The 1 Percenters demanding transparency... wk 4

I kept sitting back and laughing to myself while reading this week's chapters in Citizen Marketers. The 2nd chapter on the 1 Percenters opened my eyes to several things I hadn't noticed before. Firstly, I was never aware that anyone had the time/energy to sit around and formulate "power laws" based on tons of information that I never in a million years would think to compilate into a statistic. However, I must say that the 1 Percent rule is alarming to me, because if asked this question on a test without reading the information, I'd SURELY guess that the number of people contributing to social media sites was more than 1%.

The 1 Percenters are also interesting to me because I find similarities in that group of people and my Millennial Generation. Wasn't it on the first day of this class that we learned the characteristics surrounding our generation? The book says citizen marketers are usually "in their 20s, highly educated, intellectually curious, sociable, interested in many things and in finding new interests." Wow! Does that describe this generation to a T or what?!

Consequently, I also found a tie to this generation while reading chapter 3 and the push for everything to become more transparent for everyone. We're always the ones being called "control freaks" for getting upset when a professor bumps a test up by one day... or when they change ANYTHING on the syllabus (man, I hate that!) Maybe it's not that we're so spoiled that we need to have everything laid out for us, but rather, that our society is one that is becoming more dependant on transparency!

So which came first, the chicken or the egg? The Millennial Generation, or the demand for transparency in life? Perhaps this debate will go on forever, but I'm sure that as long as one exists, so will the other.