Nowdays communiacation between people in different generation is worsening exponentially and as a consequence of the digitalization the real (physical) contact between people is exponentially dropping and this is a fact everyone could realize.
Even in people and more Eastern or sunny countries where traditionally the direct contact has always been of a crucial importance is declining seriously, the social networks such as Facebok, Vkontakte (The Russian space Equivallent of Facebook) – if you have VK and want to add me there My profile there is here , Viber calls, WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat and all these are leading people into micro prisons narrowing their worldview up to the box (jail) each of this companies has created for people, just because you don't own the data you communicate over this channels and your data is being used for a severy complicated computerized researches on how you tend to think, how you tend to communicate, what are your triggering keywords and your general mental (mind) structures and cues. Privacy of all of these is also very low as many of this digital medias are designed with the malicious features to serve as a spy networks for end people. Not to mention often data collected about you is being sold to a third party agencies which collect all the time data about product preferences, buying behavior, life style etc.
People who refuse to become part of this electronic prisons built by Megalomaniacs (or Evil Geniuses as Richard Stallman uses to call them), just to name a few Mr. Zack Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (let him Rest in Peace), Elon Musk are being pushed into the Outside Zone., The more conservative and less exposed to technology older people or youngsters who value more their freedom and privacy, are slowly starting to being separated from the Digitalization and being looked upon like a little crazies who are psychologically sick.
In my opinion two major "camps", are being built, one of the people who doesn't have the skill or money to keep in track with latest technology advancements, these are usually people with lower education different thinking people, people with strong religious convictions, or burn out people who are overloaded by technology's chaotic ways as well as personalities trying to live as less dependent from society and social systems and are mindfully rejecting or limiting the technology use as much as they can.
The boom of Smart Mobile Phones (and the aggressive campaigns of Mobile operators for everyone to own some kind of Smart Phones be it Android, IPhone, BlackBerry etc.) and the imposed on society Digitalization of society by MultiCorporation companies is in my opinion, no doubt a planned process with a clear goals that people's reality is being more and more controlled and spied on not to mention that it is fully possible to Program People to certain degrees by using computer technology, interfaces, Alarms.
Maybe not much of Citizens has thought over it or realize it but psychologists and peoples in roles within Medias long time are aware of the high role that Social Programming (Social Engineering) historically TV Channels, Radios and Nowadays Internet News / Medias play on disinforming the masses and let them believe an invented stories about wars, problems, famines that doesn't exist to keep them stuck in Fear through Fear Mongering (manipulation techniques). Moreover it is interesting fact that Programming of Human Mind through a slow repeatable processes has been a fact to certain degree and thus with Computers and Mobiles all of us are being programmed subconsciously to things we're not consciously aware (for more on that topic please see my previous article on Color Programming) as well as What is Predictive Programming of Mind (Society) and how it affect us ?
Not to mention the prooven fact that there are psychological mechanisms for making the mind to be addicted to things seen or experienced which are being adopted by Mostly all of large medias on the Internet.
The simplification of access to the Global Net (The Internet) and the unification of (I would say anti-social) web platforms such as Facebook, where mostly all with mid or upper education of people have registrations and are letting you without choice but either to live a lonely life of more or less rejection or join the "company". Those like me who nowadays are abstaining from Facebook and most of modern communication are being cut from the Digitalization slowly.
Through the last 10 – 15 years there has been a serious attempt from Free Software and Hackers to change the game into a more positive and more open frames of communication and give freedom to people with attempts for decentralization of social networks. Unfortunately it seems we're loosing the Game of Freedom at least in the normal nowadays Highly Filtered and more and more government agencies influenced (not to say controlled) Internet, here I'm excluding from the equation the recent attempts of Alternative thinking hackers (and unfortunately) criminals to build alternative internet spaces such as DarkNet / DeepWeb
As I like to experiment with Free Software in general to explore its business applicability, here is my short results on my experience and yearly research on what is there as a free software that gives you options to build a self hosted social network.
1. GNU Social (known historically as StatusNet)
GNU Social is a kinda of Personal Twitter service top recommended project the project started and seemed to be very promising and I myself some long ago Started an own version of it (s.www.pc-freak.net) to blog about my daily life obstacles and interesting info I've learned here.
However with time the project StatusNet become GNU Social and my attempts to upgrade it following provided instructions with the GNU Social files were a failure, so I kept the old version of statusnet and abondoned it just to adopt BuddyPress as a way to keep track of my Personal Interests in organized self owned Twitter like service.
2. BuddyPress
– BuddyPress (The distributed Multi user Self Owned Social Network based on WordPress)
–
"Fun & flexible software for online communities, teams, and groups."
This is the official description of the project my own efforts to establish it cost me at least 3 days up to a week just to establish something workable and a couple of more weeks to tailor it to my likings. I was planning to involve other people and build an online social community.
Most of available plugins for BuddyPress for extra-functionality are either old unmaintained or cost you good amount of moneys. I tried allowing Public Members registrations but soon the Network started filling with nasty spammer registrations. The available free plugins for Anti-Spam protection were real pain in the ass so finally I decided to keep the Network closed just to myself.
And create the user registrations manually after a primary email request contact from anyone who wants to own an account. As you could guess, as of time of writting this post, noone is contacting.
Considering SEO side of the network, even though I have around hundred posts with Videos, Music, Books, information and various Life Stuff of importance somehow Google, Yandex and Bing are indexing the pages (only about 350 pages are properly indexed). I tried to research why is that in Google Search console and Recrawl the site a couple of times, none of that didn't give me a very meaningful answers why BuddyPress Social network posted pages by my user are not ending up indexed properly in Search Engines and I don't have the full time to further investigate why is that, so anyone who is more advanced to Search Engine optimization (or better said have the time desite to help) me with this project is mostly welcome to contact me and we can collaborate and perhaps grow that network.
3. Elgg Social Network
A highly customizable web framework and CMS for building social apps with PHP and MySQL. – however my personal experience with Elgg few years ago just shows, elgg is far from ready for a productive use, and anyone who want to start an Online Social Network has to seriously work with at least of small team of developers and system administrators and testers to make the thing good enough for daily use for the masses. There are some Elgg based social networks out there performing, however the project needs much more work until it is ready for an easy and mass use and anyone who is willing to build a custom social network needs to seriously invest a good amount of money for it to be tailored and maintained properly and the multitued of its bugs to be fixed.
4. Pligg
Is a a Free software social network designed from scratch with the help of many contributors to help you build up your website. This open source social network software can be used used and helps to lively setup communities, similar to Facebooks. Anyways for anyone who is willing to invest time and nerves, let him try and understand the project is still far from completeness.
Historically I tried to install Pligg as I was investigating on best options to build a free software based social network in 2015 but though I was aable to bring a workable version the spam problem still persisted and I brought down Pligg install in a couple of days because of its lack of enough functionality plugins and rapid development, as overall my personal experience was that Elgg was a much more grown product ready for use …
5. Oxwall
"Oxwall® is an open source mobile-friendly community website platform that is suitable for brand communities, interest-based social networks, and other online community projects."
Oxwall has been actively developed since 2010 after the team behind it developed plenty of community site projects.
Today Oxwall is a strong project with 3rd party development community.
It uses PHP and MySQL environment for social network development. It comes with a varied range of plugins that helps you personalize with add-ons to add functionality to the website. Its CMS is compatible with both small and large scale networking sites and even with executive websites.
I never personally tried Oxwall.
The development process is done by a small but dedicated team of 22 peoples which makes the project quite promising, but as the other options availabe for building an self hosted social network community, the project has still a long way to go …
I have never tried to install and use it myself but the site offered demo (you can see it here) seems promising and seems to make Oxwall an adequate competitor to ELGG.
6. AstroSpaces
Claiming to be the world's first open source social networking solution. Coded from scratch, it is highly efficient and very easy to use. As you can imagine its neither the first nor among the ones to easily build you workable solution, but for those who have intention to build something similar to facebook to the masses with the right Finances and Crowd Up raising or Business Angels eventually it can turn into something usuable with a lot of work and the right people
These free software (open source) based social networks are into a workable state, but because the enormous size of such projects and the fact that these projects are being done on a primary voluntееrs with almost little or none financial investitions the projects are moving slowly, have a lot of bugs, have a higher complexity to install and use by an ordinary uneducated people with little to less experience in the fields such as programming or system administration.
6. Mixxt is a social network design company, developing social extranets and intranets. It enables collaboration, communication, and Knowledge management through a single tool. It has a dedicated platform for fast development and enhancement. Develop your site with the help of custom designs, forums, wikis, and photos.
7. XOOPS
(XOOPS) is claiming or aiming to be "a classic tool for evolving from small to big community sites, intra-company web portals, and more. XOOPS has a modular format that can be extended as per needs. The web content management system helps in it. You may start with a blog and further augment it into a social networking website and with more functionality.
The module that is used to build a website with XOOPS is Yogurt. Environments used are MySQL, Linux, PHP, and Apache. But mainly MySQL and PHP are used. YouTube, friend list, pictures, communities, mp3 tracks, wall to post your messages are some of the features of XOOPS.".
Obviously even a little experiments with it shows, that the project has still a long way to go until it is usable enough without much tailoring for production use.
To sum it up, all of the 7 top free software social network projects gives a lot of options for free (if you have a network of dedicated developers with passion who are ready to commit work for free), mostly all of them offered a custom tailored packages with Themes and plugins sold for few hundred of dollars, for those who don't want to make things from scratch. But nomatter that developing a full featured ready to use solution, that is less buggy is amount of at least moderate to big investments.
If you happen to be a person who have an bright idea for the next competitor of Facebook at some time in future, you need to invest a lot and have to build an excellent company team and put the right amount of money / management effort to make the project succeed. However for a small and unpretencious social communities of up to few hundred of users (1000 to 100 000) users or so with the right scaling each of above projects could play well.
If you're interested just like me to build an alternative less-restricted more human rights respecting social network as an alternative to the already overcrowded commercial ones out there please get in contact with me, and perhaps we together can make a change for better!
Baby boomers and Generation X, Y, Z – Generational Marketing and 4 Common personality stereotype traits of people born over the last 60 years
Saturday, August 18th, 2018Those who are employed in the realm of Social or Internet Marketing definitely have to know the existence of at least 4 different conditional stereotypes, these are Baby Boomers and Generation X, Generation Y and Generation Z (Millenials).
According to Socielogist Karl Mannheim (who is among the founding fathers of classical socielogy) – "All members of a generation share a similar collective experience" or in other words people are categorized in generations depending on when they were born.
As stereotypes they're generalization of people born in different periods of time and sharing same or similar traits.
Because of the age and the conditions they grew up and as they share those general spirit of time and age, they tend to be more or less behaving in a similar ways in how they think save / spend money or share some common approach to life choices and attitude towards life and worldview.
But before proceeding to the 4 main cohert provisional stereotypes, its worthy to mention how these four common trait generations came to existence with a little bit of pre-history.
The pre WW I and WW II world situation and the First and Second World War played a pivotal role in forming the social conditions necessery for the development of the baby boomers.
* The depression Era people
Born in period: 1912 – 1921 who came at full maturity around 1930-1939 right in the beginning of WW I (all of whom are already deceased) as of 2018 as a cause of the war uncertainty and the havoc and the war conditions were very conservative, compulsive savers, tried their best to maintain a low debt. They had the mindset (responsibility) to leave some kind of legacy to their children. They were very patriotic, oriented towards work before pleasure, had a great respect for authority and had a strong sense of moral obligation. For all this character traits of this people undoubtfully a key role played the strong belief in God mostly all people had at the time.
The next in line conditional stereotype of people that came to earth are the:
* The World War II Generation
Born in year period: 1922 to 1927 who came to a mature age exactly at the terrible years of Second World War.
People of that time were either fighters for or against the Axis Powers or the Central Powers with the common shared goal to fight against the enemy (of course there are multiple of people who were just trying to survive and not taking a side in this meaningless war).
The current amount of people living are estimated to few million of deathbed elders worldwide.
As above conditional generations types mentioned are of importance for historical reasons and most of the people belonging to those depression pre WWI and WW II era are dead or just a few millions an overall in un less-consuming age (excluding the medicine consumption which is higher compared to youngsters).
I'll further proceed further with the Baby Boomers, GEN X, Y, Zs who are de-facto the still active members participating to society and economy more or less.
So what are these 4 Stereotypes of Generations that and why are so important for the modern marketers or business manager?
1. BABY BOOMERS also called for a short (Boomers)
These are people who have been defined by a birth year range (period) from early to mid 1940s until 1960 and 1964.
In Europe and North America, boomers are widely identified with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence.
As a group, baby boomers were considered the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit generation up to the era in which they arrived, and were amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. They were also the generation that received peak levels of income; they could therefore reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products. The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive (and that's for a good reason).
One feature of the boomers was that they have tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before or that has come afterward. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the changes they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and with a methapors such as as "the pig in the python".
2. Generation X / GEN X
Generation X is considered the people born in the following birth year period 1960 forward in time until 1980s. A specific feature in the 60s-80s period was the shifting societal values, perhaps the spring of this generation was also connected to the increasing role and spread of communism in the world.
Sometimes this generation was referred as the "latchkey generation".
The term generation X itself was popularized largely by Douglas Coupland in his novel 1991 novel Generation X Tales for an Accelerated Culture
A very common trait for Generation X was the reduced adult supervision over kids when compared to previous generations a result of increasing divorce rates and the increased role of one parent children upbringing (in most cases that was the mother) which had to be actively involved as a workforce and lacked physically the time to spend enough time with its children and the increased use of childcare options in one parent families.
They were dubbed the "MTV" (Music Television) generation – that was a hit and most popular music TV in the early 1990s.
The kids representing generation X were described as slackers, cynical and disaffected.
The cultural influences dominating the tastes and feelings of the teen masses of that generation was musical genres such as punk music, heavy metal music, grunge and hip-hop and indie films (independent films) produced outside of the major film studio system.
According to many researches in midtime those generation are described as active, happy and achieving a work-life balance kind of lifestyle.
People belonging to Generation X are described as people with Enterpreneural tendencies.
Just to name a few of the celebrities and successful people who belong to this generation, that's Google's founder Sergey Brinn & Larry Page (born in 1973), Richard Stallman (founder of Free Software movement) as well movie and film producer celebrities such as Georgi Clooney, Lenny Kravitz, Quantin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, David Fincher etc.
According to United Kingdom survey study of 2500+ workers conducted by Workfront, GEN X are found to be among the hardest working employees in today's workforce. They are also ranked high by fellow workers for having a strong work ethics (about 59.5%), being helpful (55.4%) and very skilled (54.5%) of respondents as well marked as the best troubleshooters / problem solvers (41.6%) claimed so.
According to research conducted by Viacom, gen x they have a high desire for flexibility and fulfillment at work.
3. Generation Y (Millenials) – GEN Y
Following Generation X came on earth Genreation Y the birth period dated for this kids were years are stretchy year period that this generation is described are years 1980s – 1990s to yearly 2000s where birth period range of those ppl ends.
This kids are descendants of the GEN X and second wave Baby Boomers.
In the public this generation is referred as "echo boomers".
The Millenials characteristics are different based on the region of birth, they're famous for the increased familiarity with communication, media and digital technologies.
There upbringing was marked by increase in liberal approach to politics.
The Great recession crisis of the 2000s played a major impact on this generation because it has caused historical high levels of un-employment among youngsters and led to a possible long term economic and social damage to this generation.
Gen Y according are less brand loyal and the speed of the Internet has led the cohort to be similarly flexible and changing in its fashion, style consciousness and where
and how it is communicated with.
As I am born in 1983 me and my generation belongs to Generation Y and even though Bulgaria before 1991 was a Communist regime country, I should agree that I and many of my friends share a very similar behavior and way of thinking to the GEN Y stereotype described, but as I was born in a times of transition and Bulgaria as a Soviet Union Satellite at the time has been lacking behind in fashion and international culture due to the communist regime, me and my generation seem to be sharing a lot of common stereotype characteristics with Generation X such as the punk-rock, metal, hip-hop culture MTV culture and partly because of the GEN X like overall view on life.
Among most famous representative successful people of the Millenials generation are Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Prince William (the second in line to the British throne), Kim Jong Un (the leader dictator of North Korea) etc.
4. Generation Z ( GEN Z) / iGeneration / Generation Sensible (Post Millenials)
Following Millenials generation is GEN Z, demographers and researchers typically set as a starting birth date period of those generation 1990s and mid 2000s. As of time of writting there is still no clear consensus regarding ending birth years.
This is the so called Internet Generation because this generation used the internet and Smart Mobile Phone technology since a very young age, they are very confortable with technology (kinda of wired) and addicted to social media such as Facebook / Twitter / Instagram etc. Because of the level of digital communication, many people of this generation are more introvert oriented and often have problems expressing themselves freely in groups. Also they tend to lack the physical communication and more digitally community oriented, even though this depends much also on the specific personality and in some cases it is exactly the opposite.
* Summary
As a Marketer, Human Resources hiring personal specialist, a CEO or some kind of project / business manager it is a good idea to be aware of these 4 common stereotypes. However as this are stereotypes (and a theory) as everything theoritized the data is slighly biased and untrue. The marketer practice shows that whoever conducts a marketing and bases his sales on this theoritizing should consider this to be just one aspect of the marketing campaign those who are trying to sell, stuff ideas or ideology to any of those generation should be careful not to count 100% on the common traits found among the above 4 major groups and consider the individuality of person everyone has and just experiment a little bit to see what works and what doesn't.
Also it should be mentioned these diversification of stereotypes are mostly valid for the US citizens and Westerners but doesn't fully fit to ex-communist countries or countries of the Soviet union, those countries have a slightly different personality traits of person born in any of the year periods defined, same is more or less true for the poor parts of Africa and India, Vietnam, China and mostly all of the coomunist countries ex and current. It should be said that countries who belonged to the Soviet Union many of which are current Russian Federation Republics have a personality traits that are often mixture of the 4 stereotypes and even have a lot of the traits that were typical for the WW I and WW II generations, which makes dealing with this people a very weird experience.
Nomatter the standard error that should always considered when basing a marketing research hypothesis on Generational Marketing (using generational segmentation in marketing best potential customer targets), having a general insight and taking in consideration those stereotypes could seriously help in both marketing as well as HR specific fields like Change Management.
If you're a marketer, I recommend you take a quick look also on following very educative article Generational Makarketing and how to target each of the GEN X, Y, Z and Baby Boomers and what works best for each of them.
Nomatter what just like all Theories, the theory of Boomers and the Generation segmantation is not completely true, but it gives a good soil for reasoning as well definitely helps for people involved in sociology and business.
Comments and feedback on the article are mostly welcome as the topic is very broad and there is much more to be said …
Hope the article was interesting to you ….
What was your Generation like?
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