The other day, I wandered into a 7/11 wanting chocolate. I didn’t know which candybar I wanted, I hadn’t decided. And so I stood there, in a colourful aisle surrounded by candy and snacks, looking at boxes and boxes of chocolate bars, mulling over my decision. I surveyed all the screaming colours and smiling cartoons, [...]

Boomers had it pretty simple back in their youth. Want to connect with your friends? Write them a letter, give them a call or go and see them. Gen X-ers had a little more fun. They could’ve emailed each other over 28.8 or used their pagers to send 1-sentence messages back and forth. Here’s what [...]

By now, everyone knows that you should set your privacy settings on Facebook. No sense in ending up like another Kevin Colvin. If you’re going to post party pictures on the day you called in sick… at least do a better job of covering your tracks. I don’t think Gen Y has an appreciation of [...]

Millennials are growing up in a time where an online community exists for virtually every interest and lifestyle. They can connect with other people who love chewing ice, other alpaca enthusiasts or people who really, really like pirates. Some Gen Y-ers are forming communities to celebrate anorexia (pro-ana websites). Pro-ana people have even coined their [...]

Let’s get the obvious economics out of the way. Buying an album = $20. Download = $0. Doesn’t take a math major to get figure that one out. I was having a convo about P2P with a Gen X friend who can’t bring herself to download music. It’s just something she can’t do; whenever she [...]

The celebrity gossip my parents grew up with talked about the love lives of their teen idols. The celebrity gossip Gen Y is hearing about involves sex tapes, paparazzi pictures and drug binges. What effect is this going to have? Antonella Barba from American Idol, Disney’s Vanessa Hudgens and “Hannah Montana” Miley Cyrus. Celebrities designed [...]

by feastoffools It’s no secret that Generation Y doesn’t blink when it comes to downloading music. The story of the day is not that teenagers and twentysomethings are loading their iPods with unpurchased music. I consider myself a veteran digital native; I remember the internet as it was through a 14.4 modem. But I was [...]

Slowly and surely, every social situation is developing a digital doppleganger. We can all recall the teenage awkwardness of being seen at the mall with your mom. It’s always a strange feeling when you get a Facebook friend request from someone from another generation. Many Generation Y users see social networks as a sandbox for [...]

Growing up I always learned it was cool to be different – just not too different. When it came to media, and especially television, it just wasn’t cool to have an accent. Most sitcoms depicted the “foreigner” as slightly bizarre (for anyone that remembers Latka from “Taxi”) or innocently naive (Fez from “That 70s Show” [...]

Thanks to popular music, brands can now live forever. You don’t need to look further than Nelly’s Air Force Ones for proof. I think this is a hilarious phenomenon. I would have loved to see this in the olden days, if only to see the evolution of brand attitudes. Imagine Beethoven naming “Symphony no 9″ [...]