Are you an infomaniac?
January 31, 2008
Or you could be a slacktivist, or maybe even a maturialist. In a new book, our writer defines the terms that will make you an authority on the big ideas
Young woman sitting on sofa, using laptop
James Harkin
What is it like to live in an “experience economy”? When people murmur knowingly about “maturialism”, what are they talking about? Are you suffering from infomania, or planning to be a protirer? Assaulted by a battery of buzzwords, it’s easy to feel left out. Social trends forecaster James Harkin has gathered 75 21st-century neologisms for his new book. Here are times2’s Top 10.
Maturialism
Get your motor runnin’. Head out on the highway. Lookin’ for adventure. If you recognise Steppenwolf’s lyrics, the chances are that you are middle-aged. But with the children having left home and the money to spend, there seems no reason why you can’t go wild.
The average age of the owner of a Harley-Davidson motorbike has accelerated from 38 to 46 in the past decade. “Born-again bikers” have become emblems of a spectacular inversion of social norms. Over the next ten years, the biggest growth in the population will be in those aged between 35 and 60. Many of these will be at the peak of their earning potential; many more will have benefited from “windfall” inheritances.
Maturialism is the idea – coined by the Zeitgeist-watchers at trendwatching.com in Amsterdam – to describe this determination by baby-boomers to treat themselves to high-end goods, services and experiences simply because they can afford them.
Pharmaceutical and cosmetics manufacturers stand to prosper from their anxieties about their beauty and health. Travel marketeers have invented a new segment – the “bloomers”, who have the time and the funds to travel. And for the past five years, Prada, Gucci and Armani have been offering special lines aimed at the older customer – complete with looser fits, higher waist and necklines and colours that accent pallid skin.
Yet the determination of older people to live life to the full can have unforeseen consequences. As the number of middle-aged bikers has increased, so has the number of fatalities. Sometimes baby-boomers really do die before they get old.
Infomania
In the time that I spent researching this short section, I have checked my e-mail about 50 times, played with Google 20 times, checked a newspaper search engine five times, taken three telephone calls and replied to a text from a friend who is on holiday abroad. I am, dear reader, suffering from an acute case of infomania.
Infomania is attention deficit disorder for the communications age. It is the condition of impaired concentration brought about by the constant distraction of “always on” technology. Infomaniacs are the kind of people who talk distractedly in conversation while thumbing text-messages about nothing much, or who interrupt a romantic dinner to check their e-mail on their BlackBerry.
The fantasy of infomaniacs is that the information is important and they are its vital recipients – as likely as not, they will break off a conversation only to find that Pam from Accounts is having a leaving party. The condition of infomania is easy to cure. After all, infomaniacs need only reach as far as the off button. While going through the painful process of information cold turkey, it may be therapeutic for them to have a conversation.
The new puritans
The new puritans are well-to-do professionals who invest time and money researching the provenance and pedigree of what they consume. They would prefer to live in the country, but since to do so would be financially impractical and socially ruinous, they make do as best they can.
A taste for organic food is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the badge of new puritan. What is crucial is not only how a product is produced but where and with what raw materials. There is a good deal of snob value, for example, in knowing not only that the wine they buy hails from a particular region of France but also from a particular estate in the area. For the new puritans, sourcing one’s produce has become an instrument of social competition, and one that is becoming more exacting all the time – a superior olive oil, for example, might not just be traced to Italy, but to a particular estate in Tuscany. Bottled water, whose label denotes its origins as French, is not enough: the new puritan needs to know exactly which mountain spring that bottled water came from – so that they can tell you while they pour it for you.
Preheritance
Premature inheritance, like premature ejaculation, can be a delicate and embarrassing subject. But it is increasingly common, and likely to cost us taxpayers dearly in years to come. More than four-fifths of Brits over 55 would prefer to give to their children or grandchildren before they die. Nearly half, according to a survey by Datamonitor, said that they would consider releasing equity from their homes to do so. All this might be no more than an attempt to dodge inheritance tax. But it is also an acknowledgement that marching into adulthood has become a costly business.
More than half of home-owning parents in a MORI poll said that they didn’t think that their children would make it onto the housing ladder without their support. They expected to bung their offspring up to £24,000 to help out.
There’s also the growing band of parents who would prefer to blow their capital on bonding holidays. That all-expenses paid safari to Kenya with mother and father in tow? Just grin and bear it – and try to forget it’s coming out of your inheritance.
Regretful loners
“Why am I being selfish if there’s only me?” demanded singleton Will Freeman in Nick Hornby’s determinedly sentimental novel About a Boy. Well, now we know. There was a brief moment, around the end of the last millennium, when singletons seemed to be out and proud. That moment is now over. A report published late in 2006 dubbed British people living on their own – and especially men between the ages of 25 and 44 – as “regretful loners”. Singletons are now regularly warned that their lives are lonely, miserable and short. If heart disease doesn’t get them, the social stigma surely will. In Japan, the backlash is such that young singletons are now tarred with the media brush of “parasite singles”.
The cosmetic underclass
In his classic 1895 novel The Time Machine, H. G. Wells told the story of an inventor who teleported himself into the future and was taken aback to discover that the human race had split into two different species, the Eloi and the Morlocks.
The nice-but-dim Eloi lived a carefree life above ground, their only worry being the bestial, lumpen Morlocks who toiled all day long underground to keep them in the style to which they had become accustomed.
Wells’s novel was a poisoned arrow aimed at the unproductive toffs of Edwardian England, but stories that imagine a rift between genetic haves and have-nots are beginning to find an echo in contemporary debates about cosmetic surgery.
Almost 700,000 cosmetic surgery operations will be performed in Britain this year at a cost of £539 million; by 2009, market analyst Mintel predicts, they are expected to top one million, at a cost of almost £1 billion. Many more are taking place abroad, with Spain becoming the cosmetic surgery centre of Europe. Large numbers of Brits, ostensibly on holiday, are coming home with a new set of breasts and a wide-eyed pout which wouldn’t look out of place on Desperate Housewives.
Are we witnessing the birth of a “cosmetic underclass” – people who will not be able to afford plastic surgery and will be forced to look their age as a result? It’s an arresting idea, but there are reasons to be sceptical. Cosmetic surgery, a bit like computers and the net, is getting cheaper all the time. Very soon anyone will be able to afford it and – as a consequence – it might become as tacky as a fake tan.
Crunchy conservatism
When David Cameron set out on his long media march to modernise the Conservative Party, he could have done with a look at the idea of “crunchy conservatism”. Crunchy conservatism sounds like a new breakfast cereal, but in these marketing-friendly times that might be no bad thing. It began life in the US when Rod Dreher, a journalist at the conservative National Review, mentioned to his colleagues that he was off to shop for organic vegetables and became the office laughingstock. Crunchy conservatives are as anticonsumerist and as sceptical about big business as the Left; they detest suburban sprawl, shopping malls, fast-food eateries and all the other detritus of the consumer society. They distinguish themselves from hippies of the Left because they are more interested in beauty and aesthetics.
Rather than invoke regulation, the crunchies seek to lead by example. The Dreher household, he proudly tells us, rarely watches any television and makes its own muesli and apple butter.
Dreher is too much of a God-botherer for British tastes, but his insistence that there is more to life than money echoes Cameron’s campaign. And, like Cameron, the crunchy conservative cares as much about aesthetics as about the environment.
Slacktivism
Want to feel good with the minimum of effort? Why not sit at home and sign petitions on the internet? Slacktivism, the phrase itself a rather lazy haemorrhaging of the two words “slacker” and “activism”, is the counter-intuitive idea that armchair warriors can somehow change the world.
In a single afternoon, the militant slacktivist can support myriad boycotts of unethical companies, forward endless appeals on behalf of dying children, and demand an end to Western interference in the Middle East. That most of these “e-petitions” – being unverifiable – end up in the bin need not trouble the slacktivist one iota. He has done his bit, and can go back to bed with a clear conscience.
The long tail Those who are bored rigid by the selection in Blockbuster and their local multiplex might take comfort from the latest idea to create a buzz in media and technology circles. The “long tail” is the idea developed by Chris Anderson on the pages of Wired, the magazine of which he is editor-in-chief and which has now appeared as a book of the same name.
The long tail is made up of those millions of books, films and albums that sell only a trickle of copies every year – those whose presence on a company’s sales chart form a line that tails off downwards. However, these lesser-selling products will increasingly come into their own.
For every punter who strolls out of Waterstone’s with a heavily plugged copy of the latest Lynne Truss, there is another who will not rest until they have tracked down an obscure volume on Venetian calligraphy, or the Bob Monkhouse bumper book of jokes. Half of Amazon’s book sales, he points out, come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Add up all those niche purchases and you have a business worth billions. Extracted from Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking, by James Harkin, published by Atlantic Books on February 1, RRP £8.99. Available from Times BooksFirst for £8.54, free p&p. 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst James Harkin is director of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
The experience economy
Which would you prefer – to own a Ferrari or to walk the Machu Picchu trail in southern Peru? More and more of us, it seems, would prefer to take the walk. The elusive route to contentment, according to one of the most influential business theories of the past decade, lies not in material possessions but in experiences such as scuba-diving and exotic holidays.
The idea of the experience economy was first articulated in the Harvard Business Review by the business guru James Gilmore. Jaded by the treadmill accumulation of goods and services, Gilmore argued, people are increasingly blowing their money on experiences instead. It explains why brands such as Nike, threatened with having its retail operation eclipsed by the internet, transformed its stores into glitzy retail experiences so that punters would spend more time and money in them. And it explains why small businesses emerged to indulge those who enjoy spending their birthday being hurled out of an aeroplane, or driving a tank around rural Ukraine.
According to the theory, memories last longer than material goods. They are also unique. The Joneses next door might have the same Ferrari as I do, but they are unlikely to have taken a year off to steer a converted shopping trolley around rural China.
A word of warning, however: experiences can be dull as well as thrilling, and as much an instrument of social competition as a sports car. Are you experienced? If so, you’d be doing everyone a favour if you kept it to yourself.
Extracted from Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking, by James Harkin, published by Atlantic Books on February 1, RRP £8.99. Available from Times BooksFirst for £8.54, free p&p. 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
— James Harkin is director of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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