ARG’s – Time to Get Into the Game

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ARG, or “Alternate Reality Gaming” has been around for a bit now but is still only slowly trickling into the mainstream.  A big reason for this is that it is the nature of an ARG to target “super-fans” willing to invest the sort of time and energy required for full participation.

Now MentalFloss.com is providing a great overview of ARGs and some great links to help you get involved:

For example, in the ARG for The Dark Knight, a few lucky players visited participating bakeries and bought cakes that had been reserved for “Robin Banks.” Written in the icing was a phone number. When the player dialed the number, a cell phone hidden inside the cake began to ring. As the campaign went on, these players received text messages, recorded voice messages, and were instructed to call numbers to gain further access to the game’s many puzzles.

Check out the whole story here.

I think ARGs are going to continue to grow as people become more comfortable moving between the various forms of communication out there and as marketers look for new ways to create true user engagement.

Shocking Report: 80 Percent of Teens Don’t Text Naked Pictures to Each Other!

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If there’s one thing that news outlets and bloggers love, it’s any sort of news that let’s them post something about teens and sex.  It’s the ultimate link-bait.  We all like to act all horrified and shake our collective heads over any sort of teen sex news even though nobody can seem to get enough of it.

The past week or so hase seen the widespread use of the term “sexting” – the act of sending a naked or suggestive picture to someone else via text message – and it seems that, according to some study I don’t feel like hunting down at the moment, that teens are “sexting” each other at “an alarming rate!”

Seems that as many as 20% of teens have sexted someone else.  Oh, the horror!  Even worse, some of these teens are being tried as sexual deviants and face up to twenty years being listed as a sexual offender for their society-destroying crime.

Of course, nobody is writing about the fact that 80% of teens are NOT sexting anyone.  Yeah, that’s right, the vast majority of teens get that doing something like that could easily get out of hand and result in their naked picture showing up on a website their teacher can visit late at night.

The truth is that nobody is interested in this story except for the fact that they can read it and think about all the naked teen pictures floating around out there – nobody wants to have a frank discussion about teen sexuality, or safe-sex or even confront their own conflicting desires around the topic.

Instead, we are going to condemn a small number of teens doing exactly the sort of things teens have always done, and we will absolutely succeed in destroying a few of their lives for no good reason whatsoever.

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What’s Your Privacy Worth? A Free Smartphone?

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The NYT has a good article about the pros and cons of massive data mining and the state of our personal privacy.

As a jumping-off point they look at a program being run at M.I.T.

“Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.

Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network. ”

While this is a relatively harmless and completely voluntary invasion of privacy it raises a slew of questions about what constitutes “private” actions and how, in this digital age especially, are we going to balance the technical ability to track and gather personal data with the rights of the individual?

NYT piece is definitely worth a read.

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Do You Text Your Parents?

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick

I kind of loved this silly little article from the Daily Herald regarding the growing trend among the younger set to use email only for communicating with “grownups.”

“It’s not that suburban teens never use e-mail. When compelled to communicate with adults who – bless their technology-challenged hearts – don’t know any better, teens will resort to the technology of yesteryear.”

It made me wonder, though, if texting and instant messaging is another one of those growing generational divides. I use both email and texting with frequency (and IM if others insist, though I don’t keep that open and running at all times like most people younger than I will do).  The thing is, I have never texted my parents and I know they don’t text each other or their friends.  And my folks are pretty tech savvy.

So, do you text your parents?

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