The Cult of Personality

Last week Hearst magazine and Seventeen announced that they are thinking like an evolving magazine company. Joining the "app" bandwagon, they are providing an iPhone app for readers to find products profiled on their pages in stores near readers. What a terrific way to grab more advertising dollars that had lately been alluding the publication! We applaud the innovative thinking of magazines to figure out how to build their audiences, assist their advertisers and adapt to the fluctuating business and social environment while remaining true to the magazine's mission and vision. Kudos!

While we are happy to see innovation busy at work, we offer a word of caution. As we become this ever-growing, contraption-efficient society, we may be losing sight of the beauty of personal communication. Every semester and during the summer, we take on an intern or two. Of course this involves an interview process, scanning myriad resumes and sifting through credentials to find just the right fit. But it always causes us to reflect on the current generation of students. This is hilarious to type as our office is all under the age of 35 and looking at candidates who are maybe 10 years younger than us with that "when I was your age" eye seems a bit, well, weird. But we do it. And we remain baffled. It is though the electronics with which we have surrounded ourselves has slowly sucked the personality right out of a generation.

After phone interviews, we find ourselves shocked at the lack of emotion, personality, passion pouring forth from the other side of the phone. With AIM, BBM, Twitter, Facebook Status Updates, chat rooms, blog postings and emails, you can have an almost complete relationship without ever actually speaking to the other person. And now you can shop through your phone via magazine recommendations and never have to really talk to a person. For all of these conveniences, we have isolated ourselves into society of people who can't speak. We are all for innovation, but please let's keep some humananity in the workplace.