P2JW104000-0-D00100-1--------XA
HOME & DIGITAL
What a Sweet Truck
Intro Music of
Champions
Ice cream delivered old school MY RIDE | D4
© 2016 Dow Jones & Company. All Rights Reserved.
SPORTS | D6
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 | D1
Digital Wedding Crashers
Ignoring
LinkedIn
Is Hurting
Your Career
Brides use hashtags to put
their wedding weekends,
gowns and guests on view
for the rest of us #sojealous
BY JOANNA STERN
BY ELIZABETH HOLMES
Morgan Pitts adored Kahlana
Barfield’s wedding to Dwayne
Brown. She loved the venue
(Brooklyn Botanic Garden), the
groom’s tuxedo (Tom Ford) and
was charmed by the place cards
(personalized bottles of CocaCola).
The 25-year-old Ms. Pitts did
not attend the festivities. She followed along via social media,
thanks to the couple’s wedding
hashtag: #BrooklynBrowns. “It
wasn’t like I stumbled upon it, I
was watching for it,” says Ms.
Pitts, who works in fashion e-commerce. Her review of the celebration from afar: “It was a dream.”
Meet the digital wedding crashers. In a Sunday morning ritual,
people are poring over strangers’
wedding photos on Instagram.
Brides and grooms make it easy by
choosing a distinctive hashtag, often using a combination of their
names, the location and the date
of their nuptials. Anyone can click
on that hashtag and see a gallery
of photos that is much more intimate and detailed than a newspaper wedding announcement.
It is the latest iteration of the
decades-old tradition of ogling
over the union of others. Some
wedding hashtag enthusiasts use it
as a way to fantasize about the
princess-perfect day, a digital tool
of sorts to harvest ideas for their
own place settings or bridal bouquets. But for most, it is simply a
chance to be a fly on the wall at
events that are increasingly—and
meticulously—staged for social
media.
“I don’t even know these people, I just think it’s fun,” says
Emma Silvers, a 19-year-old student at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
To start down the wedding
hashtag rabbit hole, Ms. Silvers
recommends clicking on the magnifying glass search button at the
bottom of the Instagram app,
which takes you to a page with
photos based, in part, on people
you already follow.
Ms. Silvers looks for people she
might somehow be connected to,
like a friend of a friend. “All I need
on this beautiful Sunday is a bagel
and a wedding hashtag of a very
far acquaintance’s friend from colPlease see WEDDINGS page D3
At Social Media High, Facebook
is the all-star quarterback, Twitter
is the school paper’s editor in
chief and Snapchat is the mysterious, Harley-riding transfer student. That makes LinkedIn the
nerd who skips prom for the mathlympics.
Yet, like in every great John
Hughes movie, the underdog actually belongs in the
in-crowd.
Admit it. Your
most frequent interaction with the
world’s uncoolest
network is deleting those “Join my
network” emails. You’re not alone:
61% of LinkedIn users visit the site
no more than every few weeks, according to Pew Research Center.
I was the same, avoiding
LinkedIn’s baffling design and incessant nagging. But a few weeks
ago, when I decided to give it a
real varsity tryout, I realized
LinkedIn deserves a place on my
phone’s home screen. I now check
it a couple of times a week to find
out what’s happening in my industry. Use it right and you’ll get
ideas on how to improve your
business, find new leads—and
maybe land a job you didn’t even
know you wanted.
What’s changed? LinkedIn has
drastically improved its iOS and
Android apps over the past few
months, with even more iPhone
app changes arriving just this
week. With some tricks and assistance from LinkedIn pros, I’ve
been able to zero in on the most
important features within the
overwhelming service. Don’t get
me wrong: Parts of it are still inexcusably terrible. But what other
social network allows you to connect with people in a professional
way?
#nellandteddy
#
ll d dd Nell Diamond married Teddy
Wasserman in a ceremony at the Hôtel du Cap Eden Roc in France. She
planned a three-day event with many ‘photographable activities.’
#brooklynbrowns
#b
kl b
Kahlana Barfield Brown married
Dwayne Brown at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She asked guests to post
photos of themselves. She put up her favorites of her and the groom later.
#loveyoumoor Kathleen Moor put her wedding
#l
hashtag on guest welcome bags, matchboxes and photo booth printouts.
She married Philip last October at the New York Athletic Club.
Get Better at Your Current Job
Regardless of how you plan to
use LinkedIn, I have one piece of
unvarying advice: Avoid the cluttered website. The design is so unintuitive, I’m convinced doctors
will discover it’s the cause of a
new distraction disorder—or high
blood pressure. I’ve mistakenly
sent invites to people when I had
thought I was accepting theirs.
I’ve spent hours trying to figure
out why it says I have 97 new messages when I clearly don’t.
The company is aware of these
Please see LINKEDIN page D2
#wevellainlove
#
ll
l
Michelle Campbell Mason married
Zach Vella at a castle in Ireland. Of her weddding hashtag, she says,
‘I love puns.’
FROM LEFT: FRED MARIGAUX; SHAUN JAMES COX (2); SHAWN CONNELL/CHRISTIAN OTH STUDIO (2); RACHEL CROUCH; BEN FRASER/WEDDINGS BY TWO (3); MARK SQUIRES (3)
We Miss Hearing ‘May I Take a Message for My Mom?’
“My dad can’t come to the
phone right now. May I take a
message?” It is an expression we
hear less and less as the shared
family phone disappears.
Nearly half of U.S. households
no longer have landlines and instead rely on their
WORK &
cellphones, up from
FAMILY
about 27% five years
ago, the National
Center for Health Statistics says. Among young adults
ages 25 through 34, fewer than
one-third have landlines. Even at
homes with landlines, the phone
rings mainly with telemarketers
and poll-takers.
Few miss being tethered by a
cord to a 3-pound telephone. But
family landlines had their pluses.
Small children had an opportunity
to learn telephone manners, siblings had to share, and parents had
to set boundaries governing its
use. Now, the shared hub of family
communication has given way to
solo pursuits on mobile devices.
Eric J. Parker was taught as a
child to answer the phone: “Parker
residence. How can I help you?”
His father was an anesthesiologist
who sometimes got calls at home
from hospitals or physicians, says
the Weston, Mass., attorney. Greeting all callers in a polite, formal
way “was something my mother
baked into us. We had a front-end
role. We represented the family to
the outside world.”
Mr. Parker’s 13-year-old daughter Myranda never uses the family
landline; she texts her friends. She
enjoys teasing her dad about a vintage black desktop telephone installed in his basement workshop,
calling it “his phone from the
1900s.”
Bryna Klevan got her first summer job during college, as a receptionist for a law firm, partly because of skills learned answering
the family landline. “I had a polite
telephone voice, and I knew how
to answer and get the caller to the
right person,” says Ms. Klevan.
One of Ms. Klevan’s three sons,
13-year-old Andrew, picks up the
landline in the family’s Newton,
Mass., home when a neighbor calls
to ask the Klevans to feed his dog.
Most of the time, though, Andrew
avoids the phone in favor of texting and exchanging Snapchat photos with his friends. Ms. Klevan’s
other two sons, ages 15 and 17,
avoid the landline. Most calls are
from telemarketers, and “they’ve
learned to ignore it,” she says.
Tracy Kurschner learned as a
toddler to spell her name by listening to her mother spell it for
others on the phone. “She’d say,
‘Hello, this is Mrs. Zajackowski, ZA-J-A-C-K-O-W-S-K-I,’” says Ms.
Kurschner, a Minneapolis communications consultant. “People were
just shocked that I knew how to
spell my name by age 3.”
She also listened to her
mother’s nightly phone conversations with her grandmother, asking
how doctor appointments had
gone and whether her grandmother was feeling well and getting her daily naps and vitamins.
Ms. Kurschner continued the tradition, making nightly calls to her
own parents and inviting her three
children, now 23, 20 and 14, to listen and participate.
Overhearing adults’ phone conversations taught children “the
Lessons From the Family Landline
 Overhearing adults’ phone
conversations taught children ‘the
nurturing work of adulthood,’ from
making appointments to checking in
with elderly relatives.
 Answering a home phone, children
had to learn manners, such as how to
take a message and how to make
polite small talk with adults.
ROBERT NEUBECKER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (3)
BY SUE SHELLENBARGER
 Siblings often competed for phone
time. They learned to wait patiently,
share the phone and be mindful of
others’ needs.
nurturing work of adulthood,”
such as setting up doctor appointments or planning activities for
loved ones, says Sherry Turkle, author of “Reclaiming Conversation”
and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Now
all that work is done silently, by
tapping on a keyboard.”
Sharing the landline often required parents to set boundaries
around its use. “Parents said,
‘When we’re at dinner and the
landline rings, we don’t answer
it,’ ” Dr. Turkle says.
It also caused family conflict,
says Laura Markham, a New York
clinical psychologist and author of
“Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids.” Siblings fought over who got to use
the landline, and for how long. Parental wrath rained down on any
child whose long conversations
blocked incoming calls.
Ms. Klevan was embarrassed as
a teen when her parents and younger sister knew a boy was calling.
She pulled the phone to the end of
its 20-foot cord, stretching it
through the kitchen and dining
room and into a corner of the living room. But even then, “you’d be
timed and teased about how long
you were on the phone,” she says.
The landline put children in situations where they had to talk
with adults, Dr. Markham says.
Calling a friend at home often
meant talking with a parent who
answered—a conversation that
Please see LANDLINE page D2