Social media wants your bank info. What could go wrong? -- Aug. 9, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Someday you may click on Facebook and see your checking account balance.

The social media giant has talked with several large U.S. banks about getting their data on where their customers shop with debit and credit cards, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Why? So you’ll spend even more time on social media.

“Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends,” the Journal said. Naturally Google and 

Amazon also want in on your bank action.

Facebook denied it’s actively asking banks for customer data, saying in a statement, “Like many online companies with commerce businesses, we partner with banks and credit card companies to offer services like customer chat or account management.”

Facebook also insists it won’t use bank information to target advertising or marketing. 

People would use the Facebook Messenger app to communicate with their banks and make other transactions. More than 1.2 billion people use Messenger.

“The idea is that messaging with a bank can be better than waiting on hold over the phone – and it’s completely opt-in,” the statement said. “A critical part of these partnerships is keeping people’s information safe and secure.”

So is seeing your checking account balance on social media convenient or creepy?  

Your answer may depend on your generation. If you’re a baby boomer like I am, born between 1946 and 1964, you may find it creepy. We still believe there’s something called privacy and we ought to be in control of our personal information – although holding onto this idea in 2018 is like grasping Jello.

Facebook’s track record for safeguarding information is hardly inspiring. It’s still recovering from the fallout of 87 million users having their information improperly used by Cambridge Analytica in 2016. But banks and credit card companies have been breached as well.

I’d rather stash my cash under a mattress than trust social media to safeguard details of my personal finances.

Did I say cash? Cash is quaint. So last century.

One in four adults say they rarely or never carry cash, and the number jumps to one in three for millennials – those born between roughly 1981 and 1996, a survey by Capital One found in March. Many millennials consider paying with cash “inconvenient,” the company reported.  

And if you’re a post-millennial or member of Generation Z, born in 1997 and after, you use your devices all the time and have grown up paying by phone and plastic.

Teens use cash for only about 6 percent of their transactions, according to Current, a company that offers a debit card for teens. Parents load up the debit card to give their kids their allowance. 

There’s no doubt shifting attitudes toward money are affecting us all. Major banks have closed thousands of branches in recent years as more people choose to bank online, although some smaller banks have opened branches. Cashless restaurants and shops have proliferated.

Which brings us back to your checking account in the digital age.

For millennials and Gen Zers, seeing your bank balance on social media may seem a convenient no-brainer.

Millennials like the idea of using Facebook to access and manage their money – or they did in 2015 when Capital One conducted a survey. About 45 percent of millennials said then they’d use Facebook, more than other social media platforms.

Gen Z may be especially receptive to keeping tabs on their bottom line on social media. They may not remember pay phones, but many remember the Great Recession. They saw family members lose jobs and struggle financially, and it made an impact.

Studies show Gen Zers are more likely than millennials to save money, so they may want to check their balances often because they know how easy it is to overspend when paying with plastic and their phones.

But would young people think it cool to do their banking on Facebook or on another platform? They’ve been quitting Facebook for Instagram and Snapchat, leaving Facebook with a demographic no marketer prizes.

As The Guardian, a British newspaper, put it: “Is Facebook for old people? Over 55s flock in as the young leave.”

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Back to pen, paper and the personal? -- Aug. 28, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

One of my favorite news stories lately concerns the Cleveland Browns’ radical experiment: They’re writing stuff down. By hand.

The football players got tablet computers – like everyone else in the NFL this year – but the team’s new coach also gave each player his own pad of paper.  Coach Mike Pettine wants his players to learn plays by taking longhand notes.

Pettine is drawing on his experience as a former high school coach and his dad’s as a high school teacher and coach to help players remember their moves, The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Clark reported Aug. 12 in a lengthy story about the revolutionary strategy.

“I would talk to teachers all the time, and they would say, `To write is to learn,’” Pettine told Clark. “When you write stuff down, you have a much higher chance of it getting imprinted on your brain.”

Pettine deserves points for bucking the digital tide, however his team fares on the field.

 

The Browns’ experiment reminds us that, all too often, once we’ve raced to the latest new thing – be it device or diet – it turns out to be not nearly as cool and shiny as it first seemed.

Schools have rushed to put tablets – the electronic variety – and laptops in students’ hands, and rightly so. It’s important that all students learn the technology that dominates our lives. At the same time, though, research increasingly suggests that the old reliable skills of writing by hand and reading traditional books may be better for learning and comprehension.

    

Students who took lecture notes longhand learned more concepts than those who took notes on a keyboard, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of University of California, Los Angeles reported in April in the journal “Psychological Science.”

Why the difference? Students who took notes on laptops tended to transcribe lectures verbatim while those who took notes by hand summarized and reframed the material in their own words. The second approach was more effective for learning.

   

“Laptop use can negatively affect performance on educational assessments, even – or perhaps especially – when the computer is used for its intended function of easier note taking,” Mueller and Oppenheimer wrote in “The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.”

The researchers concluded that “laptop use in classrooms should be viewed with a healthy dose of caution; despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good.”

Students love e-reading, and enthusiasm goes a long way to spur learning. But several studies here and in Europe suggest that people who use e-readers comprehend less than readers of traditional books. 

A new study in Norway found that Kindle readers could not reconstruct the plot of a mystery story by Elizabeth George as well as those who read the short story in a paperback. Researcher Anne Mangen of Stavanger University said that seeing pages that have been read pile up on the left may help a reader’s sense of a story unfolding, reported The Guardian, a British newspaper.

Researchers at West Chester University in Pennsylvania found that students comprehend at “a much higher level” when they read a traditional book than when they read the same material on an iPad. Heather Schugar and Jordan Schugar also warned that interactive e-books may be gimmicky and distracting to students, who “often skipped over text, where the meat of the information was.”

Educators aren’t the only ones who need to be wary of digital gimmicks and distractions.

“I spend so much time on my iPad, I forget how much I like talking to people,” I overheard a young woman say as she and a friend took a morning walk. It sounded like the caption on a New Yorker cartoon, but she was not joking.  

September gives us a new start, a time to reassess our “e-lationships.” If we choose, we can set aside our devices from time to time to handwrite notes or letters, curl up with books with paper pages, and talk with friends in person. How revolutionary -- and modern!

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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