online sites as I do so, and save this for me as well. Auto fill would be a nice feature and would make signing up for new social networks easier. If other social networks eventually unprotect their data and allow their users to export that data (This will definitely happen eventually) then you as an aggregator can have a step on other social network aggregators on how to handle the new deluge of data sharing and syncing/merging that I will inevitably want to do. While it is likely that uploading data will always be manual (i.e. done by the user and not a synchronizer, to protect traffic on sites), but there must be ways of making it quicker.

The key being: I own the content I create (I paid for it with my time), so I don't want to buy it twice

People don't know what is out there and they don't want to look for it
Auto-suggest new social apps based on similar usage profiles to mine. Have brief descriptions available if a contact has an application that I don't, but am considering joining. Track who is curious about which applications. No social network aggregator is currently using presenting to me a single source for what applications are available and tracking who is interested in what – I probably want to know this – particularly if you can present the data to me concisely. Amazon uses user generated data to suggest to me "users who looked at this item also looked at" - - give me that. I would love to shop around for 'free' services, but not if I have to search one at a time and read tech blogs to figure out which ones are best (costs too much). Show me which ones my friends use! An example: consider how many more people buy CD's from Amazon than direct from the label: be my one stop for social network sign up. Be able to track these referrals and use them to strike up favorable scenarios with the service providers that benefit from your referral.

The key being: Cut down my cost of finding new services and track the patterns that lead to new signups –usage data is a valuable asset and is the only proprietary info the aggregator itself creates.

Advertising/Marketing
Allow me to link my Amazon, Netflix, Buy.com, Ticketmaster accounts, because they have already taken a crack at 'smart' advertising. Wherever I have subscribed to alerts, rated products, or otherwise established connections with vendors, create an icon for those vendors that links to "recommended for you" or "upcoming events" or "sale items" on that vendor's site. Make advertising smarter and less intrusive. Offer me discounts if I add a vendor to my contacts on your network. Search my content and provide me links based on my own and my contacts' online presence.

The key being: Keep it relevant, make me feel like I want what you sell, & don't jam it down my throat. Distracting my eyeballs pays for these services, so make those distractions seem cheap.

Social Networking aggregators real value add is in search
Being able to search Tweets, status updates, Yelp entries, blog post titles, Loopt, etc. is huge. I would love to be able to consult one place to search if anyone is in the city I am visiting, or has eaten at a restaurant I want to know more about (OpenTable?), or has bought an item on Amazon or Netflixed a movie I am considering, whatever. Searching each social network individually isn't quite the same. If a shared contact tagged a photo "guys night out at Del Frisco's" on Flickr, I might have tried to find it in their Facebook account, but never thought to look in photos. But I would love to know that those photos were tagged as such and ask that contact if the food was good. Eventually, geotagging in photos, GPS cellphones, and semantic web associations will make my data smarter. When I share deeper information sets in the future, you can bet your ass I will want to be able to search that data more intelligently. Anticipate that deeper data with a framework of organization of data (individual service by service functionality can be developed as new services arrive). Categorize data that gets updated into feeds of similar types of updates across different networks. For example: I would love to be able to aggregate Facebook status updates and tweets in one place; photo uploads across Flickr, Ophoto, Kodak, Picasa, and Facebook in another; profile updates to MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc in another place; and blog posts (and comments!) in another. This way I could in effect say: which of my contacts have new photos? Which have changed their profile? An aggregation like FriendFeed (chronological feed/stream style: overall or by person) is ok, but adding categorized aggregation is better. Use the tagging concept to categorize and sort updates. Reduce redundancies in data – If I share something on my reader, then bookmark it on a social bookmarker, link to it in my blog, and shoot it out over a Tweet – should this topic come up four times or just once in a feed? What about if 3 of my contacts share the same link on various readers? The takeaway is one item – that 3 of my contacts referenced it (in X number of ways). Show it as such.

The key being: I don't know where people have put the data I am looking for, and I don't want to think about it - - I particularly don't want to 'drink from the fire hose' as information becomes increasingly available (and superfluous). But I do want to be able to search for it and view it in an organized fashion.
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Overall, growth will be dependent on how "cheap" the service is, and the depth and variety of the selection of subservices offered. If you want to be big, look at the business model for Wal-Mart and translate it to Web 2.0. Because that is the way to make it big in the business of aggregation/distribution. In my opinion, big is the only way to monetize on a low margin service like an aggregator. As a customer, it should be obvious what I want, but let me borrow a couple of slogans:
"Save Money. Live Better." – Wal-Mart
"Time is money" - Unknown

-written by Michael Muse

*update: if you liked this post you should check out: chi.mp

Open Letter to social|median

2008-07-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

I really like your mention that soon there will be private news networks. I believe that while your early adopters are comfortable with traditional tech or political news aggregator features, my sense is that your real virality is going to come from bored employees or college special interest groups who just want to help their friends find McGuyver jokes without annoying listserv type blasts. Twitter is a great example of how the tech community tends to overdo the collaborative community idea – Twitter is a product that isn’t a complicated (or even consistently available) cutting edge technology. Bloggers are already predicting it will be chewed up and spit out by the tech community when the next big thing replaces it, that it likely never have mass appeal. The facebooks of the world gained mass appeal because they reflect the individual instead of the community. Allow your users to broadcast their personality through their online reading habits. This means you reward contributors with distinction within their private group so they are incentivized to share, and you make private networks seem more like linked themed chat rooms. You want Frat boys sharing YouTube bloopers on social|median – that is how you will know you have made it.

I was wondering if the site allows me to auto add to ‘My Page’ the news items I might have shared on other sites such as Google reader, Del.icio.us, and Digg. I imagine these services restrict their API so you cannot do that because they don’t want to sacrifice traffic. I signed up for your alpha quite a while ago but the only reason I haven’t used the service more is because of the switching cost. I have shared a lot of content on other news aggregation and social sites and formed groups and relationships around that, but I like your site and would like to start using it a bit more if moving (replicating) content was easier.

Changing Paradigms of Masculinity: Heroes and Role Models of Adolescent Boys in Postmodern Society

2008-07-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

Introduction

In this paper I intend to address how culture, media, globalization and mass communication are changing the experience of male adolescents in their socialization and the formation of sexuality and identity. The general argument I hope to make is as follows: that an increasingly postmodern and global society – paradigms of masculinity are becoming more diverse and hazy. This is to say – I will take the social trends of a globalizing world as not only inevitable, but imminent. I will be sure to consider this process without value judgments. My interest is not in extolling or condemning larger social trends. Instead, I wish to focus on their implications, in order to promote an understanding of adolescent issues. For example – are these changes liberating or just confusing to young men? It seems possible that they can be both. While past role models of the man as breadwinner or war hero were easy to understand and were socially universal and respected, increasingly it is becoming difficult to characterize a ‘good man’. When adolescent males begin to make their first decisions about self identity – they face certain questions: what are the sex roles of men? What is the proper mix of traditional masculinity and sensitivity to women’s issues? There are certainly other questions we should consider in analyzing the role models of young men. How can gay and straight males avoid a mutual backlash based on their own search for identity and uniqueness in gendering ‘male’? What are the media depictions of the male role in society, especially content watched by teenagers? What are the books that young men read in school, and how do these books help them conceptualize their uncertainties about gender roles? Feminism has revolutionized gender roles for both sexes, but often overlooked is the effect it is having on young men. What effect is it having? What, alternatively, of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement? Are we in danger of a male backlash? Some other questions of interest: What of the extremely lopsided rates of criminally institutionalized men vs. women – are men in need of help? Is the apparent increase in delinquent juvenile crime by boys a reflection of their inability to identify with the male roles society deems right for them? Are boys afraid that they will never be able to accomplish a generally acceptable expression of masculinity? How does a global economy and the inclusion of women in the workforce affect changing male roles? If adult roles are becoming more ambiguous, are kids less likely to want to acknowledge them? In particular, what is expected for a young man? How can he be respected by friends, attractive to the object of desire, and congratulated by parents? Are these identity characteristics contradictory?

I intend to adopt a unique strategy of sociological inquiry in this undertaking. My inspiration is the topic itself – trying to conceptualize postmodern themes – it seems wholly appropriate to accept a pragmatic and complex framework as opposed to a ‘master theory’ of unequivocal truths and direct or singular causalities. I hope to include biology, politics, media, and economy simultaneously with social forces: in some instances these interactions will be synergistic, while in others they will yield conflict. I will draw from various disciplines in the interest of establishing a thoughtful discussion of themes. My point is not to establish a dogma of theoretical methodology – in fact; it is antithetical to this end. Rather, I want to expose the very notion of categorical and reductionist expectations. Indeed, I will argue, this notion is at the very core of my thesis. I wish to show that the socialization of adolescent males has become a decreasingly singular experience. I will document changes in male socialization via the major emerging mediums and themes of recent history. Particularly, I will be interested in depictions of males in literature, film, and television. The central theme will involve the changing form of male heroes, role models, and stereotypes. I will argue that boys are increasingly being socialized by an anonymous cultural representation of ‘what it is to be a man’. I wish to analyze what the emerging themes are in these paradigms, and to draw conclusions about them as corresponding representations of the issues of new masculinities. Lastly, I will address the problems in the existing analysis of these trends – the depressing lack of literature and study of the subject, and the problematic dichotomy of opinions in men’s studies.

Frameworks for Understanding Gender Difference

To begin, I would like to look at various frameworks for explaining gender difference. To start, biology is often overlooked by sociologists. We will look at a biological model of social difference first, and then move on to more purely social models. In his book, The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, Leonard Shlain proposes a biological theory for evolutionary development of measured sex differences in mental processing of men and women. Shlain is a surgeon, and draws on the research to make a hypothesis of gender difference: “For now, I propose that a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the are the essential characteristics of the feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist, abstract thinking defines the masculine” (Shlain, 1). He gives us various biological reasons for this assertion. Yet he reminds us that these biological differences are just tendencies, like great overlapping bell curves with different medians – the differences are not definitive, they just help explain a biological generality. He wishes to provide a new framework for understanding the emergence of patriarchy.

As humans evolved, he tells us, developing more complex brains required longer gestations, births, and ‘childhoods’. These forces made the reproductive role of females more dangerous and delicate than in any other species, and both child and mother were very susceptible to the elements, especially in the time just before and after birth. Shlain argues that the evolutionary response was to use comparative advantage and specialization of roles in the sexes – survival became twofold. First, females had to be able to care for newborn offspring with more attention – the tradeoff for greater brain capacity meant that much more development was happening outside the womb. This meant that mothers had to become totally involved in the care of their offspring. Males, however, evolved as being the providers of food in sex specialization – and the first economic system of codependence emerged. The tradeoff became food for sex. While this crude role ideal seems to be diminutive to the sociological mindset, Shlain argue that this tradeoff in face invented sociology. That is, the purpose of this tradeoff and the real evolutionary development at stake here, he argues, is culture. The ability to develop more complicated brains made early humans able to solve problems in new ways. They developed tools, language, and a greater capacity to organize. The end result of sex specialization was the greatest evolutionary development in the history of the animal world – and the subject of study for sociologists – society itself.

However, Shlain argues, the development of culture meant that specialized roles worked better when different sexes were good at different processes – and that evolution achieved this. Over time, he argues, we evolved to be better at our sex specific roles. He explains that medical research has confirmed, studied and measured these differences - primarily, hemisphere lateralization is the key to explaining these differences. This term refers to the difference in function of two halves of the brain – where most species have a mirror image of functionality on each side of the brain, we have developed difference. That is, the different halves of the brain achieve different types of thought processes. Generally, he uses the dichotomy of ‘right brain’ / ‘left brain’ for simplicity’s sake, although, he reminds us, the science is much more complex. He then tells us that science has identified significant differences in the corpus callosum (which essentially connects and prioritizes the communication between the two halves) in males and females – which explains why women might tend to use more right-side frameworks and males left-side frameworks for interpreting the same stimulus. The two sexes developed different proportions of reliance on each side of the brain. Right side functions tended to be characterized by understanding emotion, meaning, and concrete ideas – skills useful to the nurturer/gatherer. Meanwhile, left side functions tended to be logical, linear, abstract and chronological – necessary skills for the hunt/kill function. Sex specialization caused us to draw differently on these skills, and in turn biologically programmed different tendencies for mental strategies. “Although the male paid a price for his relative isolation from his right brain emotions, he gained the ability to shut out feelings that might otherwise have distracted him while he was engaged in the dangerous activity of hunting” (Shlain, 24). He goes on to explain other developments which reinforce this difference – how in fact male/female retinas have structural differences which further exaggerate these different skill sets. Lastly, he wishes to remind us that all humans need both skill sets and must call on both biological sets to function normally, that we all have both types in us, but that sex specialization has caused each sex to tend towards a particular dominance.

“These two mirror-image strategies, gather/nurture and hunt/kill, are combined in each of us. In society at large, there are females who manifest predominantly ‘masculine’ traits, and there are males who display ‘feminine’ traits … each man has a gatherer/nurturer aspect to his personality, psyche, and mind just as each woman has a hunter/killer aspect to hers. … Any particular society can accentuate one or the other of these two ways of interacting with the world, depending on the demands of the environment or the shaping influences of its inventions” (Shlain, 27)

It is important to note that Shlain’s purpose in identifying a theory of biological difference is not to justify sex difference as manifested in the various societies at which he looks. In fact, he has quite the opposite in mind, using it as a means of understanding how certain social forces may have won out over others. He uses this framework to show how changes in history and technology moved us away from a balanced male/female society, to a patriarchal society – through various technological innovations.

We must remember that Shlain’s assertion is only a theory, and is an idea which is oft discussed in science and academia. We can never quantify the effect of biological differences in recreating gender difference. Certainly hormonal differences are also at work; but beyond biology, nobody would deny the paramount effect of pure socialization in establishing male and female roles. The applicability of this theory to my thesis is only to pose another possible framework in analyzing the social forces at work in socialization of adolescent males. We will return to the implications of this theory later.

There are certainly other theories as to why difference in gender roles emerged. Nancy Chodorow presents a possible explanation as to why males and females accept these different roles. She realizes that gender roles are taught in early childhood. She takes a view that is quite similar to the Freudian view as to why children are socialized into different gender roles. In her model, female children are kept closer to the mother for longer, and receive more intimate affection, so as women they generally assume more emotional and communicative roles. She notes that statistical studies show that mothers show more physical intimacy and nurturing with their female children, and that these trends also last later in life. Boys, alternatively, are weaned from the comforting touch of their mother at younger ages. They must learn to break free from their mother, and instead develop their gender identity based on the “invisible father” (Chodorow, 178). The ‘invisible’ (working) father is distant, and less nurturing, but boys learn to model after them instead. This, she says, causes boys to learn to be more autonomous and more achievement-oriented, less emotionally interested. This also causes boys to repress the feminine and feel like they have to constantly defend their masculinity. Chodorow uses this theory to describe how identification with the mother and acceptance of her role perpetuates the ‘female’ familial roles. Girls see their mothers do gender and they in turn learn it, and then later teach it. Thus, she argues, girls learn to be mothers. The other implication of her theory is that boys learn to be something else – autonomous, even distancing themselves from physical connection and emotions, relative to females. We consider this model as just another theory for role modeling in adolescent males: that gender roles are socially reproduced – with children modeling after expectations and tendencies in the parent. This struggle for successful male gender identification (despite more unclear models), may even still be present in adolescence. Certainly its effects become issues as these young men come closer to accepting what they have deduced to be their ‘appropriate’ adult role. Chodorow’s theory is interesting; it implies that boys struggle with masculinities earlier, and that there are psychological repercussions.

One problem with this model is that it assumes a stereotypical family type: where there is the mother/caretaker and also the father/breadwinner who is present in the family but often at work, and where these roles are strongly gendered. This model – while useful – cannot be generalized to all family types. In fact, it is becoming increasingly less common. Robert Max Jackson voices another complaint with Chodorow’s theory. He uses the stochastic model to show measured patterns in successive generational parenting. He argues that Chodorow’s asymmetrical parenting will not be self sustaining. “If peoples responsibility for rearing children depends primarily on the amount and quality of their parents nurturing … then the process transmitting parenting motives and skills to children will inevitably push the population towards sex equality” (Jackson, 229). He argues that each successive generation will actually increase convergence (not difference). Jackson’s critique is useful in that it shows us that there must be other factors responsible for maintaining adult roles over time. His argument, however, does not negate Chodorow’s theory – he merely shows that it alone cannot be singularly responsible for maintaining role difference.

Thus, Jackson’s critique only supports my methodology. It seems that there are many social forces at work here; and that by trying to isolate a single causality, we omit the real picture. We should keep in mind Chodorow’s theory of asymmetrical sex role reproduction as one of many possible influences on the adolescent conceptualization of the adult role. Adolescents must mediate many different socializing influences to formulate a model. This is only complicated when we consider the many types of models which are influential in adolescents’ lives.

Barrie Thorne has a similar view of gender reproduction in creating adult masculinities/femininities. He argues that boys and girls are treated differently in school because of gendered attitudes about males and females; and that this is responsible for different attitudes about gender roles later in life. Certainly we must acknowledge that society reproduces gender, and that some element of masculinity is purely social. What are some of the implications of the way we socialize men?

In Clyde Franklin’s essay Becoming “Boys,” “Men,” “Guys,” and “Dudes”, he discusses the socialization of boys to the male sex role. He argues that males (compared with females) typically face a more restricted and specific sex role, with stronger emphasis on sex-appropriate behavior. Agents of socialization like the family, educational institutions, religious institutions, peer groups, and the media teach men very specific patterns of ‘male’ behavior. They learn the importance of being manly, and are taught that these ‘male’ characteristics promote success or achievement. He also discusses how traditional masculinities have been constrictive – for example: men might feel obligated to hide emotion or grief despite yearning to express it, or they may fail to meet traditional expectations of athleticism and bravery. If we believe Franklin, then a move towards greater diversities is actually liberating. Similarly, Michael Messner sees the decreasing rigidity in traditional expectations of masculinity. He tells us how boys have always used sports as an environment where boys can practice masculinities. He argues that this institution teaches boys the roles and expectations they will be expected to accept as men; and that that increasingly, athletics are becoming less a measure of masculinity and more an arena for personal satisfaction. Thus we can see that Messner would agree that in this sense, changing expectations can be very liberating.

These frameworks are useful in helping us understand the various forces which are responsible for the creation, development, and preservation of differing gender roles. Shlain’s theory explains how males may be predisposed to traditional masculinities. Chodorow and Thorne explain how we reproduce these roles socially. Messner and Franklin look particularly at male roles – their implications and how changing masculinities can be both confusing and liberating. Generally, there are many forces at work. I will focus on masculine paradigms as a major social force in boys’ lives. I will look at the men and young men that boys look to in learning how to adjust to adult roles. I will use various different models (heroes, stereotypes, protagonists) to show how boys conceptualize manhood. Paradigms are powerfully important in the male transition to adulthood. Boys naturally look to examples to understand their adult masculine role. We can see in Franklin’s argument that masculinities are tremendously important for boys – they are constantly concerned with how to ‘be a man’. In fact – males may be even more concerned with learning their adult gender role than females. If masculinities are changing, boys are ever more conflicted by this process. We need to address the effect these changes are having on adolescent boys. First, we should look at the historical events that initiated change in traditional masculinity, and the new forms manhood has taken.

Historical Changes in Masculinities

The Creation of ‘Traditional’ Gender Roles

To understand the development of what I will call traditional masculinities, we will look at what made them emerge, and later, what made them change. Shlain has an interesting position about the emergence of patriarchy. We should return to his theory of biological difference here. The thesis of his book uses this theory (explained earlier) to show why patriarchal societies came about in the first place. He notes that in ancient human societies, women were very much a part of religion and society. Many societies practiced primarily goddess worship – revering the female role of ‘life giver’. He then notes that around the time of the invention of alphabets, these goddess societies peculiarly switched to more masculine-dominated societies. Shlain’s thesis is that the alphabet in fact caused this change, and brought about patriarchy. He notes that reading and writing are linear processes. This process of conveying information favored masculine strategies: it was sequential, logical and abstract way of representing ideas. Alternatively, feminine strategies increasingly were not being used. Previous modes of interaction and expression favored feminine characteristics: such as communicating with images (ie: face to face). Image based communication such as facial expressions and gestures (in combination with spoken language) became replaced by communication via sequential symbols. This, he argued, favored masculine modes of communication and brought about major change. In fact, he notes several different societies where goddesses worship was replaced by male gods, just after the creation of an alphabet. This is merely an interesting theory; there is certainly no consensus as to why patriarchal roles emerged. In any case, I will use this as a starting point, ‘traditional masculinities’ are assumed to be those under a patriarchal gender order. Here, the male is the protector, the breadwinner, and the hero. This role, however, was increasingly becoming different as the twentieth century progressed. With the rise of industry, fathers increasingly became distant. They began to work in factories, farther from home. Increasingly, young people worked out of the home as well. When World War II hit, these jobs had to be replaced, and women took over while men were away. Many academics cite this as the major impetus of change for women’s roles in the workforce. Economist Claudia Goldin disagrees. She says that many of the jobs women took after men returned to the workforce were temporary jobs. She uses statistical analysis to show that more consistent structural changes which took place. Goldin’s hypothesis is that there are 3 primary factors at work in the progress of change in the workforce. The first is ‘cohort specific effects’, which are primarily predetermined, such as education and fertility. These are largely supply side factors. The second variable she describes is ‘point in time’ factors such as women’s earning power, assuming exogenous wages. These are described as demand-side factors. The last factor, which she says can reflect supply and demand side factors, is ‘time trends’ of long run changes in the economy. She shows, through statistical regression, that these variables are the true agents of change. She even develops a dummy variable to eliminate the advent of WWII as a primary motivator, by showing a minimal coefficient for this variable. What she does show, is a general trend in changes in female roles. The end result was that women were increasingly entering the workforce, forever changing male roles in the family. This shows a general trend of changing male roles. Gerzon also refers to World War II as a major turning point in male heroes, particularly the soldier. He remarks that the old soldier was no longer the most powerful weapon of war. The atomic bomb forever changed the face of power. “The hero has been replaced by the robot, John Wayne by Dr. Strangelove” (Gerzon, 83). However, there was a more abrupt time of change in store for male roles.

Feminism/Vietnam

The major social changes of the sixties and seventies certainly had a major effect on perceptions of male roles. In his book Warrior Dreams, James William Gibson tackles changing masculinities in relation to this turning point. He argues that this was the first major instance where men had to face criticisms of traditional masculinities. Feminism recast female roles, but little was done to decide what men ‘should be’. Also, the loss of the Vietnam War marked the end of the undefeated record of the American soldier, and his first confrontation with a society which wasn’t proud of him. Traditional masculinities were even becoming vilified. We will use Gibson’s analysis to see the implications of this change.

Gibson explores the topic of a growing subculture in our society – that of paramilitary culture in post-Vietnam America. He describes a ‘New War’; the ongoing battle fought by the new male hero, which is quite different from male heroes of the past. This general pattern he calls ‘paramilitary culture’ is seen in many areas, yet he focuses on a few places where the “New War” is manifested: in movies (like Rambo), gun-collecters’ conventions and publications (he focuses on the magazine Soldier Of Fortune), and gun/military training services (the author attends one called Gunsite). Gibson finds that the collective picture of the male warrior in these groups is fairly consistent; and that it portrays a flawed image of masculinity. This is not the only new masculinity, but it seems to be the one that felt the most betrayed by the loss of traditional masculinities. We will look at it as an example of the danger of not considering new masculinities. By ignoring men’s issues during this time of social change, we can see a negative subculture has emerged in the absence of new ‘acceptable’ masculinities.

Gibson explains new paradigms of manhood as being distinctly different from historical versions. He notes how traditional male heroes had always been characterized by descriptors like ‘protector’, and how the image of the soldier has always been a central male role, yet he reminds us that the new paramilitary soldier is different. We can see this changing warrior reflected in film: In older movies, the classic masculine of the soldier was popular. He was a loyal and patriotic part of a team, who was dignified and brave, yet a family man and only willing to kill as a last resort. These men were the characters in spaghetti westerns and John Wayne films (Gibson, 41). Yet he notices that in more recent films this picture of the male hero and soldier has changed. He means to show us that the loss of the Vietnam War and the social attitudes about it caused this new form of soldier to emerge. His quintessential example is the character John Rambo in the movie [Rambo] First Blood. This character is the model of the ‘New Warrior’; he is cut off from the social rules of society, he is potent and almost superhuman, and he even kills passionately and efficiently (more like a sport than a last resort). He is not a member of a team, but a man alone. “The New War promotes a vicious appetite for destruction that cannot be satiated (Gibson, 30)”. The New Warrior is largely independent and even socially rejected. The main theme is that the warrior is typically almost a rebel or vigilante. More importantly, there is usually a notion (if only slight) that the warrior has been limited by or even outcast by the larger society, so he must make his own rules. Gibson explains that these warriors, like Rambo (who was a Vietnam veteran), often feel betrayed by their own society and aim at redefining the warrior image as potent and not a failure.

The author points to several changes in American society which set the stage for the American need to redefine masculinity. First and foremost was our nation’s loss of the Vietnam War. This loss was the first time the most powerful nation in the world could not win. Not only was America’s perfect military record of victory (in every war since its own war of independence) broken, but the value of the American cause was disparaged as well (Gibson, 10). Veterans of the war returned to a society which blamed and criticized them. The end of the war damaged the notion of American potency and right, a patriotism that was central to previous male archetypes. Secondly, he explains, social change (which challenged traditional masculinity) was rife. Feminism sought to equalize men and women, yet men’s experience of this equality was felt differently than women’s. Men found their traditional role as provider and protector would no longer be acceptable. “Feminism was widely experienced by men as a profound threat to their identity. Men had to change, but to what?” (Gibson, 11) Traditional male roles had to be changed, and it was the rest of society telling them to ‘fix it’. Gibson also reminds us that around this time America experienced a sudden increase in civil rights and immigration which seemed (to some men) to be somehow diluting the notion of what was ‘American’, as well as a loss in economic power as we moved from creditor to debtor nation. Suddenly, white males felt their own role in society was being threatened by all sides. This is the demographic that the fictional representation of the ‘New Warrior’ seems to be targeted at. The general theme of these changes is that the traditional roles of American men were rejected by society. Even though these social changes were very necessary and good, the flipside is that men felt like their traditional role of protector and provider was being recast as enemy and oppressor, and that men reacted problematically. When men came to feel society was devaluing their masculinity, men began redefine it for themselves, and not surprisingly, this new masculinity was often a rebel. This reaction created a negative masculine archetype that we must mend. Rambo’s story is one of a man who tragically failed to achieve societal notions of ‘the right man’. Adolescent boys looking to Rambo see masculinity as a goal which they must achieve in spite of society. Gibson is fearful that the ‘New Warrior’ role model is not healthy. I will return to this idea of the ‘New Warrior’ later, to discuss its implications.

Globalization / Postmodernism

I maintain that this the aforementioned (post-Vietnam) era of social change was the most substantial point in time for changing masculinities. However, many new masculine paradigms have emerged via globalization, and with the emergence of a ‘global culture’. We have seen an increasing fragmentation of roles, with many new ones emerging. Increasing equality between the sexes promises a better climate for the socialization of young men. It offers a new start at parity in the gender order. Postmodern social roles offer young many (instead of one) ways to ‘be a man’. With all the positives of this social change, it is easy to welcome change. In doing so, however, we must remember that the transition will not be easy for everyone. Particularly, young males may be confused in finding an appropriate adult masculinity. Young men have a uniquely conflicted process of doing gender. ‘Being a man’ is a constant pressure, and failure to do so has tremendous social repercussions. The new wave of ‘metrosexual’ and gay-themed content in popular media is helping to remove the restrictive pressures of traditional masculinities. Globalization is affecting adolescent socialization as well. People watch more and more television, and increasingly are part of a ‘global culture’. In fact, this ‘global culture’ is being broadcasted and downloaded ever more. In his book, The Lexus And The Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman describes this process as the ‘democratization of information’. The idea is that culture and society is increasingly global, fragmented, and accessible. Suddenly, society is much less singular, and in turn, the same is true of masculinities. Bob Connell, a leading writer in men’s studies, agrees with this: “It is clear from the research that there is no one pattern of masculinity that is found everywhere. We need to speak of ‘masculinities’, not ‘masculinity’.” He adds later: “The hegemonic form need not be the most common form of masculinity, let alone the most comfortable. Indeed many men live in a state of some tension with, or distance from, the hegemonic masculinity of their culture or community.” (Connell, 10-11) This has major implications for adolescent socialization. We will return to the role of media and literature in adolescent socialization, but first we should look at the trends that characterize new masculinities.

Paradigms of Masculinity

There are many different sources of socialization; some important ones were covered in the first part of this paper. The second portion of this paper covered major historical factors that have changed the way young men are socialized. In this section, I wish to use those frameworks, within the context of historical change, to address paradigms of masculinity. Boys have always looked up to models in deciding masculinities. Thus, I will look at fictional heroes, role models, fathers, musicians, and other expressions of masculinity that young boys look to. The changes in these icons are merely a useful way of describing new masculinities. It is not to say that these trends are necessarily representative of masculinity in everyday life. It is, however, difficult to measure the specific ways that masculinities take shape in our lives. But the icons I will address are masculinities experienced by all boys. In fact, boys are increasingly subjected to larger social (rather than local) heroes. Thus, we should look at these heroes as a creation of real masculinities. These paradigms are what real boys and men look to for comfort, solace, fantasy, amusement, and validation. They are the representations and expressions of our society’s image of maleness. In the next section, I will look at some emergent themes in these models of masculinity and male adolescence.

Themes in ‘New Masculinities’

In order to look at some of the issues of changing masculinities, we should return to Gibson’s notion of the ‘New Warrior’. This is certainly one prominent theme in new masculinities. For Gibson, this negative male archetype was created in much the same way Nancy Chodorow describes it (while he does not specifically refer to her, he mentions Freud and alludes to her theories). The male is cut prematurely from the nurturing parent (society), and thus creates the masculine out of his own anger and independence. Indeed, a central point of the author is that heroes in the “New War” have typically lost their families or loved ones (one of Gibson’s examples is Mad Max – who lost his family and coworker/friend to the villain) and that this loss empowers him to fight fearlessly. He has no obligation to society, only to vengeance. Gibson connects this to Chodorow’s view of male loss: “the New War is a playpen for men, a special one without the drag of a supervising mother” (Gibson, 117).

Gibson describes the male “popular desire for narratives of victory – New War stories featuring American heroes whose triumphs in battle could somehow heal the wounds of a crippled political system” (Gibson, 28). Yet he offers that this desire to heal the system is reactionary, and that it is misguided. He explains the negative influence of paramilitary culture – through gun related violence and separation from society, resentment of other groups like women, racial minorities and immigrants, and liberals in general. He even likens the graphic new killing scenes in movies to a type of sexual violence or sexual act (Gibson, 111). He explains how this culture in particular (more so than in larger society) views women as dangerous temptresses and distractions, and relationships with them are represented as weakness: he calls this image of the female the ‘Black Widow Woman’ (Gibson, 51). In his analysis of these characters in movies he says “The message is clear: sexually powerful women are ‘castrators’ who cannot be mastered” (Gibson, 56). In this violent backlash subculture, we can see there is something seriously wrong with reactionary masculinities.

This theme of ‘a man alone’ is interesting. It seems there is a longing for this fantasy if it has become so popular. Dirty Harry and The Fugitive are two additional movies, both classics, which have this theme. The protagonist is sure of his methods, though nobody else believes him. It seems that a new theme in masculinities is fighting through criticism and denigration, to eventually achieve validation in the end. While traditional masculinity is outdated, men feel like the struggle to find a new form of potency and manliness is constantly scrutinized. This is why it is appealing to see a man have to battle for what he thinks is right, even if others cannot understand. He seizes his masculinity – he has confidence that he is right even without the universal support that the old John Wayne hero has. In some ways, this extends healthy attitudes of self empowerment and self confidence, but we must make sure it doesn’t encourage isolation like with Rambo. The danger in encouraging adolescent males to pursue their own version of masculinity autonomously means that perhaps they will pursue masculinities which are in opposition to society. We need to be comfortable with having positive male images again. In some ways, after feminism, it became fashionable to denigrate men. Lionel Tiger makes this argument in his book The Decline of Males. In the first page of his book, he describes and anecdote:

“The Body Shop is a self-conscious international retailer of cosmetics. It prides itself on environmental commitment, wholesomeness of commercial purpose, and thoughtfulness about securing products from benign suppliers. So it was startling to see a window ad in one of its Manhattan stores featuring a photo of a woman holding a small mammal, with the text: ‘Why test on poor defenseless little animals when they could use my husband?’ Imagine if the ad had said ‘wife’ instead.” (Tiger, 1)

This pattern is peculiar. We will return to it later, but it is important to introduce the idea in conceptualizing men’s struggle with gender roles. Dirty Harry doesn’t care what society thinks. He somehow has some innate sense of right and wrong, and punishes the criminal himself. After some of his actions in tracking a murderer, the district attorney asks him: “Where the hell does it say that you've got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel? … What I'm saying is that man had rights.” And later, explaining that some evidence would be inadmissible as evidence to an incredulous Harry, he says: “It’s the law”. Harry’s response: “Well, then the law is crazy”.

This ‘man apart’ is one of many new themes in male heroes that are replacing more traditional heroes. There has also been a concurrent rise in anti-heroes (like Woody Allen) and villain heroes (like Tony Montana in Scarface). This is not to say that classic male heroes are gone. Clearly, the consistent success of James Bond films over more than four decades is testament to the power of a classic masculinity. It should be noted, however, that he has elements of the autonomous warrior in him as well. I only wish to note that the classic male hero is still relevant. Saving Private Ryan, a film about a group of brothers in World War II, was both tremendously successful and an example of classic masculine heroism. It is a story of teamwork, family, and bravery. Society is not cast as an impediment to the righteousness of the protagonists. The point is that classic masculinities are still relevant; they are, however, increasingly being displaced by these other forms.

Another interesting trend is the appeal of the ‘against all odds’ theme. This is the story in the classic football movie Rudy, or in the widely popular comedy Revenge of the Nerds. This same theme is apparent in J.R.R. Tolkein’s masterpieces; the tiny, weak hobbits find the strength to perform amazing feats of bravery. The theme here is a classic David and Goliath idea. This form of bravery invites anyone. It appeals to young men of all types, telling them that they too can achieve social validation in the end. The protagonist always starts out as being ridiculed and powerless, only to prove himself to everyone. Perhaps this theme is appealing for a reason. Maybe, young men feel that achieving appropriate masculine roles is a greater source of confusion and criticism than ever. Even if young men feel weak, these stories appeal to their fantasy of ultimate validation. One day, they will find a way to be heroes. Particularly, comic book characters typically follow this form. Spiderman is a classic example of this common theme. The protagonist, Peter Parker, is a nerdy, socially awkward, weak young man. He is a ‘good boy’ – he takes care of his needy guardian aunt and uncle. He works hard in school and is polite. However, he is ignored or even disrespected by peers. He is an adolescent trying to be a good man, to the approval of some but not all. A freak accident empowers him to take on an alter-ego which lets him live out these fantasies of being universally a hero. The accident makes him strong and agile, and gives him superhuman powers. Perhaps adolescents feel they need superhuman abilities to be the man that they are expected to be. No longer are masculine roles simplistic and widely socially acceptable. It seems that all forms of manhood are subject to criticism. Adolescent boys are increasingly aware of their shortcomings, and find solace in fantasies of success ‘against all odds’. This is not to say that this is a purely new theme. These characters have always been around, but only recently have reached mass appeal. Comic books have always had a niche market, but in 2002, Spiderman the movie became the number six top box office grossing movie of all time. (movieweb.com) The concurrent movie adaptations of The Lord of the Rings trilogy rank number 7, 11, an d 16. This is a truly substantial entrance into popular culture, for a theme that traditionally occupied a niche segment. The idea is that this paradigm is gaining popularity. More young men identify with Peter Parker than ever before.

Masculinities in Media

We must also look at the media’s growing influence on the socialization of adolescent males. We watch more and more television everyday. In Amusing Ouselves to Death, Neil Postman laments this change, saying we are giving in to sensationalism and losing sight of substance. However, Shlain has a more optimistic outlook. He sees the rise of image based culture as a step back towards gender equality. He attributes some of historical female empowerment to the increasing equality in means of communication – occupying both ‘feminine’ (interactive) communication and ‘masculine’ (written) communication. He sees imaged based communication as positive change, celebrates the existence of both means of expression.

There are many different opinions on the media’s role in changing the process of socialization. For one, there is a trend of change in gender roles in the media. Women are beginning to be encouraged to find alternate femininities. Women have been recast in media as powerful, successful, intelligent, and responsible. Increasingly, men are being portrayed as dumb, hapless, incompetent, and irresponsible. Here we return to Tiger’s idea that it is increasingly fashionable to denigrate men. A classic example is the television show The Simpsons. This is a very clever show, and one to which I admit being a big fan. However, it underlines a startlingly common trend in the portrayal of gender roles (particularly in comedies). The father figure, Homer, is an oaf. He has a menial job, he drinks, is irresponsible and is generally a fat simpleton. His wife, Marge, is thin, caring, intelligent, and generally picks up after Homer’s mistakes and holds the family together. Similarly, besides the baby, they have two children who follow the same gender stereotypes. The son, Bart, is vulgar, troublemaking, bad at school, and often thoughtless. His sister Lisa, however, is a brilliant young girl, a musician, a good student and always the voice of reason in a house of blubbering male buffoons. This gender stereotype is prevalent in all kinds of television, movies, and advertisements. As a young man, I was exposed to this gender stereotype on innumerable occasions. There are too many examples of the same theme to even begin naming them. I will take it as a given that we can all agree that it has become much more fashionable to denigrate men. It is concerning that these stereotypes are becoming so universally acceptable. Tiger’s question comes back here. What if, alternatively, these negative stereotypes were attributed to women instead of men? How would we feel if a woman was portrayed as the fatter, dumber, more incompetent sex? The point in this exercise is this: perhaps we should feel equally uncomfortable with such negative male stereotypes.

Confrontations with Adult Masculinities in Literature

We can also look at literature as a medium of expression for changing masculine roles. Certainly in many high schools there is required reading which addresses the themes I have addressed. We should look at the characters in these books as representations of adolescent boys and their attitudes towards adult roles. For many young men, this may be the one of the only arenas where talking about masculinities or adult roles seems legitimate. Certainly a lot of them may feel uncomfortable discussing them with parents or friends. Thus, classroom discussion of books might be important to healthy self conception and to understanding adult expectations. In particular, I would like to look at these themes in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and Easton-Ellis’s Less Than Zero.

Lord of the Flies is certainly a very popular part of the modern American high school curriculum. The central themes of Id vs. Superego battles and savagery vs. society are central to the process of growing up. The boys, stranded on an island with no adults, must reproduce society in order to prevent Hobbes’s classic state of “war of all against all”. Written in 1954, it is a classic form of the struggle for manhood. The protagonist (Ralph) and the antagonist (Jack) battle with different styles of leadership to organize the society. The reader is invited to see how Ralph presumably decides how to ‘be a good man’. This story is my classic example of adolescent confrontation with adult masculine roles. Many stories tackle this theme of society versus impulse (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness comes to mind), and are taught in high schools as a way of getting adolescents to discuss social expectations. Lord of the Flies is particularly interesting in its portrayal of masculinities as naturally violent, but furthermore, that without proper society, these masculinities become singular. Many of the characters have one-dimensional personality strengths, making them representative of various qualities in masculinities. Piggy is smart, Simon is caring, Ralph is responsible and a leader, and Jack is aggressive and power hungry. However, as the story progresses and society falls apart, these multiple traits become unable to coexist. Savagery becomes the single characteristic of masculine achievement on the island. This is an interesting reversal of the process I have been describing; instead of social progress and a resulting fragmentation of masculinities, it is the opposite – a disintegration of society and a devolving singularity of masculinity.

The Lord of the Flies is a useful exercise, yet I would like to turn to the opposite example, where we can see the issues with the fragmentation of masculinities. I will use J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as another important book in American high school curriculum concerning the confrontation of adult masculine roles. Published around the same time as Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye evoked immediate controversy. It was this story that finally addressed new masculine issues candidly. It is a book which has often been described as ahead of its time. So what was so unusual about this book, and what made it so much more controversial than the vicious behavior of the boys in Lord of the Flies? Most likely is the fact that it contained more explicit language and sexual content than was consistently acceptable for legitimate literature in dealing with adolescent issues. Also, the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, didn’t seem to be a good representation of dealing with these masculinities. By most accounts, he is a failure. He has done poorly at school, cannot maintain friendships, gets into trouble a lot, and generally has a bad attitude about life. But my interest in the subject is Holden’s particular attitude towards assuming the adult role. Holden feels contempt for the world around him. He considers the adults in the story to be ‘phony’. Furthermore, he only seems to show affection for his younger sister, which is symbolic of a larger theme: lamenting the loss of his youth. Holden feels upset at the thought of growing up, and he believes the adult roles that are presented to him are illegitimate. He is not just rebellious, but sad – he invites the reader to empathize with this rejection of adulthood. We finally see a representation of this adolescent urge to reject the adult role, although the story was written in a rather socially traditional time period, just after the Second World War. What made this book a classic was its relevance to the future of adolescence. The sweeping social changes that would take place in the decades following would only seem to make this novel more relevant. As more traditional adult masculinities were criticized, and appropriate new roles became decreasingly obvious, more young men were feeling like Holden Caulfield. Holden shows us the adolescent response of delegitimizing the adult role in postmodern society.

Lastly, Bret Easton-Ellis’s Less Than Zero gives us the most postmodern view of the adolescent struggle with adult masculinities. Easton-Ellis has become one of the foremost postmodernists, and Less Than Zero, his first book, gives us a modern Holden Caulfield. The protagonist, Clay, is from a wealthy family in Los Angeles. He and his friends live a life of low expectations and high privilege. They all do enormous amounts of drugs, most are bisexual, and none respect any traditional sense of moral values. In fact, all the relationships in the book are portrayed without any emotional attachments. All of the characters make relationships based on drugs, money, sex, or material goods. A particularly interesting passage is his visit to his father, who was divorced from his mother and who he rarely even sees anymore. “It doesn’t bother me that my father leaves me waiting [outside his office] for thirty minutes while he’s in some meeting and then asks me why I’m late. I don’t want to go out to lunch today, would rather be at the beach or sleeping or out by the pool, but I’m pretty nice and I smile and nod a lot and pretend to listen to his questions” (Easton-Ellis, 42). It is surprising to see such a surprising apathy for the most prominent model of masculinity in this character’s life, his own father no less. After a lunch constantly interrupted by business calls and completely devoid of any meaningful conversation – it ends uneventfully and without remorse:

“ ‘Well, Clay, what do you want for Christmas?’

‘Nothing.’ I say after a while.

‘Do you want your subscription to Variety renewed?’

‘It already is’. Another pause.

‘Do you need money?’

‘No.’ I tell him, knowing that he’ll slip me some later on.” (Easton-Ellis, 43)

The idea here is a new, postmodern Holden. Clay rarely feels disgust, although the relationships and motives in the story are almost unanimously superficial and dysfunctional. He only feels apathy. He has no inspiration, he doesn’t even lament his childhood. The struggle with adult roles truly seems lost – he ignores it completely. We can perceptualize this apathy in relation to the lack of distinct adult roles available to him. He rejects masculinity, responsibility, and emotional connection in relationships. He has lost all direction or ambition – indeed, his parents, friends, and siblings expect virtually nothing out of him. The book ends with a resolution not unlike what Georg Simmel is talking about in Dialectic of Individual and Society, that the postmodern city is stealing our identity. “The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun.” (Easton-Ellis, 208) The paradigm in this book is the apathy response to the growing vagueness or myriad meaning in adult roles.

‘Alternative’

Rebellion is one of the most classically identified processes of adolescence. We have a tendency to want to blame it on hormones. Certainly, some of it must be a natural part of the teenage reaction to adult roles. ‘Growing up’ involves a process of accepting various freedoms and responsibilities afforded to the adult. Often, these seem disproportionate. In a postindustrial society, we can see that young people must spend more and more time investing in their future. This process of ‘growing up’ is being drawn out, and often, it is not unreasonable for teens to feel trapped in this slow process. I will look at rebellion in its relation to the socialization of adult roles. Particularly, I am concerned with new forms or trends in rebellion which might be unique to the various social forces brought on by a rapidly changing society.

In Cynthia Fuchs’ essay “Beat Me Outta Me”: Alternative Masculinities (from Smith’s collection of essays Boys), she addresses the growing alternative uprising. This word ‘alternative’ is commonly used to define a genre of music from the mid nineties, but Fuchs more accurately describes it as a loose trend of rebellion which made its way into popular mediums such as MTV. The point is not to say that this was the first instance of counterculture in music, but that a particularly postmodern identity surfaced here, and for the first time brought counterculture into the mainstream (if this is possible). She points out that this trend is both a subculture of rebellion and a multi-million dollar market. Importantly, the idea is not to struggle to reconcile these two seemingly oppositional ideas. Rather, it is to understand this duality as a theme in new masculinities:

“If we reimagine incomplete, confused, and contentious as less a stage than an understandable and ongoing ‘norm’; masculinity – a socializing narrative with a familiar endpoint, as in “boys become men’ – becomes less entrenched. Alternative boys are increasingly understandable as being in process, as masculinities are made specific, local, and multiple.” (Fuchs, 173)

The ‘alternative’ theme is a largely adolescent phenomenon, with young men who might otherwise be typical – middle class, white, heterosexual – express their identity in a new light. “The challenge is staked not so much in opposition (to the world? – come on) but in refractions, complications: Things are blurry here. Insisting on continuous difference within-itself, ‘alternative’ as a concept reconfigures the temporal and embodied boundedness of youth, whiteness, and masculinity as subcultures.” (Fuchs, 174) Fuchs believes that at the heart of this change is the search for authenticity and uniqueness. Indeed, much of the lyrics of the genre confirm this – Beck’s famous song ‘Loser’ challenges: “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Generally, the pattern seems to be one of young men challenging the way they feel that society views them. They use irony, apathy, or even nihilistic detachment as a way of establishing their own (as opposed to a larger social) authenticity. In some ways, this subculture is an outlet for insecurities, a community of people who feel marginalized by social roles. It offers them a new way of expressing themselves, and enacting social change. Alternatively, this struggle for authenticity is also a cause for concern. The epitome of this group is Kurt Cobain, who struggled with this concept of authenticity for his whole life. He could never resolve his desire to reach people with his music without being just another mass cultural icon telling people how to be. Eventually, it lead to his suicide – it was a central theme in his suicide note. When faced with this tragic idea – that the struggle to feel legitimate has become so overwhelming for some boys; we tend to want to blame something. Who killed Kurt Cobain? Is someone killing our boys? Interestingly, this is one of the lessons of suicide – that often it is hard to blame anyone or anything. We hope for a solution. Realistically, the most immediate solution is understanding. We can no longer perceive these issues as illegitimate. This is my purpose in addressing the socialization of masculinities in the modern male adolescent. I do not purport to have a solution to their problems. I simply wish to encourage a framework of understanding them. The lesson with this case is not to say that we expect too much – or that masculinity is too confusing. It is that we can no longer afford to think of social change as a fight. Every fight has victims. If our goal is social equality, then we must not think of the ‘typical’ young man as one without legitimate issues and concerns. We must help boys find legitimacy in masculine roles now and in the future.

This brings up an important concept – the significant danger in male backlash. Gibson’s ‘New Warrior’ and Smith’s ‘Alternative’ icon are examples of a backlash. The rise of gay culture in the media further complicates expressions of masculinity. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals are guilty of defining their own masculinities by ‘othering’ the opposing male sexuality. Homosexuals defy norms of masculinity in order to define themselves. Equally, heterosexuals often disparage failures of masculinity by calling them ‘gay’. A particularly interesting representation of the ‘masculist’ backlash is Comedy Central’s The Man Show. In this show, the hosts drink beer and make sexist jokes. They intentionally objectify women in defiance of political correctness. Every episode ends with the credits rolling over slow motion video of attractive, scantily clad women jumping on trampolines. The show has appeal because men feel constrained by new expectations of their relationship with women. The theme of the show is that men cannot speak or act the way they feel in everyday life because society tells them it’s inappropriate. Thus, this show seeks out to vent this repression. It exaggerates traditional masculinities and intentionally violates political correctness, giving male viewers a fantasy outlet for this tacit gender conflict of everyday society.

The ‘masculist’ backlash is purely negative; it puts forward no new positive roles for men. Rather, it only tries to fight back by attacking women and praising hegemonic masculinities. There are even more dangerous examples of this backlash. Rising rates of adolescent male dropouts, suicide, drug abuse, crime, and violence are testament to this fact. While it is difficult to establish causality, I believe that conflicted male roles are a dominant source of these dysfunctional lifestyles. Simply put, boys are having more trouble learning to be men. The shooters at Columbine High School were troubled adolescent boys. Their heroes were Adolf Hitler and countercultural musician Marilyn Manson. They couldn’t find a healthy way to be a man, so they chose models in opposition to society. It wasn’t just these boys whose lives were at stake. All of us have a stake in these issues. Males are responsible for an overwhelming majority of violence and crime in our society today. It is surprising that there is such a lack of literature and academics devoting to understanding the issues in boys’ lives.

Solutions in Dealing with Modern Masculinities

There has been an effort at redefining masculinities. A movement in male heroes was lead by famous men’s writer Robert Bly, who wrote Iron John. This book constructs a sort of creation myth for masculinity, describing the quest for adult masculinity by the boy, who achieves it through mythical adventure. The response to this book began the Mythopoetic Movement. Sociologist Michael Kimmel has written frequently about this men’s movement. He describes a male effort to participate in this primitive search “to celebrate their inner warrior” (Kimmel, 593) These men went on wilderness retreats, beating drums and sharing stories. More than just understanding masculinity, this movement also built support groups for men to share problems. Michael Schwalbe describes the Mythopoetic Movement as an institution (for men) that uses talk, drumming, and ritual to search for Communitas, a relationship based on similarities in a common experience (masculinity), despite the individuals still leading very different lifestyles (Schwalbe, 569). Another men’s movement was lead by the Christian group ‘The Promise Keepers’, which set out to recreate traditional masculine responsibilities along with understanding of women’s issues. Schwalbe describes these movements as very helpful in bringing together the men involved in it, so that they could share and heal each other.

Yet Schwalbe points out the same problem that Kimmel and Gibson found with men’s movements; that the new male archetype is merely a reaction to women’s struggle, it still does not seek to end patriarchy. “Mythopoetic men’s work may open men to seeing things in themselves and help them to make connections with each other … [but misses] that, in a male supremacist society, there can be no innocent celebration of masculinity” (Schwalbe, 576). This idea that men’s groups help men deal with feminism but not accept it is similar to the point Gibson is getting at when he describes the backlash among men via paramilitary culture. Kimmel agrees as well; his synopsis of men’s groups is that they seek to heal men - but that they still encourage patriarchy. They reject homosexuality, encourage many elements of traditional masculinity that suppress women (such as the Promise Keeper’s belief that men should be the primary breadwinner), they see feminism as an enemy, and exclude women (Schwalbe, 594). Bob Connell has a similar view of men’s efforts to redefine masculinities: “this school of thought has constructed a fantasy of the universal ‘deep masculine’ … we cannot solve contemporary problems by nostalgia. We need new and more democratic patterns in gender relations, not re-runs of discredited patriarchies” (Connell, 5-6). Generally, Kimmel, Messner, and Connell are some of the foremost sociological writers in modern men’s studies. They all generally have a feminist framework, meaning they welcome social change. For the educated sociological mindset, gender equality is necessary at any cost. However, this school of thought generally wants to achieve this via gender homogenization, at the expense of the masculine. For example, in Recreating Men, Bob Pease argues: “I believe that it is possible for men to reposition themselves … and consequently come to formulate their interests in different ways” (Pease, 142) Wasn’t the problem in previous generations that we had asked women to ‘reformulate their interests’ in order to accommodate men? The assertion here is that men should just accept this prescription, even if they do not find it in their own interests. I find this tendency problematic, in that it merely tells men how they should be to alleviate gender equality. It neglects how they want to be. It tends to cast male-specific issues and concerns as being of lesser importance. It denies the likelihood of male victimization in society. While the net effect of social forces may be patriarchal, this does not mean men are without their own problems.

The other half of the dichotomy in the literature tends to position itself in opposition to these approaches. It argues that boys are in fact the real victims. It cites the growing troubles of men and the negative media portrayal of men. In The War Against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers explains:

“This book tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy children. It is a story of how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world. No one denies that boys’ aggressive tendencies must be checked and channeled in constructive ways. Boys need discipline, respect, and moral guidance. Boys need love and tolerant understanding. They do not need to be pathologized.” (Sommers, 14)

Tiger’s book can also have these tendencies, although he has a more moderate approach in the spectrum of literature on men’s studies. He argues that men are becoming seen as unimportant relics of historical societies, that they are no longer part of intelligent progress. These male-sympathetic arguments also have some very valid and constructive criticisms. The downside to these is that they tend to reduce gender differences to purely biological reasons, and often, can even encourage patriarchy. Thus, we can see that much of the literature in men’s studies has both strengths and weaknesses. This is why I have chosen such a broad and diverse method of explaining changing masculinities – it seems that any singular approach falls victim to the respective weaknesses of either argument. Indeed, part of the problem of young men is that this is an argument. This is exactly what is so confusing – that so many people are arguing about how boys should be, and have so many different answers. Rarely to we stop to consider: What do boys want to be? Who are their heroes and models? What are the paradigms in masculinities, how are they changing, and why? Hopefully, this paper has shed some light on changing masculinities. I also hope that my methodology contributes an important lesson in the ongoing effort to understand adolescent males: that there are many ways of being a man, and that adolescence is not about figuring out which one is the real way to ‘be a man’, but rather, the right way to ‘be a man’. Adolescent boys need to feel like society will accept them however they decide to be. Currently, we categorize and pigeonhole masculinities. Boys face conflicting expectations – often making it hard to avoid either extreme: they struggle not to be ‘too sensitive’ or ‘too insensitive’, ‘too gentle’ or ‘too abrasive’, ‘too aggressive’ or ‘too passive’. We need to encourage the spectrum of masculinities, and acknowledge that each has its own unique place in society. The true path to gender equality lies in supporting adolescents in their own choices for adult gender roles. By fostering mutual respect, tolerance, and acceptance, and eliminating the ‘singular masculine diagnosis’ tendency present in the literature, men and women can truly work together to create gender equality. More importantly, adolescent boys can find healthy social roles which do not suppress, embarrass, or conflict them.

Works Cited

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