We hold on to stuff we don’t need anymore—in language, design, our closets, and culture at large—because it makes us comfy.
Consider the “remote”.
We still call our—um, control sticks?—”remotes”, because when they were introduced, it was novel to control anything remotely. That was the defining feature. Now it’s a shade anachronistic—where else am I going to change channels from? Go right up there & press the buttons on the side?
This term will probably persist until we use voice & gesture alone to control our devices. Which may not even be ”devices” by then, but ambient technology.
I’ve been known to call my iPhone a “walkman” on occasion. Because you can, you know, walk around with it on.
Skeumorphic language: mental comfort food.
The latest Wired (not online yet, sors!) has a rant against skeumorphs in UI design: those throwback nods to analogue objects like leather address books, rotary phones, and flipping pages.
The ostensible rationale for making new things look like familiar things is that the familiarity will give users a confidence boost that will help them learn the interface. This may have been particularly salient for Apple’s early OSX and now its iOS aesthetics, to welcome users switching platforms.
Not really sure I understand why mags that do digital issues that mimic paper copies with the pages turning, sounds, etc.
When we get to the last week of February, open your Google Calendar and choose the Month view. You’ll see the previous three weeks greyed out. Only the next few days will be “active”. If you’ve want to see what you’ve got lanned for more than the next couple of days, you have to flip forward to March.
Now ask yourself: Why does Google Calendar—and nearly every other digital calendar—work that way? It’s a strange waste of space, forcing you to look at three weeks of the past. Those weeks are mostly irrelevant now. A digital calender could be much more clever: It could reformat on the fly, putting the current week at the top of the screen, so you can always see the next three weeks at a glance. —Clive Thomspon, “Out With The Old”, Wired Feb 2012
I see the problem. Modernism—”the rejection of tradition’s reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms”—despises this kind of saccarine fake columns-and-woodgrain atavism.
But in an age of incessant, frantic cultural change and the treadmill of a learning curve that goes with it, maybe we long for the past a little bit. Skeumorphs & skeumorphic language are a bite of comfort food for the overteched soul.
Apple has been trying to address the ongoing Foxconn suicides with increased transparency. Articles are simultaneously appearing that attempt to explain the migration of manufacturing jobs as being rooted less in wages (and the accompanying “cheap” products that go with low cost labour) and more in government regulations that facilitate the industry.
I have an iPhone, among other Apple products. I’d pay more for the next one so that people don’t have to be woken up in the middle of the night, given a cup of tea, and sent to work on an assembly line. Or maybe Apple—who made $400,000 in profit per employee last year—could kick in a little.
@miguelcarrasco @darrenosadchuk How do we create demand for socially just production if we don't talk about about bad conditions?
January 18th (#J18) is a day of global blackouts for many websites in protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (& PIPA, the Protect IP Act). Participating sites include Reddit & Wikipedia, and many people are avoiding social networks or taking down their own blogs in solidarity.
As our culture rapidly changes under the yoke of technology, as these changes are forced upon it, it’s heartening to see the subtleties of Facebook’s effect being discussed from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, marketing, & privacy.
Here’s some thinking on Facebook big F8 announcements. I know it’s a lot (though far from all) to take in, but hey, it’s a lot to take in.
Not Sharing Is Caring: Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web (Facebook is Killing Taste) Premise: Zuck wants you to share your every move, regardless of whether that move turned out to be a really good experience actually worth sharing. Frictionless sharing takes the curation element (or “taste”) out of your presentation. UI implications: The news feed is now totally stories about your friends (status updates), whereas the minutiae of their liking & commenting has moved to the ticker. Assessment: I don’t want you to know about every movie I watch, only the ones I liked so much I want to endorse them and thereby incorporate them into my personal brand. Media will become status, like wearing a logo, as a display of taste. People may be less inclined to experiment, because merely absorbing media now implies some sort of support for it.
What Facebook Open Graph Means for You Premise: “You, the point of friction in their data mining, have just been excluded from the process.” Assessment: I agree. Facebook wasn’t wringing every piece of information out of users, and information about users is the product it sells its customers, advertisers. The more it can collect about what you watch, listen to, like and use, the more money it makes.
Why Facebook Timeline Is Made For Its Youngest Users Premise: Facebook’s Timelines is intended to facilitate the communication & sharing needs of younger users, and doesn’t really care if older folks want to ‘scrapbook’ (ie, blog) or not. UI implications: Not everyone wants to blog or lifecast. Picking a header (‘cover’ picture) etc might be a little more tech/design-intensive than they desire, which may lead to a feeling of pressure instead of fun for some users (age agnostic). With customization comes a pressure to perform that some people might not appreciate. Assessment: As far as I know, GenX is still the biggest participants on blogs, microblogs (Twitter) and Facebook. We’ll be ok, and the Millenials will too. Boomers who don’t work in the tech industry will not like any of this (UI changes or personal record). And GenZ? They could probably use a little MySpace. Expressing yourself is paramount in the Maslowian hierarchy of the young.
@EricaGlasier All interesting. Maybe younger gen is more willing to share in general, but less willing to share something out of mainstream?
What newsrooms should know about new Facebook stream Premise: Getting content seen depends on quantity of interactions (like & comments). More frequent posting is going to be required to get in front of people. UI implications: Stories need to gather the momentum of user approval before they join Recent Stories Assessment: A commenter thinks the author of this post has it all backwards, and branded pages have a better chance of being seen in the timeline. I dunno. I can tell you that as a brand manager I was masterminding an inside liking job like no other on Thursday, trying to push my update into people’s streams. It didn’t feel good, but it did feel necessary.
As a page I feel like Facebook's new feed needs me to either create awesome content or drum up a whole lotta support to get posts seen.
What Facebook Changes Mean for Marketers Premise: Apps that provide real value, like Nike+ are going to be key; content is going to have to step up its game. Gathering likes means less than ever. Assessment: The onus truly is on brands to earn a place in people’s lives.
@EricaGlasier I think the danger in what they're doing is it will force everyone to pump up the volume until its all too noisy...
The Ultimate in Privacy Premise: The ticker is freaking people out. The “please hide my comments & likes for me” status that’s going around tries to put the onus for your privacy on your friends. UI implications: We need to either get comfortable with all our actions being visible, or leave the system. Assessment: The way the ticker is set up, it’s a bit of a reality check into “Hey, everyone can see what I do on the internet”. They always could, but aggregating those actions and explicitly revealing them makes people feel kinda naked.
The ticker doesn’t follow normal conversational conventions (though it does lead to new person/topic discovery, which is what Facebook is trying to facilitate to combat social graph boredom and purchasable media sharing). So I sort of see the freaked out users’ impetus for wanting to hid eall that minutiae; it isn’t actually intended for everyone; it functions beneath status updates as a subtle communication upon which it’s a bit awkward to shine a light.
There’s a distinction to be drawn between inappropriate sharing and action aggregation. When you see the sum of your actions gathered and reported by an insensitive algorithm, it seems like an unfairly black and white overview of your character.
This is precisely why the likes Sponsored Stories, Klout and retargeting bother privacy advocates so much: they lack context. They paint a partial picture by which we are judged, but that we can’t fail to own because it is, after all, constructed of our data.
We’re All Doomed: Facebook’s Giant Reality Show Premise: “The lines between entertainment and real life disappear, as people use social media to broadcast whatever they want. Criminals like thieves and murders are followed online, given TV shows, endorsement deals as we as a culture begin to lose grip of reality. A world where everyone’s a celebrity and anything can be entertaining leads to murders and suicides for fun as advertisers monitor in-depth metrics on what we view and how. Our social lives are put in digital pens that lie to us and tell us that we are all stars”. Assessment: No surprise: “Heavy reality television (RTV) viewers not only spend more time on sites like Facebook, they also have larger social networks, share more photos and are more likely to engage in “friendships” with people with whom they have no off-line relationship, a practice known as promiscuous friending”.
A generation is going to grow up living very public lives, because that provides more accurate information for advertisers.
Facebook is actively gathering your life story: it just suggested I add a photo of the day I was born. http://t.co/p6SiEeBs
For Venessa Miemis’ blog on Forbes as part of The Future of Facebook project, a six-part video series exploring the impacts of social networking technologies on our lives and business.
Facebook facilitates political organizing and could be a communication channel for dissidents, but monitoring is inherent to the system. The walled garden listens.
Ever wonder how cities become cultural meccas? Their governance has a lot to do with it.
An artist-certification law, a zoning provision dating back to the 1970s, requires that all Soho apartments be occupied by at least one “creative” artist, as defined by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Downtown Express, NYC, Jun 15 – 21 2011
Imagine the community you could create if creativity was a prerequisite to entry. Even the grime would have a little more flair.
Social media success ultimately comes from the same thing as general social success: be a fascinating, compelling, genuine, supercool human being. But unless you’re an art star whose career hinges on publicity at all costs, there’s a couple topics you wanna stay away from, like religion, politics, and stuff that makes the Twitterverse go (rightfully) nuts.
Today’s case study: Uptown Hockey, an NHL-level sports management firm, express their opinion of marriage.
The backstory
The disaster
Very sad to read Sean Avery's misguided support of same-gender "marriage". Legal or not, it will always be wrong.
Don Reynolds of @uptownhockey 's email & phone #...tell him directly what you think of his "tolerance" ! uptownsports.ca">don@uptownsports.ca (905) 632-549
Not because they were squatting on a popular event. While unsubtley markety, it was also pretty smart marketyness. My irritation stemmed from my loathing of the suggestion brides should—nay, must—slim down for their “big day”.
But if “loathe” was the response, perhaps I wasn’t the target of this ad!
Lol, then, at the next in line for the throne on the #RoyalWedding tag: Magnum Ice Cream.
Marketing message: It ain’t YOU, so let yourself go!The already-married message, picking up the demographic Slim Fast missed. Kinda genius. Kinda sad.
Postscript: And the “scan resolve”, if you will, of Magnum’s ad dollars? Just a visit to their site.
If you’re a 30-something Canadian, these National Film Board vignettes are a part of your genetic makeup. Step back and see why you hold the chain power saw in so much regard.
The Logdriver’s Waltz
Are there still logdrivers? Do they still please girls completely?
The Logger
By the way: Do not turn your back on a falling tree.
Bill Miner
“Hands up”, said the Sargeant. “Haaaands up.”
Lady Francis Simpson
I still call gruelling tasks “merciless portages” to this day.
Spence’s Republic
You can’t act as judge & accuser both!
The Dance
You’ll have this song in your head for the rest of—I was going to say “day”, but really, “life”—yet it’s patently unhummable. Kind of like Canada.
I respect the NFB enormously as a Canadian institution: filmmakers, animators, and propagandists all. I mean that affectionately—their task was to enculturate Canadians with muted palettes, natural narration, absurd humour, and a deeply-rooted sense of our own history. The patriotic nostalgia you felt from watching these Vignettes proves their success.
They’re still doing amazing work today in the interactive space, preserving Canadian memories in web documentaries. Pine Point made my nose run for sure.
My car has satellite radio, and the funny thing about it is that 90% of the time it’s tuned to CBC. [I work with CBC Manitoba (news ) and CBC Radio, but I've been paying Sirius monthly for no reason for a while now].
Turns out our national public broadcaster talks about smart stuff & topics I care about. Here are my hand-selected podcasts that you should totally get.
Mellifluous Terry O’Reilly talks golden age of advertising, replete with insights into classic marketing strategies.
Juicy tidbit: this podcast is brand new, because it took forever for CBC to get permission to use all the copywrited jingle action. The back catalogue of older stuff isn’t up on iTunes (yet?).
See through everything: subscribe to this podcast.
I first heard of Q when Billy Bob Thorton went nuts on silky smooth host Jian Ghomeshi last year. In solidarity, I gave Q a listen, and ❤ the easy-going analysis of current culture (always situating Canada in a broader ‘North American’ context) and media panels examining—you got it—the media.
Excited! Two new books that ponderthe role of humans in a technological future—or is that technology in humanity’s future?—arrived yesterday.
I opted for paper copies in accordance with my family’s “no iPad in the tub” policy.
Ray Kurzweil, a futurist with 17 honourary doctorates (how does he fit them on his business card?), seems to have invented the concept of technological singularity, so we’ll put him in the “go robots” category, at least until I’ve read him & have a more nuanced grasp of his ideas.
Neil Postman, a media theorist & cultural critic, was recommended to me by a friend as a means of understanding the biases inherent in different technologies. A few pages in, I’m already liking the cultural awareness Postman recommends:
Once a technology is admitted (to our culture), it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is—when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.
We’ll put Postman in the opposite corner, a damper on our blithe embrace of a mediated environment. At the moment I gravitate towards this side of the octagon, because the pace of technological change has pushed us into new social conventions (Zuckity Zuck Zuck) that were certainly not thoughtfully admitted to our culture, but rather inserted there by commerce.
You can see my toddler is pro-robot,: within 5 minutes of unboxing she’d already torn out the last signature of Technopoly.
Postman’s quote “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see” recently went viral, because it’s being misattributed in Google results. So here’s my contribution to setting that straight.
I’m sometimes privileged to information that belongs to other people, and I’m evolving an ethical approach to handling that sensitive information. Here’s my policy.
“Look away.”
There are times when you can easily read someone’s email, their private messages, their browser history. Don’t even look.
“Gossip a whole lot less.”
For your own sake: what you commit to type can always come back to bite you in the ass, and can make you look bitter, mean or untrustworthy (which is kinda what you’ll be).
For other people’s sake: when I was inspired to visually enhance the Manitoba Time slogan, I didn’t link to the branding document someone sent me. I don’t know that it was top secret, but I suspect heads would be rolling at my agency if staff had inadvertently left it where it could be discovered.
If you think it might get someone in trouble or make them look bad, keep it to yourself.
“Tell ‘em if you can see their unmentionables.”
Let other people know, quickly, tactfully & privately, if they’re exposing a little too much beer snake photography on Facebook. Often people are unaware what laundry they’re airing.
If you had spinachy teeth or you were flashing a little crack, you’d want someone to say something, right?
“Ask permission.”
Get an explicit ok to tweet, blog or update about new projects and other might-be confidential stuff. I figured this out after more than one person looked me in the eye and said “Don’t tweet this”.
Research released this week indicate that large, complex social networkscorrelate with big, fat amygdalas. It can’t yet be determined whether higher-volume brains make people capable of greater social sophistication, or whether extensive socializing makes the brain put on weight.
The amygdala is the fear centre that generates our fight-or-flight and anxiety responses. So why is the scary place bigger in social butterflys?It could be that humans in contact with more humans have more opportunities to sweat over social cues, defuse volatile interpersonal situations, and just generally live through more drama.
The “social brain”—human cerebral evolution in response to ever denser social networks—is adaptive in humans. The bigger our groups, the more we benefit from the skillful manipulation of social capital. This preliminary study shows we are indeed getting better at interaction as industrialized society brings most of us together in cities.
Advances in communications technology such as we’ve experienced in the first decade of this century can only be called “social intensification”. I’m curious about whether the greater frequency of contact outweighs the loss of physical cues from computer mediation. Will we invent compensations for body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and develop ever richer, larger, and more nuanced social networks?
In a (marketing) meeting the other day I referred to the way we expressed an idea as “semantic”.
The reaction to this was as if I had belittled a distinction as “just semantics” (something people say when they think you’re quibbling over words that don’t really matter). Dictionary.com’s own usage example includes this common derogation.
On the contrary, semantics matter a lot, especially to marketers. A linguistic theory called the “Sapir Whorf Hypothesis” states that language affects the way people think. Words colour your concept of a thing & its potential.
Not to be all Seth-Godin-state-the-bleeding-obvious, but isn’t that theory talking about the very cultural encoding marketing seeks to affect?
We try to “own” categories, to “rank” for keywords, to “brand” the way people talk about us. We reiterate, restate and cleverly dictate (advertising) what we want people to think about us, and try to lead the discourse in brand categories (semantic domains). We’re using adjectives, superlatives, vocabulary to dominate “mindshare”. The biggest marketing revolution in __ years is about starting & managing “conversation”.
Semantics win hearts and minds. Semantics matter. A lot.
Look, “tweet” in French is the same as in English. In linguistics that’s called a “loanword”, but I just know that because I’m about to ace my Cultural Anthropology exam.
I blog because, basically, I’m an ambulance chaser for the #singularity. Technologically driven global culture has emerged just in time to ignite the biggest crucible of social upheaval since, you know, ever. And I can’t wait to see what happens.
Train wreck? Transcendent transformation into immortal, mostly-machine superbeings? Or just anxious, multitasking, marketing-soaked, rapidly evolving humans whose bodies rebel against “knowledge work” by seizing up with carpal tunnel (hopefully on camera)?
Posthuman forms like the effervescent, holographic Hatsune Miku—a vocaloid (vocal+android) who just happens to be a giant Japanese pop star—are starting to join us regular folks, at least at sold-out arenas. Prepare yourself for a glimpse of the future. The crowd & backup band at this performance are totally biological; the star of the show, not at all.
Is this, you know, the direction we want to go with humanity?
If we set the bar for female roles at “impossible exaggeration”, like “we” did in fashion and porn, we alienate real women.
al·ien·ate
/ˈeɪlyəˌneɪt, ˈeɪliə-/ –verb (used with object)
1.to make indifferent or hostile.
2. to turn away.
If that doesn’t sound like a problem to you…insert snark here. Q’s Jian Ghomeshi attempted to broach this subject with interviewee and futurist blogger Aaron Saenz, but Aaron only considered the sinister aspect of fabricated women from a “Will this result in a pop star work shortage?” perspective.
Had Miku been designed as a realistic woman, like Britney Spears*, she would no doubt still be an unattainable ideal for lots of girls, but infantilized anime schoolchildren are especially dismaying as a role model.
Miku is getting bona fide media coverage and playing festivals. But I’m not seeing a lot of comment-thread critique—and don’t get me wrong**, I have no qualms about humans interfacing with, being moved by, or paying good money to see an avatar (movies are digital representations of people too. It’s ok). It’s the kind of media idols we make that we need to think about.
i·dol
/ˈaɪdl/ –noun
1. any person or thing regarded with blind admiration, adoration, or devotion.
2. a mere image or semblance of something, visible but without substance, as a phantom.
3. a figment of the mind; fantasy.
4. a false conception or notion; fallacy.
In his humanist manifestoYou Are Not A Gadget, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier wrote about the subtle psychological effects of software design.
The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people…Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. (Technology) can change how you conceive of yourself and the world.
(Lanier, 2010: 5, 6, 36)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Crypton Future Media, Miku’s virtual dad/pimp, says she’s 16 years old and 92 pounds. Discuss.
* hahahahaha ** I’d feel very cool & futuristic if I got to see Hatsune Miku live!
If we were acquainted when I was furnishing my baby’s room, you know my deft eBaying and Amazoning abilities. You also know my fury when confronted with absurd shipping charges and companies that “can’t” ship to Canada.
Online shopping is the lifeline of people in comprised retail situations (cough, Winnipeg, cough). And with Twitter flattening culture, Canadians (and I assume the world) are absorbing holidays, events, and national moods on a level never imagined by the CRTC. We’re basically going to do Thanksgiving twice this year because, I mean, why not?
When a giant American event like Black Friday goes down, the global marketing machine unavoidably affects the rest of us. And nothing ticks off a customer more than when major brands offer deals to some folks and not to us. (I’m talking to you, Best Buy. Shame on your $30-off iPods).
To combat the strong dollar’s pull on cross-border shoppers, some Canadian outposts are offering online Black Fridays. I expect this custom, along with double turkey days, the ability to enter contests, and watching tv online (yeah, we still kinda don’t have that) will only grow as online consumer’s dismay at being left out of cultural events—amplified by social media—becomes a customer service problem for big brands. We can hear everything you’re saying, guys.
Facebook has an advertising policy that I respect: don’t use pictures of hot women to sell your product, unless your product is hot women.
It decreases the sleaze factor of advertising while serving the audience by making ad graphics more relevant, and thus less painful (in the time-wasting sense) to click.
I have sort of an augmented reality vision now, where I see social media as a layer overtop of everything, even snacks.
Zeitgeist (German pronunciation: [ˈtsaɪtɡaɪst] is “the spirit of the times” or “the spirit of the age.” [1] Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction or mood of an era. [Wikipedia]
Saw this terrorism home furnishings display in the Village. I’m not sure if it’s positive we’re laughing at this stuff, or scary that we’re absorbing it into our culture. I think the xray bag is pretty cool.
Hey, wait, where’s the interactive marketing in all this cultural examination? Where indeed.
Communications strategy for niche retailers
I’ve noticed recently that a number of the small Winnipeg stores, like this one, who carry hard-to-find products aren’t online. Wait, what? I know. We’re talking abandoned Twitter, tumbleweed groups on Facebook, no websites.
Floored by the seeming fact that a local business (quirky clothes, long term existence, tons of real fans) doesn’t seem to have a website.less than a minute ago via webErica Glasier EricaGlasier
This won’t do. It’s inconvenient for your customers, and there’s a certain suicidal tendency in leaving your brand in the hands of Yelp.
Here’s a brief new media strategy, gratis, to get you up and running. Thank me in teapots.
1. Get a one-page site up containing:
hours
phone number
Google map
Facebook and Twitter links
2. Train your staff to upload a photo a day to Twitpic and post it to your Facebook account. Said photos will illustrate:
new arrivals
sale items
hot customers
neighbourhood funkiness
3. Tweet only these photos, special discounts, and pertinent store info. This doesn’t take a communications genius. Answer questions. Offer customer service as required. This will add about 5 minutes to your staff’s day (especially shooting & uploading via mobile phone), until you get really popular.
This isn’t about having a web presence because it’s “cool” (I can’t believe I have to mention this in 2010, but apparently I do). Please tell me this whole no-website thing is an oversight & you don’t actually look at customer communications this way.
You’re missing a chance to build excitement, word-of-mouth buzz, and covetousness in your customer, for the cost of a photo a day. The “website” will at least put something you control at the top of Google. The real action takes place through social media, because you’ve got something simple & shareable: cool stuff people would like if they knew about it.
Retail sales will follow as the constant stream of great merchandise reminds shoppers how much they love your store. Throw in a few 10%’s off to reinforce social sharing, sit back and count the cha-ching.
And a warm welcome…
…to a Village retailer who is taking the social media plunge, Osborne Spectacle Centre. It’s scary that people might talk about your brand online, I know. But the value of showing off your products & services to an audience who loves to share information will be worth it.
/ˈeɪl
yəˌneɪt, ˈeɪ
