 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called first person plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. Birthdays mark an annual ritual of celebrating and dreading aging. On the one hand, getting a year older is a positive thing. The alternative to growing older is dying. So a birthday can be pretty exciting piece of news. On the other hand, each passing year seems to bring one closer to the inevitable. And that can be, well, disturbing. Added to the personal and spiritual aspects of growing older is the ways in which our culture views aging. North Americans have very distinct ideas about what it means to be a certain age. We expect children to act like children. We expect young adults to act like young adults. We expect our elders to act like senior citizens. People warn us to act our age at all ages. Like many other forms of prejudice, when these expectations become the exclusive basis upon which we judge another group of people, they create painful consequences in the lives of the members of that group of people. The prejudices based upon aging have come to be known as ageism. Stereotypes are reproduced in culture through representations such as art, music, drama, and advertising. Dr. Malcolm Smith, the associate dean of the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba, studies ageism in advertising. The focus of his research is marketing to older adults, and in particular age-related differences in memory for advertising. As part of his research, Dr. Smith is concerned with the ages messages and attitudes found in advertising and the people who produce advertising. Dr. Smith also has an interesting hobby. He collects birthday cards. He often shares cards from his collections in his presentations of his research. It turns out that the collection provides an intuitive barometer of how the culture looks at aging and older people. Recently, we spoke with Dr. Smith by phone, and he shared his thoughts on ageism, marketing, and birthday cards. Tell me about your current position. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Marketing at the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba. I'm also one of the associate deans in the business school, and my portfolio as associate dean is graduate programs and the research portfolio for the faculty. I have a Bachelor of Science honors. Actually, it's in biology, of all things, from Queen's University. When I finished that, I realized, first of all, I wanted to, as people have said, you want to define yourself. So I backpacked through Europe for five and a half months, and then I came back and said, what the heck am I going to do now? I really don't want to scrub test tubes for the rest of my life or study the mating behavior of snow geese. And I applied for various graduate programs in epidemiology and in community health, but I also applied for the MBA program. And I was accepted into the MBA program at Queen's, where I completed that in 1982. Graduated at the depths of one of the worst recessions we've had in a long time, when the class before me, approximately, maybe, oh, 90% of the class had jobs at graduation. That was the year before when I graduated. I don't think 40% of our class had jobs. And nobody talked about that at graduation or the banquet that we had, etc. I was lucky enough to get a teaching position at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. I found out that I liked academia. I liked the flexible hours. I liked the intellectual challenge, and I enjoyed teaching also. So after spending five years there, I then moved from the East Coast directly to the West Coast and went to the University of Oregon in Eugene and did my PhD there. During that stint, I taught for two years in between there in Lethbridge, Alberta, at the University of Lethbridge. And then when I finished up my PhD, I came here to the University of Manitoba, and that was in 1992. Is your PhD in business? Yes, it's in marketing. And my dissertation was on age differences in advertising. So how did you get interested in aging? It was quite by accident, I have to say. I had taken a seminar from the Psychology Department at the University of Oregon in cognition. And I was supposed to take a research methodology course from the Journalism School. And when I went to talk to the professor there about it, she asked me about my background and what I had done and what statistics courses I had, etc. And she said, go find something else. This is not going to give you anything you don't already have. So I started to go searching for another course. And it just so happened that this one was added for the spring quarter at the University of Oregon on aging and cognition. And I clearly remember going into the professor's office, and this was her first year teaching there. She really grilled me on why would a business student want to take this course and what did I have to offer and what was I hoping to get out of it. I guess I convinced her to let me into it. And as a matter of fact, we still do research together now. I just found the whole thing absolutely fascinating about memory, cognition, processing of older adults. And I knew, because I was studying for my comprehensive exams at that time, I knew there was nothing like this done in the realm of marketing. And consumer behavior, basically an awful lot of it, is simply applied psychology and applied sociology. And so we take the psychological, for instance, the psychology theories in memory or decision making or in information processing and apply them to a consumer or a group of consumers. And the stimuli we use are things like packaging and products and pricing and advertising. And so I saw this whole area, this big gap in the literature and marketing on aging. Because when you read the journal articles, more often than not, when you read to the subject section, it says the subjects for this study were 235 second-year university students. 20-year-olds. 20-year-olds. And then when you read the conclusions, they'll say, therefore it appears that consumers process the information, et cetera. And this seminar I took in cognition and aging really opened up my eyes and made me stop from then on and say, no, that's how younger, well-educated, above-average social-economic status, usually white adults, young adults process information. Yes. And what I had read in that seminar, that there were very likely age differences there. So that's how I got into it. And it seems like it's a pretty important thing to be thinking about, considering how the baby boomers are getting older and the market is changing in terms of the age of consumers. Exactly. I mean, just this week, the 2001 census reports were released. And in the Winnipeg newspaper, in the free press here, they made a big splash about how the average population of Winnipeg is aging, that the population of Winnipeg as a whole is not growing at all, and that we are getting older. Of course, we're all getting older, but the average age of our population is aging. And a lot of marketers are now waking up to the fact that older adults, well, when you compare them perhaps to my grandparents, they're a lot healthier than they used to be. They're more active. They have planned for their retirement. They control a huge amount of wealth in this country. And they don't react the same way to marketing stimuli as younger adults do. And they're at a loss, in some cases, of how do I promote my product, my service, to older adults. The first time I met you, I saw you do a presentation looking at birthday cards. And I'm especially interested in how you've been looking at ageism, sort of the hidden prejudices about aging, the stereotypes about aging that are prevalent in marketing and in the ways in which products are brought to the market, I suppose. Yeah, it's especially prevalent in how they're promoted. And I find in some of the reading that I've done, there was one study, and I don't remember the authors of this study, but they interviewed quite a few advertising agencies in the United States that designed advertising that was aimed at older adults. And most of the people that were involved in the creative side of things didn't know anybody over the age of 50. They operated on what they thought that these older people would be like or what they would respond to. And if you look at that, advertising is a business that there's a very fast burnout rate. And if you stay in the business long enough, you get promoted to such a point that you're managing things and you're not down in the trenches getting your hands dirty, so to speak. Most of the creative people who designed the ads are in their 20s. The people who are managing the account are in their late 20s and early 30s. And if you last longer than that, you're up in upper management and you're more concerned with the overall picture of your company than you are about the individual products that are being advertised. And so this study concluded that these people who were actually designing the ads really didn't know much about how older adults fought, what their values were, etc. And after reading that, then I really started looking around and noticing the ageism that is out there in our society. I'm not saying all products promoted to older adults do this, but there are a lot. And then it's when I was approaching my 40th birthday and I start realizing even at 40 people are getting cards that say that they're old and they're decrepit and they can't remember things. That's when I started looking at birthday cards. And tell me a little bit about what you've found. Have you done, is this a rigorous study that you've done? No, not at all. I almost consider it a hobby. It makes me sound pretty boring when I say I almost consider it a hobby. But when I go in to buy a birthday card for someone, I always spend an extra 10 minutes and browse through them. And if I come across some that I find are extremely negative, or I also try to pick up ones that are extremely positive. And I like to use them in my presentations just as an illustration of how in everyday life aging is portrayed in our society. So do you have a couple of examples of like the worst and the best? Well, I've got one here that I show. It's a cartoon picture of these cheerleaders on the front, and they're supposedly spelling out aging, A-G-I-N-G, A-G-I-N-G. And you open it up and it's more of what they're going to say. And it says, sagging flesh and cataracts, liver spots and more, cellulite and senility, there's so much more in store. So go out and have your fun now and do what you can do because in a few more birthdays you won't remember how to. Oh my gosh. My favorite negative one, and I mean that really with a tongue in cheek, is one that has a picture of an older man. It's like an old photograph of an older man with his hand up to his ear and it sounds like he's trying to, you know, what did you say to me? And on the front of it it says, every year on his birthday my grandfather would complain about the loss of his youth. And you open it up and it says, so we put him to sleep. Oh my gosh. Happy birthday. Now when you flip to the back side of it, like where it says it's okay to look to see if it's a hallmark card type of thing, this one is from TacList Greetings when you have to work up to really caring to what it says. Now did you find that one just in a store? Yup. In a stationary store? Yup. Just in something like, well, one of our typical card shops, definitely. And then on the positive side, oh I've got one here of an older man who, there's a sprinkler in the yard and it looks like he's just taken off his shirt and his pants and his shoes and he's running through the sprinkler in his underwear. And you open it up and it says, born to be wild. Happy birthday. And then I've got another one that's a picture from the back side of four. They look like they're women in their late 60s, early 70s. I'm terrible at judging person's age. And they're holding hands in a line walking into the surf in their bathing suits. And on the inside it says we may not be getting younger but we're still making waves. Now that's the type of thing. I've also got one that I really do like. It's a picture of Albert Einstein on the out front. On the front with his picture, wonderful wonder. And on the inside it says age is relative. Have a happy birthday. Cool. And I think that's, you know, I think that things like that should be celebrated. So do you find that it's a mix or do you find when you're looking through the cards that you almost always find a negative one? It's much easier to find negative ones than the positive ones. Especially things that are making fun of memory loss, making fun of incontinence, you know, the very negative things. You know, when you hit those milestone birthdays of 40 or 50 or something, it's difficult to find a really nice 50th birthday card for somebody. I had a friend that hit 50 last year and I had one heck of a time finding one that wasn't about memory loss or some other negative aspect. You've done some more serious study around ageism. Do you find that, is it just, you mentioned before about how the marketers are young and that they haven't really met or worked with older adults. But I'm wondering if some of the ageism that you see isn't necessarily aimed at the older adults but uses ageist stereotypes in order to sell products. Well, some of it is, especially if it's a product that's not aimed at the older adult. It makes the older adult look like they're not too with it and it's done supposedly for humor's sake. But when I'm out and I'm doing my research on memory and things like that, and I usually like to sit and talk with these people for a while to find out what they think about advertising. And most of them find a good deal of the advertising out there that portrays an older adult, they find it very insulting. And likewise, they find a lot of the products that are aimed at them, the advertising, insulting also. Is there more age positive advertising when the product is for an older adult? Not necessarily, not necessarily at all. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV, Victoria's Public Radio, 101.9 FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet, cfub.uvig.ca. Giving sociology an edge! It depends on what they're advertising in the approach. I think quite a few products and services, especially if they're aimed at the older adult, play on fear an awful lot. And some of the things that I've read, I've not done any direct research on this, but some of the research that I have read, say that older adults don't respond that well to the fear. There's a consultant in the United States, David Wolfe, who has written quite a bit for American demographics, and he also has some textbooks out. And he claims that there are values that older adults respond to very well. And if these values are embedded in your advertising, the older adult will respond better to that ad and that product than if they don't have these values in. For instance, one of the values is autonomy, and another one is social connectedness. So if you can show that in your ad that if you use my product or if you use my service and you can have the autonomy to live on your own and do things on your own, and it will connect you with society, then an older adult will respond more to that than to one that just says, this is how our product functions. Or realize upon telling them that you need this product because life is going to get bad or that kind of thing. Or if you don't use it, something bad is going to happen to you, a possibility. One example of that depends undergarments. And Depends is made by Kimberly Clark, the same company that makes Kleenex. And they basically have the vast majority of the market share for these types of products. And if you look at their advertising, they used to have, I haven't seen them in a while, but they used to have June Allison in there who was a spokesperson that more of the older adults would be able to relate to. And it showed all of these wonderful things that she could do if she used that product. She could get out, she could play with the grandchildren, she could go out to bridge parties and all of these things instead of being stuck in her home because she was afraid to go out. And that's the autonomy and the connectedness. And the connectedness in there, right. Now, on the other hand, or on the flip side of this, Procter & Gamble, which is the biggest consumer product company in North America, and they produce Tide and Cheer and Crest and all kinds of other products, they have not broken into this market very well. And David Wolf claims that it's because that their advertising is more functional than what it stresses instead of showing the benefits of using the product. This is what the product does and how well it works. He claims, you know, the older adults are saying, we know what it does. You don't need to tell us this. Why should we buy your brand versus the other one that's available? Is it just a matter of marketing or do you see this as permeating a broader understanding of what aging means and a broader view of older adults? In other words, we're kind of talking about it from one side, which is these marketers are relying upon stereotypes and are sort of using agist messages to sell products or at least not being sensitive to the aging market. But as a sociologist, I'm also interested in the flip side. Do you think that when these things get produced, do they actually contribute to stigmatization of older adults? I would say, Patty, that's almost a which is first the chicken or the egg question. It's always been a controversial topic amongst academics in marketing of does advertising reflect society or does it influence society and societal views? I think it does a bit of both. And I don't think it's the only thing that helps perpetuate negative stereotypes of aging, but I think that it could help break those negative stereotypes. Advertising creates a lot of word of mouth. How often do you come into work and somebody will say, say, I was watching advertising last night and you should have seen, or I was watching television last night and you should have seen this great ad that I saw. And you can't get, well, hopefully better publicity than that. If it's negative, then it's a bad thing. If it's a negative, but you can't get better. There are certain ads that people talk about or that people remember. Where's the beef ads from Burger King? I think it was Burger King. Was Wendy's? I don't even remember which company it was from. That's another thing that's a problem with advertising. You can remember the product, but do you remember what the brand name was? But you have to wonder, sometimes you wonder, is the negative stereotyping a self-fulfilling prophecy? Because it's expected in our society that we're going to do it, that people say, oh, I am this age, therefore I can't do that. And as a matter of fact, there have been a couple of studies published in the psychology journals and it's our researchers out of Harvard that have sort of looked into this. They found that with a, especially with a memory task that had to be done, they surveyed three different populations. And one was the normal population in the states, the everyday population, younger and older adults. The other was they went to China and did it in the Chinese culture where elders are held in higher reverence. And they also did it in the American hearing impaired community where apparently, and I didn't know this until I read the study, that older adults are held in higher regard than they are in mainstream American society. And what they found was that the Chinese older adults on the same task outperformed the hearing impaired who outperformed the normal Americans. And you sort of wonder if it's prevalent in our society already, is it something that people more or less succumb to? And have they been empowered? That's one thing I really think that we can empower older adults to, just because you are a certain age does not automatically mean that you aren't capable of doing a lot of normal everyday things. Certainly, certainly. I think I remember that you have done some research for companies to assist them in better addressing marketing to older adults. What kinds of things have you suggested to companies to make their marketing better? Well, I think one of the things is to try to use these values that I spoke about that David Wolf, the consultant in the U.S., has come up with, because there's quite a bit of evidence that these values really do help that older adults respond better to them. Additionally, I think that one of the things is when you have to be careful on how do you measure effectiveness of advertising? People tend to say, oh, well, it's by sales. But just because I have an ad campaign and my sales went up does not necessarily mean that that ad campaign caused those sales. You have to worry about things like what happened to your competitors, what happened to the pricing. A lot of other factors in the environment could have caused the sales to go up. It may not have been, or it could have been, but you don't know that it's been the advertising campaign. One of the ways that's more direct to measure effectiveness is things like awareness of the product and actual memory for the ads. Quite often, marketing research companies will be hired by various other marketers to do what's called a day after recall test, and they will randomly call various people around the country and ask them, if they watched television last night, what ads do you remember seeing? Whether you remember it's Wendy's or... Well, first of all, do you remember any ads for cars, fast food, for soft drinks, for beer, et cetera? And then if so, what brand was it? And what did the ad say? I think we have to be careful on how we measure memory. Because what I have found in some of my research is that the older adults don't necessarily remember what was literally said in the ad. And one could take that to say they just don't remember what the ad said. But when it gets down to really the brass tacks, they do remember the underlying message. Sometimes in memory studies and in these day after recall, they don't measure that. And so they'd say, well, the older adults don't remember it. My recommendation has always been to be very careful on how you measure the effectiveness of your advertising. And if you're judging it on the basis of memory for what was in the ad, be careful that you're not just going for the actual words that were used in the ad. But you have to be able to also take account for the underlying message. Interesting. So I very much appreciate your... I appreciate the chance... When I talk to my mother about this, she tells me I should have been a minister. As I say, I always enjoy the... or appreciate the chance to what I consider is spread the good word. There you go. Well, I think this is an important aspect. I mean, I think culture and marketing go hand in hand in the way that we were talking about earlier, that it is a chicken and egg thing if you try to figure out which does what. But I do believe that marketing and social norms reinforce each other and that one of the ways to break the stigmatization that happens in certain parts of our population is to pay attention to it in things like advertising, which are quite powerful. Yeah, they are very much so. I mean, they can set norms. I mean, when you look at what influence advertising has on young children, it really does raise your eyebrows and you think of what effect is this having on our society. Yeah, and we tend to forget that even though advertisers are aiming at one particular segment over another with their advertising, then in fact, all of us are exposed to all of it, including our children. Yes. And so, you know, attitudes do get reinforced and formed from the exposure even if the intention isn't there. Yes, I think so. And I find this area very fascinating because it is so interdisciplinary. You know, you can look at it from a sociological point of view, from a psychological point of view, and from a business point of view, and really all three intersect very well. And I have a suspicion, I've always suspected that marketers are doing really good sociological research and that sociologists ought to pay more attention. No. No. Well, I should say I don't believe that at the academic level, yes, but in business practice, I don't think so. Really? I don't think so. Interesting. It's the smart companies that are doing that. Yeah. And the ones, other ones are just lucky and have an intuitive sixth sense about it, but oh, you'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. And maybe we'll have you on again for a whole other topic. Well, that'd be interesting. Well, I again appreciate your time. Well, it's a pleasure to speak with you. And all right. Thank you very much, Patty. It's good talking to you. I'd like to take this opportunity to wish a very special, happy birthday to Dr. Patty Thomas. Thank you. July 28th is her birthday and she'll be older on that day. Oh, that was very diplomatic. Thank you for saying so. Yes. I'm going to be 45. I'll own up to it. It's hard to believe. I don't feel 45. The big four or five. I don't think that's a big one. Is that a big one? I suppose they're all big ones. Someone gets to be your age. See, the advantage of being older than you is that no matter how you harass me at each age, I can be waiting for you when you turn that age to harass you in return. I hadn't thought of that. Maybe I'll have to start being nice to you again. Yeah, you're going to have to be kind to the old lady. But what is the next big one if not four or five? What you tell me? All right. I can say it. I know I can say it. Okay. 50. Just spell it out. Five zero. Five zero. That's spelling to a math major. None of this FIFTY garbage. Yeah, none of these letters things. Letters are for algebra. Well, what did you get out of the interview with Malcolm Smith? You obviously were very engaged by the discussion. Yeah, I really liked this guy. I saw him at a conference at University of Manitoba last year. The presentation that he gave, I thought was one of the clearest presentations of ageism in society in a really mundane way. I mean, we all have birthday cards. We all send them. We all read them. We laugh at them and so forth. And Harry was presenting just some really rude ones. I mean, the ones that he mentioned were among the ones that he presented last year. And I guess the meat of what I was trying to get at with him in the interview was that there's this age-old argument that goes on in marketing. And I had this come up when I talked about culture and classes when I was teaching. And invariably, there was at least one or two, maybe four or five business students who had taken marketing in my classes who would sit there and argue with me that marketing was in response to culture, not that it created culture. And here is a very good example of the way in which it creates culture by taking a bunch of 20-somethings and having them try to figure out what it means to be older and marketing on the basis of those stereotypes or those guesses. I mean, let's be generous and say they're not aware of the fact that they're using stereotypes and they really are trying to be sensitive. And we'll assume that they in fact don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. But nonetheless, what they have to rely upon are cultural understandings of what aging means. And so they rely upon those cultural understandings and then they repeat them. And after they repeat them, it sort of solidifies, it becomes a vicious circle at that point in which they hear these ideas about aging. They turn them into an advertisement using whatever cultural resources they use to depict aging and then that cycle turns into one more resource that the next bunch of 20-somethings can use to interpret aging. And so it just becomes a cycle and it's a cycle in which nobody intended to manipulate culture, but it nonetheless happens. Once they get a system in place, the tendency is to keep using that system so that results can be backwards compatible. Exactly. And the tendency to avoid changing the system is very strong as a result unless the system is so obviously bankrupt and validity that it has to be changed that minute. Or unless somebody somewhere from the group that's being stigmatized through this system gets a chance to speak out and say, wait a minute, you got it wrong. And I think that that's also a piece of this. Aging scholars are gaining more power and more voice in this kind of thing. And so are older people. I mean, we have the Grey Panthers, we have the raging grannies, we have older people speaking out and saying, wait a minute, this is not what it means to be old. Here, let me tell you my experience of what it means to be old. And I think you can fill in the blank here. I mean, we're talking about aging, but we're really talking about the process of stigmatization of a particular group and the membership in that group, of the people who are members of that group. And so, you know, we can talk about the ways in which marketing has changed to African-Americans and African-Canadians. We can talk about the ways in which marketing has changed to women. I mean, we can fill in this blank called aging and ageism with a bunch of different categories and still have the same kind of process taking place and still have the same kind of remedy needed. We can also talk about the intent or the lack of intent that is present in the researchers. It's important to note that there doesn't have to be malice on the part of the researchers for this kind of taxonomy to get in place and stay in place even when it's deleterious. The researchers may simply not know what they're doing. Yes, haven't thought of it yet. I've often wondered if throughout the course of human history there haven't been more really terrible things done by people who simply didn't know any better than by people who really were out to get somebody or something. An interesting thought experiment, one that doesn't lend itself to retroactive analysis very well, but one that's pertinent here. The marketers simply can't think of everything. But one of the things they can't think of is that they can't think of everything, that it's easier just to go to the seniors in the first place and ask them and avoid the extrapolation. But those of us who are blind are often blind to our blind spots, otherwise we probably get them fixed. Yeah, that's what... One of the things that Malcolm is suggesting here is that part of the blind spot is the ways in which they gather the information. Not only are they not thinking of everything, but they're not thinking of the right way to ask the right people. So they may go to an older person or a group of older people and ask them, do you remember this commercial or do you remember what the message was that you saw on TV yesterday or whatever? And what happens is that because of the way that they ask the question and the assumptions that they're making and composing the question, they still miss the point. They still don't get the accurate picture of the older person. Something that he didn't talk about but was also at that conference in terms of memory and the ways in which older people remember things and can reproduce what they remember was a study that was done. I can't remember whether Malcolm is the one who told this or somebody else at the conference. It was a study that was done with older people retelling a story. So they would read or be told a narrative and then they would be asked to recite the narrative back to the researcher. Stories didn't get recited back just in the presence of the researcher. They were also recited back in the presence of children. When the older person told a story to a child, they remembered all the details. But when they told the story to the researcher, they didn't recite the details back. And it turns out that what was going on was not a matter of memory. It was a matter of social context. When they started asking, well, how come you can remember when you tell the kid versus when you tell the researcher, the response was, well, the researcher already knows the story. He's the one who showed it to me. So they didn't feel the need to, but when they were in the context, when it was the context of telling a story to a child, that had a whole other social meaning and it became important then to be able to tell the child the story. So the subjects were responsive to the listener or rather to their construction of the listener. Exactly. In each case. And in fact what they ended up, what the experiment ended up testing was the difference in the way that they constructed the researcher. The researchers were constructing themselves as neutral, but the older person wasn't. It was, I mean there's almost an attitude of I don't have time to repeat this to you because you don't need to hear this. In one case it was necessary to reinvent the wheel, as when one is explaining something in great detail to a child who being new here does not get all of it yet. Right. And in the other case it was not necessary to reinvent the wheel. And so it was very pragmatic on their part. You know this. Let's move on. I don't have time for this. It's kind of the attitude that came out. The implication for this is that when marketers call up the next day and start asking questions about what you remembered on television the day before, if they ask it in a certain way, they're going to get, you know, I don't have time for this, go away. But they'll be polite about it and just tell them a few little things. And that gets marked down as don't remember. But if they called up and asked questions like if you were going to buy such and such for so-and-so and gave them a scenario which became important to remember what they had seen the day before, they would remember it in great detail. Both we are in simulations pointed to Q&A sessions as a really mundane, the benches of that word, corruption of discourse. I would say that if Q&A is a corruption of discourse, then forms are a corruption of Q&A. Yes. And the degeneration continues proportionately. You get further and further and further away from reality. From the way people would like to construct what is going on. Yes. It robs it of, well, at a minimum of context, but it robs it of so much more. We're listening to first person plural, your source for soothing sounds of sociological sagaciousness. The police state is using its phallicentric organ, the corporate media to control ordinary people like you and me. I was encouraged by the fact that Smith is very obviously grounded in business administration and is still considered an intellectual. He's the associate dean at his college, his PhD is in marketing and being an MBA, I nonetheless hold out hope that someday I will be considered an intelligent person or at least one who plays one on the radio. There you go. Which will be the next best thing. On the other hand, his reaction when you asked him about academic marketing research versus the sword that's done in the secular world was pretty definitive, I think. He didn't seem to be, I think no, no, no, speaks for itself. I think there was clarity to that. What did you say it was an accident when they get it right? Well, I'm not sure that I got across to him when I was talking about it. I find that marketing research, especially academic marketing research, because it is applied sociology, is sometimes much more on target than the sociology that you read that is academically motivated and theoretically motivated but not necessarily practically motivated. And I think that the reason for that is very simple. When you think about the pragmatics of what works and doesn't work, then you are willing to throw out things pretty quickly. When you're hanging on to your favorite theory, you might not be as willing to throw things away in your research. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Exactly. I wanted to ask you about one more aspect of this. Speaking as a sociologist or speaking from your methodological background, is the term ageism applied to seniors but not to young people as a general role? Is that the convention in the sociology field? And if so, why? I would say that there is more controversy than I implied in my interview with Malcolm. There is a very distinct argument that it is just as ageist to regard children as something less than citizens. It is just as ageist to regard young people in a stereotypical light because they are young and so forth. And one might argue that ageism is more about assumptions about the aging process. When you're young, you just don't know anything and you're impulsive and you're so intense and blah, blah, blah. Every teenager is rebellious. Every 20-something is horny. Every 30-something is ambitious. Every 40-something is, I don't know, I'm 40-something so I can't... Unable to say the word 50? Yeah. And so forth. I'm afraid that more for comic effect than truth. I'm not afraid of 50. But yeah, in a sense that's ageism. Having said that, among gerontologists, the word ageism means a discounting of the old. People who are older. And I use the term be old very nebulously on purpose. I did a little experiment with a class one time in which I asked them to... I read the book Tuesdays with Maury. Familiar with that book? I've read it. And for those who aren't familiar with it, it is basically a professor who was dying of cancer, who was visited weekly by one of his former students who wrote about the visits in which Maury kind of shared his life wisdom with his student one last time. And it was sort of... It's presented like it's a seminar, like it's a 15-week seminar. And it uses academic language, but it's really much about life and so forth. And my social problems class read it. And then I asked them to write a little essay for me and share with the class what they knew about the oldest person in their lives. And I told them, I don't care how old the oldest person is. I just want you to think about the people that you know in your circle of friends and family. And tell me about the person who is oldest among them. I'm expecting stuff about your grandmother, right? Stuff about your grandfather. Some of them wrote essays about 25-year-olds. Did they not understand the question? They understood. From the way you've articulated it sounds like it would be a literal impossibility for a student to pick as the oldest person in his life a 25-year-old. Some of them swore that that was the oldest person that they knew. A couple of people wrote about 25-year-olds and they made the case that for whatever reason they were estranged from their parents. The grandparents had died. They hung out at college. They don't count their professors among their circles of friends and family. And so in their world, the oldest person that they had any knowledge of on any kind of more than a superficial level was 25-years-old. And I mean it was very telling what they did in the presentation and in the writing was basically examine that. Like what kind of life am I leading that the oldest person I know is only like 5-years-older than me. So it was probably one of the best experiences I had as a teacher. Because we did this on what I call Break the Norms Day. Which I do in every one of my sociology classes. I have a day where we do nothing that you usually do in the classroom. Like I come in and I stand on the desk in the front instead of... Don't you have to do that anyway? No, no, I get up and stand... Oh, shut up, you're making a short joke, aren't you? Yes, I am. Yeah, but I don't stand on the front desk. I stand on one of the desks in the back of the classroom and yell over their heads. And I make them get up and sit on top of desks or we go around and sit on the floor, that kind of thing. And so in this particular day we ended the class by sitting in a circle on the floor. And this is about 65 students all sitting around together on the floor and they were sharing their essays about the oldest person in their lives. And some of them were very sweet. They gave little essays about their grandma or a lady that they lived near or something like that. But it was a very interesting discussion that evolved out of that when we realized that some of these students didn't know anybody was over the age of 25 or 30. Some of them, the oldest people they knew were my age because they knew their parents, but they didn't know their grandparents. They knew their parents and their friends but they didn't know their grandparents. And we asked some really important questions about what kind of society we have that segregates the old from the young so completely. It was one of the best teaching experiences I ever had. I felt like the students were in that way and they told me that they walked away kind of moved by the book and moved by their own self-reflection on this. Did you have any discussions about by whose agency the segregation was made? No, we didn't get that deeply into it but certainly a case can be made that the segregation comes from above to below. The way that seniority works and work situations the way that college is constructed so that it is on a campus somewhere off away from and out of the way of regular people all of those kinds of things one might also argue that it might be the middle aged people who are separating the young from the old too because the middle aged people are the ones who are putting their moms in homes and sending their kids to college and keeping them in separate little compartments in their lives. So I think that's a complex question and I guess that a broad understanding what ageism is like what we were talking about before this kind of assumption that if you're at a certain age you are a certain person is as much responsible for this as anything else? What do I have in common with fellow in the blank in any person at any age can say that about any other person of a different age? And as with the marketing taxonomy you mentioned earlier self-perpetuation kicks in and that can be a real pain in the neck to reverse. You have been listening to First Person Plural because how people get along with each other still matters. First Person Plural is a show created for community radio by Carl Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues. Music for First Person Plural is performed, composed and produced by Carl Wilkerson except where noted. For more information about First Person Plural Dr. Patty Thomas or Carl Wilkerson visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com