Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Leisure and Downtime, USA, Atlanta, "Darnel"
Darnel is a recruiter for a government agency, focused on increasing diversity. He recently took a different internal focus to reduce the amount of travel he did for work. As Darnel put it, Atlanta is a nice city, but it was hard to make friends when he was always away. Darnel is from Georgia, though three hours outside of Atlanta. He moved to Atlanta about 1.5 years ago after doing volunteer work abroad.
Darnel lives with a roommate in an apartment he is subletting from someone he met through his volunteer network while she works on her doctorate. Until about 8 months ago he lived alone. Darnel says his home is his sanctuary and he doesn’t have a lot of friends over. His family comes on occasion, but they usually go out to dinner, or he goes home to them. He prefers to keep his house quite and private in stark contradiction to his nightlife.
Darnel goes out on a regular basis, and as a friend of his told us, she can only go out for Darnel phase one. At about 12:30 or 1:00 she will go home while Darnel will move on to the next place and party until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. Darnel has such a strict division of his nightlife and the rest of his life he even has two cameras. One that is incredibly small so he can easily bring it out at a nightclub, and a second that he uses for everyday events. The small camera that he uses for the nightclub is private and kept hidden from everyone. This is another reason Darnel doesn’t want too many people in his apartment, what if they find something they shouldn’t be seeing?
At work Darnel recently received approval for a formal office Facebook page. He mentioned that the different offices have been using Facebook for a long time, but not on any official basis. Facebook is used for recruitment purposes; to reach a wider audience and have more people attend their events. Darnel and his office have chosen to use Facebook over Myspace as it is easier to control. Although Darnel has a work cell phone for when he is on the road, he will give out his personal cell number to some of the applicants. He personal cell number comes with strict guidelines in terms of not calling after 5:00pm or before 8:00am. It wasn’t quite clear why some applicants get his personal number and why some don’t. When Darnel makes a work related phone call on his personal Blackberry he makes sure to block his number so no one can call him back. Darnel has a very clear division between work life and private leisure life.
In times of leisure Darnel says he will sometimes have phone calls that can last hours in which he and a friend will discus different funny websites such as www.passiveaggressivenotes.com, browse different Youtube videos, or even watch a movie while on the phone. Darnel is also a fan of taking care of himself. This ranges from getting acupuncture, going to the gym, and working on one of two yahoo hair groups he started. He also has three weekly standing social events. Sunday night is date night with a good friend, every Wednesday night is drinks with his coworkers, and on Thursdays he has Ugly Betty cookout with about 7 people. Other than that he enjoys sitting and smoking, having some drinks and generally relaxing.
Technology ecology:
Darnel has a Blackberry, 2 cameras, a small TV with no cable, personal laptop, and a work laptop. Darnel does not have a music devise, although he utilizes itunes, limewire, and Pandora on his computer. His BB, which he very lovingly calls his Baby, is his most important possession. His Blackberry is not utilized for work emails, only his personal life goes on the Blackberry. He uses the BB calendaring system to keep track of his busy social life. He has active email accounts with AOL, yahoo, gmail, and the Facebook messages. All of these get sent to his BB. Darnel doesn’t use BB messenger as it is only for ‘cool people’. Through gmail and his BB, Darnel is always available on Gchat for IM-ing. He also utilizes his text services. Darnel told us only one friend has figured out how to properly ‘cyber stalk’ him; if he doesn’t respond to a phone call, then try gchatting him and he will respond. All messages go into the same place on his phone, including text messages and emails. During our conversation, Darnel checked his phone every minute or two on average. At night Darnel will silence his emails and text messages, but his BB is never actually fully turned off. Darnel also mentioned the effective slogan for a Blackberry, and felt he was really "joinging a network" when he first got his BB.
Leisure sites
Darnel has a long list of sites and groups he frequents on the Internet. Darnel likes sites such as the passiveagressivenotes.com and other funny ones people send him. He does a lot of “Facebook stalking”, goggles Atlanta to find new things to do, and searches for Graduate schools (this is considered leisure to him as he enjoys thinking about his future). He has his two yahoo hair groups where people can post questions or issues specifically relevant to black people. Darnel is also on the list serve for different clubs around town, along with Ticketmaster Atlanta, and outrightbooks.com to stay up-to-date on concerts, poetry reading, and other relevant events around town. He frequents a black gay pride website to keep in touch with that community.
Darnel uses meetup.com a fair amount. He finds groups that go on day trips or hikes to help him explore new places. Although Darnel enjoys utilizing meetup.com, he doesn’t tend to meet people though the site because they usually aren’t his type. He joined a non-profit start up group on meetup.com that went through an interesting transition. The group started in August of 2008 and tried having meetings in downtown Atlanta, but only 6 or 7 people showed up for these meetings. Once they decided to move the face-to-face meetings to yahoo group chats, 25 members or so showed up. Young people inclined to join the group are too busy to take the time to go to the physical meetings.
Future thoughts
Darnel believes in the future we will not use phones for talking. With so many new forms of communication becoming easier and more efficient, phone calls seem to be the expensive less efficient way of doing things. Darnel also thinks cash will be a thing of the past. Soon we will have chips in our arms that track everything we have. We will swipe our arm at the grocery store to pay for our food.